JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

History of Normalcy, Part 1: “Girls”

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My wife, Patti Digh, and I have long talked about the
history of normalcy—a history of what looks to be “normal”, or standard, or
acceptable at one time that became not so over the course of time. Buying and selling human beings, women and
their children being property of her spouse, Chinese immigrants not have (any)
legal rights, are three good candidates (among thousands) for this history. It is an interesting proposition to think
about—what things around you, or better yet, what thing you think or say or do,
that look good and acceptable today might look embarrassing and unacceptable thirty
years hence. In 1935 one issue might’ve
been accepting the codified behavior of treating women as less than equal of
men, deserving less in the workplace (if they were in the workplace), less
rights in the courts, less deserving of equality in general; by 1965, this
viewpoint may have well been in the minority; by 1995 it begins to look
fossilized; by 2025 it might well be unbelievable. What are the issues of 2009 that could be the
equivalent of the 1935 issue?

And so the first in th is series: the October 1951 issue of Life magazine’s article
by Carl Mydans (the great and esteemed war and documentary photographer), “Girl
War Correspondent”. It is a sympathetic
look at a sharp minority in the American newspaper business: the female war correspondent. Or, in this case, the “girl” correspondent.
One would hardly refer to Edward Murrow as “the male correspondent Edward R.
Murrow”, or “Edward R. Murrow, Boy Correspondent”. The “girl” in this case was Miss Marguerite
Higgins (1920-1966), aged 30. She was a
correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and covered the war,
boots on the ground, covering the war in Korea. Mydans gives a creditable review of Higgins very active and
dangerous participation in the war effort.
It was not the intention of the article though to look at where Higgins
had been before Korea;
particularly, what she had been doing in 1944 and 1945. AS a matter of fact Higgins was a
correspondent for the Herald Tribune in Paris and London in 1944/5, and later sent to Germany in
March 1945. She received a combat ribbon
for helping in securing the surrender of SS guards when she witnessed the
liberation of Dachau.. Afterward she covered the Nuremberg
trials and the Soviet blockade of Berlin.

In spite of all that she was banned from covering the war in Korea. If not for the personal appeal/demand of
Douglas MacArthur (who telegraphed Higgins’superiors at the Herald Tribune “BAN ON WOMEN
CORRESPONDENTS IN KOREA HAS BEEN LIFTED. MARGUERITE HIGGINS IS HELD IN HIGHEST
PROFESSIONAL ESTEEM BY EVERYONE”) she and all other female correspondents would’ve
been kept out of the war. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for
international reporting (in 1951, for Korea),
and would go on to cover international affairs, winding up in Vietnam for
Newsday in 1963. As a result of her
years of experience she wrote, in 1965 (!), Vietnam U.S. Our Nightmare: The story of involvement in the Vietnamese tragedy, with
thoughts on a future policy New York (Harper and Row).

In spite of it all,
given her experience in WWII and her developing coverage in Korea , she was,
in October 1951, still a girl.

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Militaria
Seeing Renaissance Pillows: a Short Bit on an Unnecessary Topic

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Evelyn, a dog, having undergone

Further modification
Pondered the significance of short-person behavior

In pedal-depressed panchromatic resonance

And other highly ambient domains…

“Arf” she said.
—F. Zappa, One Size
Fits All (“Evelyn the Modified Dog”)

I was going to write something completely different about
these images for this post—but I fell completely into the beds of these
paintings—actually, I missed the beds and made straight for the pillows. I really didn’t have anywhere to go with
this–no point, no cozy tie-ups—and when I told about my wife Patti Digh about
this problem she wisely told me to forget about a point, and “send it out into
the world”. (Patti has no doubt that the
subject of this post sounds like an unending and probably unendurable doctoral
dissertation.) And so when faced with my
own set of sensory inputs that couldn’t come to some sort of comprehension, “arf” sounded pretty good.

