(Photo:Mona Street)
Lo Songs – The LETTER B (Part 1)
20 minutes ago
Sunday, 10 July 2011
RupertMurdochPR RupertMurdochPR
Up to 20 #notw journalists could face jail. That's appalling. Thank God they don't work for me. #DeleteAllYouMongrels
The haunting power of old photographs
More than just forgotten light ... Confederate soldiers as they fell near the Burnside bridge, Maryland, in 1862. Photograph: Matthew Brady/Alexander Gardner
Old photographs have a compelling power. I am talking about really old photographs, from the early days of the medium in the 19th century. Here is light from more than a hundred years ago caught by a camera; here are the faces of the long dead as they really were: the face of Charles Baudelaire, the face of Oscar Wilde.
But how much meaning can a photograph hold? How much depth is there in these flat renderings of silver and black that happened to be caught on ancient chemically prepared plates and preserved? Inexhaustible meaning and daunting depth, it turns out, when you know how to look and how to show these historic pictures.
I recently saw, for the first time, Ken Burns's documentary series The American Civil War. It is well known that the American civil war was one of the first wars to be recorded by photographers. Matthew Brady and other photographers followed the armies in wagons that contained their hefty equipment. They photographed the aftermath of slaughter, the twisted bodies lying in fields.
But it takes Burns's extraordinary eye and technical mastery to reveal all that photography can show of the horrific war that ended slavery in America. For one thing, the sheer range of photographs that Burns discovered in the archives defies belief. Thousands of images have been lost, yet he seems to find records of every place, skirmish and character. It is eerie to watch what comes to feel like a contemporary film of the war, a live newsreel of events from long ago. But the reason it is so haunting is that Burns does not just passively film the images, he digs into them, excavates their secrets.
In one visual coup, the film tells us that future general Ulysses S Grant worked in the family store before the war. Impressively, we are shown a photograph of the Grant family business at the time. But then Burns closes in on a detail: a man standing outside, the image enlarged to reveal that we are seeing Grant himself, hanging about in the days when he was a nobody.
The civil war is full of jaw-dropping images. It becomes hallucinatory, a deathly journey into the heart of the battle: you are there. Photographs, this film revealed to me, are not cold relics of forgotten light; they are landscapes that you can explore as if they were three-dimensional spaces. The civil war is still happening, and will continue to happen for as long as these shadowy imprints survive. This is also true of the pictures of our own time. A photograph is a world frozen, that imagination can warm into life.
Jonathan Jones @'The Guardian'
But how much meaning can a photograph hold? How much depth is there in these flat renderings of silver and black that happened to be caught on ancient chemically prepared plates and preserved? Inexhaustible meaning and daunting depth, it turns out, when you know how to look and how to show these historic pictures.
I recently saw, for the first time, Ken Burns's documentary series The American Civil War. It is well known that the American civil war was one of the first wars to be recorded by photographers. Matthew Brady and other photographers followed the armies in wagons that contained their hefty equipment. They photographed the aftermath of slaughter, the twisted bodies lying in fields.
But it takes Burns's extraordinary eye and technical mastery to reveal all that photography can show of the horrific war that ended slavery in America. For one thing, the sheer range of photographs that Burns discovered in the archives defies belief. Thousands of images have been lost, yet he seems to find records of every place, skirmish and character. It is eerie to watch what comes to feel like a contemporary film of the war, a live newsreel of events from long ago. But the reason it is so haunting is that Burns does not just passively film the images, he digs into them, excavates their secrets.
In one visual coup, the film tells us that future general Ulysses S Grant worked in the family store before the war. Impressively, we are shown a photograph of the Grant family business at the time. But then Burns closes in on a detail: a man standing outside, the image enlarged to reveal that we are seeing Grant himself, hanging about in the days when he was a nobody.
The civil war is full of jaw-dropping images. It becomes hallucinatory, a deathly journey into the heart of the battle: you are there. Photographs, this film revealed to me, are not cold relics of forgotten light; they are landscapes that you can explore as if they were three-dimensional spaces. The civil war is still happening, and will continue to happen for as long as these shadowy imprints survive. This is also true of the pictures of our own time. A photograph is a world frozen, that imagination can warm into life.
Jonathan Jones @'The Guardian'
James Murdoch: Why I shut down the News of the World
'...quality of journalism that we (News Corp.) believe in'!!!
What planet does this man live on?
The Sun, The Herald Sun, The NY Daily Post, Fox News etc. I rest my case...
The Sun, The Herald Sun, The NY Daily Post, Fox News etc. I rest my case...
James Murdoch could face criminal charges on both sides of the Atlantic
Eh???
Please ignore last tweet from this account re NotW - not authorised, and not the paper or its political team's opinion. Has been deleted.
And here's the deleted tweet in question...
Sun_Politics Sun Politics
NotW - RIP. A loss to 1st class journalism. Ed Miliband, Guardian & BBC; how proud you must be of your work > Discuss
Spaceboy's classic film re-enactments #1 - Scarface
NB: No bread rolls were harmed in this remake...
Steve Mason & Dennis Bovell - Yesterday Dub
Former Beta Band man Steve Mason has joined forces with reggae musician and producer Dennis Bovell. The pair have announced the release of an album on 25 July, a radical ‘dub’ reinterpretation of Steve Mason’s Boys Outside‘ LP, which was released last year. A collaborative effort, Ghosts Outside was recorded in early 2011 at Livingston Studios in North London with Dennis Bovell. Using the original tracks as a basis, with Steve’s guidance Dennis added additional instrumentation; the tracks were later given the classic ‘Bovell production’ treatment. Steve met Dennis at a Black History month in Hackney. Dennis is a renowned and much respected artist-producer, central in the development of British reggae from the 1970s onwards. He gained renown with his own group, Matumbi and also worked with the likes of Linton Kwesi Johnson, I-Roy and Janet Kay. He also produced a wide diversity of bands including The Pop Group, Orange Juice and The Slits. He recently featured heavily in the BBC4 Reggae Britannia documentary
♪♫ Ash - Walking Barefoot
Gawdamn - bring on global warming is what I say...brrr!
More examples after the jump...
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