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Bettie Page
Photo by Irving Klaw
I’ve found a very strange interview with Bettie, transcribed from ‘Nashville Citysearch’s Bettie Page Live Chat’, held September 23, 1998.
There’s some left field questions that lead to even more bizarre answers
Bruno asks: did you travel outside of USA Bettie?
Bettie Page: I like to travel. I regret that I never got to Paris. In October 1978, I had saved money and wanted to go to Hawaii – to see the islands. People told me that Paris would have been my style of living.
I did live in Haiti – for 4 months. I was ready to go to work as the secretary to the ambassador to the US, but they were angry because the US president wouldn’t give them a loan – they started rioting and talked of killing all Americans. I left. But I like the Haitian people. I lost all of my prejudice against black people – growing up in the South, you know. When I was 13, I would collect photos of baseball stars – I had a crush on one of the Nashville Vols, in particular. These two black girls grabbed my baseball cards and shoved me to the ground. So I didn’t feel good about them, but Haiti changed me. I fell in love with a Haitian man there, but found that his wife was about to have a baby on the other end of the island!
Stereo3d asks: Do you think Lucy Lawless of TV’s Xena patterns her look after you?
Bettie Page: She is one of my favorites. To be as big as she is, when she can do flips, she is something. No other woman can do what she does. I have heard she patterned her look after me. But she doesn’t have long hair like I have. I like that show.
Bruno asks: Did you see “Titanic”?
Bettie Page: I thought it was fascinating. Those scenes were so real. The closing scenes with that couple so much in love …that is love. If ever there was an example of true love, that is it.
Hannah asks: Have you seen all the questions on this message board? Do they make you feel good — that so many people still care for you?
Bettie Page: It makes me feel wonderful that people still care for me… that I have so many fans among young people, who write to me and tell me I have been an inspiration. You would think they never think about 50′s pinup models. I have had 11 songs written about me – the best is by a song by BR-549 from my hometown, Nashville – called “Bettie, Bettie.” I wonder what he means by, “if I had known you-I would have been a better man,” in the lyrics? I once was in love with a man named Carlos from Peru. He showed me a picture of a blond woman and a little boy. He told me it was his sister. One night I had a cold — we were making love — his sister was his wife. this night, she knocked on the door and accused me of being a homewrecker. I told her I did not know he was married, but as I was going down the stairs, she was calling me these names and felt like a snake…I didn’t have anything to do with him after that.
Photograph by amateur Nicholas Rutledge
24 Oklahomans RIP
See more coverage of the tragedy at Atlantic Infocus
UPDATE: This post makes an interesting point, that last year every county in Oklahoma voted against support from FEMA.
Don McCullin
The Guvnors, Finsbury Park, London, 1958
Gelatin silver print
Check out the amazing 2012 documentary film, McCullin directed by David and Jacqui Morris.
(You are not invited to the Gala)
This is the best documentary I’ve seen in a very long time.
Seems to me that Don McCullin’s seen more than anyone on the planet.
He systematically sought out access to the worst part of any war/conflict/disaster he visited, the story behind the above photo is tragic, but not nearly the worst in his legendary career.
It’s a very hard watch.
You can also download it from archive.org
Enso sleeps on rags on the floor of the storage room
He is not allowed to have a bed or a pillow.
He works all day and is not allowed to go to school.
International advocates for children estimate that there are 250,000 restaveks in Haiti — children working as unpaid domestic servants after their parents, who cannot afford to raise them, give them away.
The literal translation of “restavek” is relatively benign: these children, mostly girls, are “live-ins” or “stay-withs.’’ But the social translation is brutal. To be a restavek is to be the ultimate have-not in a society of have-nots; the word itself is a slur.
The ultimate have-not in a society of have-nots. Jesus H Christ.
The gaping flame-filled crater has been this way since 1971, when Soviet geologists tapped into a cavern of natural gas and decided to burn it off so it wouldn’t poison anyone. They thought it would take a few days. Four decades later, locals refer to this pit as the Door to Hell. In Turkmenistan, many people leave their gas ranges burning all day and all night: why bother turning them on and off, when gas is inexhaustible?
From Two Rivers, Carolyn Drake’s upcoming book of photographs from the area in Central Asia that follows the region’s major rivers the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. See more at the New Yorker.
This reminds me of the scariest movie of the eighties, The Gate.