The first image is an oil on canvas (transferred from wood)
by Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, Italian, Ferrarese, 1476?–1559) called Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Reviving the Birds and painted around 1530. The
man in the bed is a deathly sick St. Nicholas, an Augustinian monk, who was
attended by no fewer than six of his brethren.
They are shown offering him a plate of roasted birds, but Nicholas, a
vegetarian, rose from his bed and in rejecting the food brought the birds back
to life. We see that long, bed-width
pillow with a small cozy on top of it

In another painting of another Nicholas, Bicci di Lorenzo’s
(Italian, Florentine, 1373–1452) Nicholas Providing Dowries (date

1433–35), we see the Bishop of Myrna in Asia Minor Nicholas pushing bags of
gold through a transom and into a house. Sounds a little like St. Nick of
Christmas lore, though this St. Nick was providing the dowries to three
daughters of a destitute man unable to provide his offspring with money of his
own. (Not having money for a dowry was a major deal in these times—without the
money the women probably would not have been able to marry, forced to other not
savory means for providing money for their daily needs to survive. Here again we have a big red bed, with a
bed-width pillow, and the smaller pillow on the top of it all.

The last example belongs to Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460 – 1525/1526), in his The Dream of St.
Ursula (painted 1495). Again, the same: red bed, big pillow (though no little fellow
is visible). There is a strange small
ball-like object near her head at the base of the pillow, and her slippers are
where they were when she stepped from them into the bed. It looks like she has six books in her work
area at the back of the room (as well as an hour glass on the desk). There is a problematic burst of light on the
ceiling from the high window to the left of the door—it doesn’t seem likely
that this splash of light could be on the ceiling given the shadows in the
room. Oh well.

And so. There are
more examples of these pillows, but we probably don’t need to look at more
right now—just noticing them is probably enough. Sometimes finding interesting
detail in the detail leads somewhere, and sometimes not. There is a continuing
thread in this blog that looks at the importance of incidental detail in art,
though today’s post chooses the “sometimes
not” option.

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Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Detail in Renaissance Paintings: Carpaccio’s Venice

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While finishing yesterday’s post on the occasional
nothingnesses of details in Renaissance painting and using one of the painting
by Vittore Carpaccio to make my point, I stumbled upon another image by this
Renaissance master that was almost all detail,
and of great somethingness. The painting
is Il miracolo della reliquia
della Santa Croce (“The Healing of a Madman”, painted in 1494), which is a
large, extraordinary and detail-filled canvas of a street scene in Venice. The subject of the painting is Francesco
Qerini, the Patriarch of Grado (which was the old name for the Patriarch of
Venice, one of the four Sees, with patriarchs reaching back to the 6^th
century), who was healing a mad/possessed man of whatever aliments finding
safety in him, and evidently accomplishing the task with a tiny piece of the original
cross of Jesus, given to Qerini ‘s patriarchy in the 14^th
century.

The miracle itself takes up only a very small portion of the painting—you
can find it in the upper left, in a spacious loggia, the “madman” (I think)
crooking his head to look up at the outstretched crucifix; a quiet, almost
secondary acquiescence to all of that other energy in the painting. Even though not the intentional subject of
the painting, it is the wooden Rialto Bridge (the version built in 1458) that takes center
stage, though I guess one could say that the key area of interest was the city
of Venice
itself. Or the throngs of its citizens
enjoying the airy passage through the city.
The focal point does seem to be the bridge, which had the capacity to
open for taller ships, and was a focal point of transfer for the
community.

There is some reason for this outside of the artistic sense—the paining was
one of nine commissioned by the Confraternity of the Scuola Grande di San
Giovanni Evangelista, which was a major concern in Venice.So it would seem that Venice
was meant to be as much a part of the appeal of the painting as was the miracle
that called for the attention in the first place.

This was a very crowded scene, the foreground and background material and
subjects as important as the subject itself; it was a greatly democratized work
calling as much attention to the city of Venice as the miracle being worked
within it—and it still remains a calm and quiet vision Perhaps it is the steadfast of the objects
above the street, like the pot-like chimneys (at least 26 showing) and the
clothes-drying poles with their flag-like fare that contribute to the quietness
above the bustling city street. Experts
say that this is a superb rendering of the cityscape, with accurate coloring, a
beautiful documentary of life in Venice
just at the end of the 16^th century.
In addition to the cityscape we see all manner of small life in the many
people in the painting: passengers in
the gondola are carrying pets (at least one dog and a bird), the stores at the
foot of the bridge, an open air market (with sellers lined up with small
tables), plus all manner of styles in dress.

