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Awesome necklaces are an air pollution visualization

by KattieUINM Posted on July 30, 2015

Awesome necklaces are an air pollution visualization

By on 30 Jul 2015commentsShare

Statement necklaces are so hot these days, but those giant neck shackles are nothing compared to these bad boys.

London-based artists Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick designed three in-your-face necklaces to reflect air pollution levels in Sheffield, U.K., a former steelmaking city with notoriously bad air. According to Posavec’s website, the duo felt that a necklace was appropriate because air pollution impacts the heart and lungs. Here’s more from Wired:

Posavec and Quick mapped three nonconsecutive weeks of unusual air-quality patterns onto flat plastic beads. Each bead represents an eight-hour period. The more pollution during that period, the larger and spikier the disc, and the more aware you are of how necklace touches your skin. The outlying data is particularly evocative: One of the necklaces has a big, prickly orange bead depicting the highest level of particulate matter during those few weeks, which took place on Guy Fawkes Night, a UK holiday during which celebrants light nighttime bonfires.

The designers also made three pairs of sunglasses, each with three lenses that represent different air pollutants in Sheffield. The lenses all have designs etched into them — the more prevalent the pollutant, the larger the design. Altogether, the lenses make the glasses pretty hard to see through, which is the point: Pollutants make the air hazy.

Steve McInerny

I never really knew what “statement necklaces” were supposed to be saying, but I’m pretty sure these accessories — called Touching Air and Seeing Air, respectively — are saying something more important. How about earrings that reflect noise pollution? Or toe rings that reflect soil toxicity? Maybe if we were all walking manifestations of the toxins in our environments, the world would be a cleaner place! Just kidding — that’ll never happen.

Source:
Funky Accessories That Visualize Invisible Air Pollution

, Wired.

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Awesome necklaces are an air pollution visualization

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The 19 Best Photobooks of 2014

by AndreasD07 Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The tide of excellent photobooks continues to rise, with new releases straining wallets and bookshelves of collectors as well as those of us who just enjoy a well-put-together body of photography. While there are worse predicaments than wondering where you’ll keep all these gems, it’s definitely been tough to keep up. Here’s a round-up of the ones that stood out to the Mother Jones photo department this year.

Night Walk & Invisible City, Ken Schles (Steidl)
Night Walk is an essential companion to the new, long-awaited reprint of Schles’ gritty 1988 classic Invisible City. A document of life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as it went through the death throes of being a dirty, lawless pocket of the city, Invisible City and Night Walk evokes a sense of danger and fun in roaming through this veritable no man’s land. The grainy black-and-white photos make you feel like you’re falling through a dream.

Frontcountry, Lucas Foglia (Nazraeli Press)
Lucas Foglia‘s second monograph looks at the intersection and conflict of mining, ranching, and environmental interests in the American West. It’s a wry, beautiful book. Unlike a lot of fine-art-oriented documentary photobooks, Frontcountry feels grounded while still serving page after page of gorgeous photos that at times feel surreal. Foglia has a knack for putting humans in their place against expansive landscapes, as well as capturing serene moments of breathlessness, waiting to exhale.

Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, Eugene Richards (Many Voices Press)
This self-published book brings together Eugene Richards’ work from the Arkansas Delta since the days he first went as there a Vista volunteer in 1969. Some of the work appeared in his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises, published in 1972. It’s a mix of classic documentary reportage of the ’60s and ’70s; the forceful, wide-angle work for which Richards became known in the ’80s; and his recent, sublime color work. A single line of text on each page opposite the photographs strings the whole thing together. It’s very lyrical, in a way you may not expect if the last Eugene Richards book you looked at was Cocaine True Cocaine Blue or even Walking Through the Ashes. Far more than a collection of Richards’ work in the Delta, Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down is about his fulfillment of a promise made to a woman he met long ago—and to himself.

Still Moving, Danny Clinch (Harry Abrams)
He would probably shun the comparison, but Danny Clinch has become something akin to this era’s Jim Marshall. He shoots plenty of great portraits, sure, but unlike a lot of music photographers who eventually abandon shooting concerts, Clinch still gets in the mix, capturing great backstage moments as well as generation-defining live moments. He’s certainly among the best living music photographers.