Cristina De Middel
The Afronauts (Self-published, 2012)
CdM: Obviously, when I started producing the images of the series I was aware that I was approaching a sensitive subject matter and that whatever I decided to do it could potentially offend others. I tried to work on the cliché and the icons to be, at least, honest with what I was documenting and not trying to state that things are like that in Africa. The dreamy and legendary ambience of the whole series, I think, is a good tool for that because I use a language that is closer to a tale than to a report. The images, in one hand do not pretend to be documents and in the other hand the poses and the action are respectful and emulate the images we already respect from the NASA space missions. If I had done a literal translation to the documents I found, the result would have been certainly more offensive, even if more accurate to what really happened.
From the feedback I have got so far I think it looks like most of the people understood my message and intention, but it is true that I received a couple of emails accusing me of racism… just a couple of them, which is not that bad. The funny thing is that the most enthusiast feedback always comes from African countries. I don’t think they see it offensive as it is as if we could be offended by movies as Bridget Jones´s Diary or Rambo. It is a fabulation of their lives and I understand that the Western world is the only one having trouble in understanding that Africans have aspirations and that they can pursue them.
Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers, left background, near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus. April 30, 2013.
No Caption Needed is quickly becoming one of my favourite reads on the internet.
Robert Hariman: This photo was captioned by Corbis as, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers, left background, near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus.” Now, the photographer and magazine were playing by the rules, carefully identifying who, what, when, and where in sufficient detail to place the photo within the event being covered. We now know that the photo was not taken on April 29th and that it was near Yitzhar (the Jewish settlement) near Nablus (the Palestinian city) and not near some other settlement or city. Given either forensic or historical questions, those could be crucial details.
Those are not the only questions that apply, however. There also are political and moral questions, for example. In respect to those questions, a very significant detail has not been identified. Look closely: the man is double over in pain while trying to get something out of his eyes. He is a large, well-muscled man yet unable to resist the two soldiers grabbing him, so the pain must be debilitating. Now look closer still: the two soldiers are trying to spray something into his face. The one is spraying–you can see that he is holding and firing a spray canister, and that the foam or mist is coming out as white blur. The other soldier is trying to hold and turn the man so that the first can hit him directly in the face. Hit him squarely in the eyes, that is, and for the second time.
The caption did not say, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces try to force a second dose of pepper spray into the eyes of a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers.” That would be the more specific, more accurate description of what is being shown. It also would shift the sense of political blame: instead of a man being “arrested,” as if a criminal, we have Israeli soldiers siding with the settlers who rioted following a stabbing. (The stabbing of a settler was of course criminal and should lead to an arrest, but ask yourself how rioting following a crime would be treated in your town.) Instead of settlers violating the rule of law, here the Palestinian is the sole law breaker. Instead of soldiers attacked a wounded man to deliver a second dose of punishment, we have merely an arrest.
The saving grace of photographs is that they can show what is happening contrary to the interpretation that is applied to them. Even so, as many commentators have pointed out, captioning can significantly influence what is seen, what is remembered, and how it is used. The caption tells you both what to see and what to ignore in the photograph.
Read on and see the other photograph they question
Photograph by Nasser Ishtayeh/Associated Press
Dean Musgrove
September 26, 1989
Dean Musgrove was assigned to shoot a school bus accident, but by the time he arrived, the children and driver were gone. “All there is is this maintenance guy working for the school bus company.” Musgrove says. “And all of a sudden I just see him fall through the window and I took a couple of frames…. It went from a nothing picture to something that made Page 1.”
His legs’ve gone all floppy.
Go and see more of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner photograph collection
Miloslav Druckmüller’s solar corona July 22, 2009
Shot by Czech photographer Miloslav Druckmüller from the Brno University of Technology, these amazing composite images capture the moon during a total solar eclipse revealing a vast solar corona. To achieve the crystal clear effect the shots are comprised from some 40+ photos taken with two different lenses. Additional clarity was achieved due to the incredibly remote location chosen to view the eclipse from, a pier just outside the Enewetak Radiological Observatory on the Marshall Islands, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You can see several more images from the project at Druckmüller’s website and don’t miss this much higher resolution version including some 209 stars.
Did you know that in 1504 Christopher Columbus ripped off a bunch of Jamaican locals by pretending to cause an eclipse?
What a jerk.
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