The Sound of Two Eyes Opening, Spot (Sinecure)
Well known to punks as the man who recorded dozens of ’80s hardcore records on SST Records and toured with their bands (namely Black Flag), it turns out Spot was also something of a shutterbug. This book gives an unflinching look at beach life in the LA area during the ’70s. Lots of girls on roller skates in short shorts and dudes in tube socks skateboarding, as well as early photos of Black Flag and the Los Angeles punk scene. It’s worth picking up the slipcase deluxe edition which comes with a poster, print, and record (available only from the publisher).

Disco Night 9/11, Peter van Agtmael (Red Hook Editions)
Disco Nights has made a number of appearances on other “Best Of” lists—for a good reason. Though it’s a pretty simple book, lacking some of the bells and whistles that other notable photobooks include, the simplicity in this case reinforces the weight of the subject and lets the photos stand out. Having covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, van Agtmael continues his coverage by following the soldiers home and photographing their struggles getting used to normal life.

War Porn, Chris Bangert (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg)
“These are not by best pictures,” Chris Bangert writes of this uncensored, unvarnished book of photos from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This book is not about the drama of war or the phony myth of the heroic war photographer.” Rather, it’s about a photographer dealing with everything he’s seen, and the images he’s captured that linger in his mind. It’s full of the grisly, gruesome photos war photographers make but we rarely see. Editors don’t want them and often the photographers themselves don’t like to face them. All of which makes War Porn a tough little book to look at. It’s punctuated by a haunting epilogue involving Bangert’s grandfather, who served as a doctor with the Wehrmacht in Russia during World War II.

Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk (Rizzoli)
Pick this one up along with Playground, by Paul Zone (Glitterati Incorporated; I review it here) and you have an unbeatable ringside seat to the nascent days of New York City punk. Both Zone (of the Fast) and Stein (Blondie) were musicians foremost, but they seemed to always have their cameras on them, capturing the New York scene as it evolved from an eclectic group of musicians, artists, poets and filmmakers into the ground zero of American punk rock—until New Wave swept it away.

Rich and Poor, Jim Goldberg (Steidl)
Every write-up of this reprint mentions how it’s as poignant today as back in 1985 when it was published. As the title suggests, the book, shot in San Francisco from the late ’70s through the mid-’80s, is a study of the very wealthy and the very poor. In what was to become his trademark style, Jim Goldberg photographs subjects and then has them write something about themselves on the print. Of course, San Francisco is a different city now, with the income gap between rich and poor having grown to an enormous chasm. For the redesigned book, available in hardback, Goldberg added a few photos revisiting locations and people he shot for the original.

Bedrooms of the Fallen, Ashley Gilbertson (University of Chicago)
It’s a simple idea: Photograph the bedrooms of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan using a wide angle panoramic camera. The resulting images are a stirring and unsettling documentation of lives left behind. Many bedrooms show transitions—remnants of boyhoods and teenage years mixed in with the trappings of new military personas. Some of the bedrooms have been made into shrines, carefully maintained by the parents. In other images, you sense the parents slowly moving on, with boxes and household items beginning to impose on the bedroom space. The very still, voyeuristic photos draw you in slowly and hold your attention through the book.

Vietnam: The Real War, AP (Abrams)
One of the better photobooks on the Vietnam War, Vietnam: The Real War, pulls images from the AP archives to trace the history of America’s involvement in the conflict. It’s a powerful collection that includes those iconic photos that altered the war’s trajectory by changing hearts and minds back home: Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photo of the Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze, Eddie Adams’ image of the chief of the South Vietnamese national police executing a suspected Viet Cong official in the street, Nick Ut’s image of the little girl running naked, burned by napalm.

Afghanistan, Larry Towell (Aperture)
Essentially a richly detailed scrapbook of Larry Towell’s time covering Afghanistan, this reproduction of his original artist’s maquette gets under the skin of the country and into the mind of the photographer. It’s about as close to a 360-degree view of the place as a Westerner can provide. The book covers ordinary Afghans, Western and Afghan soldiers, war victims, street scenes, and political machinations. The inclusion of Towell’s notes, contact sheets, and of course, excellent images, makes this a treasure for those who like to pull back the curtain on a photographer’s process.

The Decisive Moment, Henri Cartier-Bresson (Steidl)
One of the most influential (and yet hardest to find) photobooks in print gets the Steidl gold-standard reprint treatment here. Available for the first time in sixty years, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment still sizzles with taut, kinetic energy. From the Matisse-designed cover through the tightly edited image selection, it’s a brilliant mix of street photography and reportage, photos that, despite being perfectly composed, feel very alive. Many of them have evolved from classics to cultural wallpaper. The book reminds us of Cartier-Bresson’s genius—just in case you needed a reminder.

Ponte City, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse (Steidl)
A multi-part book about a 54-story residential building in Johannesburg that Mikhael Subotzky describes as, “a huge blinking advertising crown visible from Soweto in the south to Sandton in the north.” Built in 1976, “Ponte City” housed young professional types before falling on hard times in ’90s, as those people fled to the suburbs. Developers who bought the building in 2008 with grand plans to refurbish it went belly-up. Subotzky and Waterhouse’s book-in-a-box includes a standard hardcover photobook along with 17 pamphlet/zine type booklets, each focusing on a different aspect of the building. It’s an audacious deep-dive into Ponte City that traces its history through archival documents and photographs of those who live there.

Testament, Chris Hondros (powerhouse)
This retrospective of Chris Hondros, a photojournalist killed in Tripoli while covering the Libyan civil war, proves what a talented and courageous photographer he was. Testament, which I reviewed earlier this year, holds up as a standout. Even in volatile situations, Hondros managed to find the poignant, emotional image that often told more of what was going on than the bang-bang shot. And it’s worth mentioning that proceeds from Testament go to the Chris Hondros Fund.

Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, Paul Martineau (Getty Publications)
Fully appreciating Minor White’s images, like learning to taste the subtleties of a good wine, requires something of a learning curve. His landscapes, nudes, still lifes and street photos all bear a very classic beauty. Very fine grained, precisely printed and composed, technically perfect in nearly every way, these are photos that legions of photographers have tried to imitate. As this book makes clear, White was a tour de force, constantly seeking, always challenging himself with new projects. His impact extends well beyond his work as a photographer. He was a founder of Aperture and worked closely with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), eventually leading the photo program there. Amid the many retrospectives of White’s career, this stands as one of the best overviews, an excellent starting point in your education on one of the world’s greatest photographers.

Superlative Light, Robert Shults (Daylight)
Superlative Light is a simple soft-cover book of black-and-white photos of the Petawatt Laser facility in Austin, Texas, that look like stills from an old sci-fi movie. It’s an unassuming project really, basic reportage about the facility that in 2009, when these photos were taken, produced the most powerful laser pulse to date. Translating something so magnificent yet so clinically mundane in such striking photos is no small feat.

The Photobook: A History, Vol. III, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (Phaidon)
The third and final installment in a series that jump-started a recent increased interest in photobooks. Parr and Badger’s insightful series highlights books that mark significant points of evolution in the medium. From well-known masterpieces like Robert Frank’s The Americans to lesser-known books like Morten Andersen’s Fast City, the series leaves no stone unturned. This third edition focuses on photobooks published from World War II to the present.

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The 19 Best Photobooks of 2014

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These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

by RRIAbraham Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform exploded in June 2010, killing 11 workers and sending roughly five million barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, much of the media coverage featured sludge-covered seabirds, empty shrimp baskets, and other environmental impacts. But for Doug Brown, the catastrophe was even more immediate. He was the rig’s chief engineer, standing in the control room when a deafening blast sent him flying and turned his workplace into a fiery, oil-soaked hell.

In The Great Invisible, a documentary about the blowout and its aftermath that premieres today in Los Angeles and New York, Brown breaks into tears as he recalls the “incoherent screamings of pain” of his coworkers: “I saw men completely lose control.”

This virtually untold side of the Deepwater Horizon story emerges from a melange of archival footage (including home videos shot onboard the rig) and original interviews with rig workers and family members of men who died in the disaster. They speak of pride at working on one of the world’s most advanced drilling rigs, terror at the explosion, and the post-traumatic stress and guilt that still haunt them.

Above all, they tell of their betrayal by Transocean, the rig’s owner, and BP, its operator—companies to which they gave their best years, and which they now blame for systematically walking back basic precautions in the months preceding the explosion. The film is equally critical of the federal government, which has resumed selling offshore drilling leases while offering no new rig-safety regulations.

The Great Invisible also paints a vivid portrait of life in the bayou fishing communities where filmmaker Margaret Brown (no relation to Doug) grew up—communities still reeling four years after the spill. I spoke with Brown about producing a film that is as much an exploration of America’s love-hate relationship with the oil industry as it is a critique of a few miscreant companies—and about how she encouraged her emotionally scarred central characters to speak out for the first time.

Climate Desk: You grew up in southern Alabama. How did your own background affect your filmmaking approach?

Margaret Brown: That’s pretty much why I made the film. My dad was sending me pictures of his house with the orange oil booms they put out during the spill. It was weird to see your home surrounded by the booms. It was really emotional. And then I started talking to people in the area, and everyone was super depressed. It’s not like a hurricane where people know how to respond. In a hurricane, there’s a drill if you grow up down there. With this, nobody knew what to do. There was a lot of uncertainty and depression. And that was what I responded to.

Filmmaker Margaret Brown

When we first went down there, there were so many cameras on the beach for like two or three months. And then it went away. I was curious about what would happen when all the other cameras left—when that image went off the news of the plume of oil leaking. The minute that was gone, all the reporters were gone. I stayed four years. I was curious what it would be like to make a film about something everyone knows about. How do you make that novel and fresh?

The film changed. It started with me wanting me to make something about where I grew up, and turned into something about the larger question of how Americans relate to petroleum. I wanted to see if I could make something personal, but also where people can watch it and understand a little more about what happens when we fill up our car. Hopefully people would have the same kind of thought process that I did, learning about how deeply entrenched the government is, how it makes so much money off offshore leases—which is probably a big answer to why things aren’t changing.

CD: Which of your initial assumptions were challenged or changed as you made the film?

MB: I think just the scope of what we talk about when we talk about oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. And after watching all the grandstanding in Congress, I really did think something might change in terms of safety regulations. Maybe that’s naïve. But this is the first major oil spill where something hasn’t changed. It made me a little more cynical.

But I think it’s a timely moment. People are realizing climate change is real in a way they didn’t 10 years ago. I think the film is part of the conversation, but it’s not the answer. I think people see it in a really simple way, like it’s either “Boycott BP!” or “Drill baby drill!” There’s no real understanding of the huge expanse in between, and that’s frustrating to me. We are all connected to what BP is giving us.

The spill happened, and then nothing happened. I hope the film can address why nothing happened, and I think a lot of that is Congress. But also that, the minute it got off the news, people stopped thinking about. It seemed like, “Okay, they capped it. It’s gone.” But actually, there are no new safety regulations. It’s not gone.

Doug Brown was chief engineer on the Deepwater Horizon when the rig exploded in 2010. Courtesy Margaret Brown

CD: How did you get the workers and their families to open up?

MB: That was the hardest part, actually, those interviews. Rig hand Stephen Stone and Doug Brown were absolutely the hardest people to get to agree to be in the film. I think that was mainly because of the PTSD they’d suffered from the accident, and they and their wives weren’t sure if being in the film would be better or worse for them. I think they’re still not sure. We still talk about it. But I think mainly the consensus has been that it’s been cathartic and positive to share their story. Those stories of how their lives have changed, and how they haven’t gotten paid, and what happens when you witness this—the guilt and the troubling feelings, the suicidal feelings. It’s some of the scariest stuff there is. They were super brave to be in the movie, because in that industry I think people sort of follow the leader, and those guys decided to speak out and be whistle blowers.

Doug had tried to kill himself, and it was really hard to get them to open up. I spent hours with his, Meccah, on the phone talking, and crying sometimes, because I think they thought at first that I was a spy from Transocean. They had such a level of mistrust and being messed around with by those companies that they didn’t believe that I was an independent filmmaker. So I went from being a spy to someone you would talk to. They felt that Doug had been so loyal to that company, and was so proud of his job. To go from that to feeling like—I mean, Doug struggles with a lot of guilt for something that he had little to no control over. And it’s interesting to me who feels guilt in this film—and who should feel guilty.

The workers are proud of what they’re doing. There’s a sense of bringing oil to the American people and providing energy. If you just look at it from the left, and how bad BP is, you’re going to miss a lot of what’s really going on.

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These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

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No, Ronald Reagan Was Not Just a More Amiable Version of Barry Goldwater

by SharynW08am Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

Jacob Weisberg is critical of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, the third volume in his history of movement conservatism from 1958 to 1980. The first two books covered Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon; the third spans the period from 1972 through 1976, which encompasses the end of Nixon and the rise of Reagan. Here’s Weisberg:

Most historians view the Nixon-Reagan transition as a break in the ideological continuum, a shift from an era in which Republicans made peace with the growing welfare and regulatory state to one in which a newly energized conservative movement effectively challenged it. Perlstein, by contrast, sees the move from Nixon to Reagan as continuity: Both men tried to reverse what the 1960s were doing to the country.

….An alternative thesis is the one Perlstein seemed to be framing up with his first, shorter, and better book: that the crucial bridge in modern Republican politics was the one leading from Barry Goldwater to Reagan. Nixon was the last important President of the New Deal Era, in the same way that Bill Clinton is best subsumed under the rubric of the Reagan Era….In his attack on government, Reagan drew very little from Nixon, and a great deal from Goldwater….Reagan’s views were not simply Goldwater’s views; they were Goldwater’s views purged of their excesses and abstraction, grounded in the country’s lived experience, and given a hopeful cast. That’s the bridge Reagan walked across and the one I wish Perlstein had tried to sell us.

I think Weisberg has missed the bridge that Perlstein is trying to sell us. Reagan wasn’t merely a better, more congenial version of Barry Goldwater. That’s part of the story, but there’s a second part as well: Reagan’s exploitation of the politics of resentment that Nixon rode to victory in 1968 and 1972. Just as Reagan sanded off the scariest edges of Goldwaterism to make it more palatable to a national audience, he also sanded off—or perhaps just kept hidden—the scariest edges of right-wing populist resentment. But make no mistake: it was there, and it was a big part of Reagan’s appeal. Intellectually, Reagan’s politics may have been the child of Goldwater, but emotionally they were the child of Nixon.

That said, I think Weisberg also makes some sharp criticisms of The Invisible Bridge. I enjoyed it, but it rings true when he complains that “for long stretches, reading this book feels like leafing through a lot of old newspapers.” It’s a little more of a pastiche than either of his first two books, and too often this is to the detriment of the bigger story.

But there was another, more fundamental, disappointment. The genius of Before the Storm, the first book in the series, is that it explained the birth of movement conservatism to a liberal audience. This is harder than it sounds. A conservative history, simply because of the unspoken assumptions that would inevitably color it, would largely leave liberal readers cold. An overtly liberal history, by contrast, would almost certainly be unable to truly explain the appeal of Goldwater and his supporters. But Perlstein threads this needle brilliantly. Before the Storm explains the rise of Goldwater in a way that conservatives consider fair but that liberals find comprehensible.

For better or worse, Perlstein abandoned this approach in The Invisible Bridge. Maybe that was inevitable as the spotlight moved first from a principled loser like Goldwater to a destructive manipulator like Nixon and then to a man who set back the liberal project in a way that’s still painful to this day. It’s just plain easier to be dispassionately curious about Goldwater than about either Nixon or Reagan. Nonetheless, this failing also makes The Invisible Bridge less interesting. Even granting the hagiographic glow that conservatives tend to demand of Reagan biographers, this really isn’t a book that very many conservatives would consider fair. And except for brief flashes of insight1 it doesn’t truly explain to liberal sensibilities just what was so appealing about the man.

It’s still a lovely book that I paged through hungrily. And let’s face it: saying that it’s not as good as Before the Storm is something you could say about nearly every book ever written. It’s still pretty damn good. But I wish Perlstein had gone a little lighter on his obvious contempt for Reagan and spent a little more time owning up—perhaps uncomfortably—to just what it was about the liberalism of the 70s that finally drove so many voters crazy.

1For example, there’s this brief bit about the White House consulting Reagan during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war:

Kissinger [] solicited him for advice on the extraordinarily delicate matter of how to frame an Israeli resupply operation that, if handled incorrectly, could lead to a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Reagan suggested: “Why don’t you say you will replace all the aircraft the Arabs claim they have shot down?”

This was brilliant. Since the Arabs were wildly exaggerating their success, presenting them with a Hobson’s choice—saying nothing or facing international humiliation—was perfect. Reagan’s interpersonal intelligence was something to behold.

More like that, please.

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No, Ronald Reagan Was Not Just a More Amiable Version of Barry Goldwater

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