It is a wonderful example of the opposite of yesterday’s post: something where all of its comparative “nothings”
were the most important part of the unit.

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Architecture and Building — Art History — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
A Note on the History of Simultaneity

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There is a great, unifying factor drawing together Aztec glyphs, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Marcel Duchamp, the Renaissance Sienese Sassetta, Guillaume Appolinaire, William S. Porter—they all display disparate chronological sense to a single story.

The concept of displaying the passage of time, relating multiple events taking place at the same (or different) times, is really quite a lot older than the what is generally considered to be its recent modernist beginning. Duchamp’s Nude Descending, which is a masterpiece of modernism displaying unfolding time and multiple perspective views across time of the same object, is the direct descendant of centuries-old artworks. The Egyptians and the Aztecs certainly made use of this idea of multiple stories at multiple times in their stone storyboards. Closer to the present is the genre of early Renaissance painting like Sassetta’s The Meeting of St Anthony Abbot and St Paul the Hermit (painted circa 1440), which shows several aspects of the story over time, and depicted on the same canvas. (We see the beginning of St. Anthony’s journey at top left, heading out on his journey as a younger man, winding his way through dark wood and along a curving trail; we see him a second time as an old man, and then lastly at bottom, elderly, finally meeting the other monk.)

The rollout of the Sassetta masterpiece (hanging happily at the National Gallery in D.C.) reminds me a lot of the great hallmark of storytelling at the beginning of the twentieth century—no, not Barzun or Cendars, but Little Nemo (who predates all of the other greats who were to come in the next ten years or so). Winsor McCay’s (1871-1934) Little Nemo in Slumberland (appearing in the Hearst newspapers beginning in 1902)—better yet, the comic strip in general—adopts a platform for storytelling that is nothing short of revolutionary. By breaking out the development of the narrative in front of the reader and on one single sheet of paper gives the author fantastic maneuverability. This is also seen in the early motion pictures of Edwin S. Porter (like The Ex Convict, 1905) and D.W. Griffith (The Lonely Villa, 1909) who both use a new concept of contrasting editing—cutaways from the main action and pace of the.

film and incorporating vignettes of actions that are related and happening elsewhere, sometimes all of it happening at once. The story is able to develop multiple themes that are occurring at the same time but in disparate locations—the artwork of futurists Balla and Boccioni and the unclassifiable Duchamp reach for the same end, and so to (again) with Apollinaire and Cendars and the rest…and all of them coming into view in 1912/1913 or so.

There’s a lot to talk about on the tech end of this too, not the least of which is the work of Etienne Marey who made highly successful photographic investigations (in the 1870’s and 1880’s)
of all manner of locomotion, some of the results of which look like the x-ray of Duchamp’s Nude. Perhaps the greatest early enablers of technological simultaneity are the telegraph and (more impressively) the telephone, both of which allowed people to be in two different places at the same time (so to speak).

Again, this is just a note, thinking out loud, about the concept of simultaneity, and I doubt that I’ve even broken the surface…I’ve not even considered the math and physical aspects of it all, not even a whisper about Einstein and Schroedinger. I’ve just done a search and found two works by eminent historians of science on this topic which I should think would demand reading: Max Jammer’s Concept of Simultaneity (2005) and Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps and the Empire of Time (2003). I’d like to return to this post when I think I might have an idea of what I’m talking about…

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Perception — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
1932 as an Annus Mirabilis

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My daughter Emma started a collection for my wife
Patti last year–for Mother’s Day—of books with dates as the main part of their
title. For example: Roger Crowley’s
1453, James Chace 1912, Andrew Brieford 1066, Charles Mann’s 1491, David
McCullogh’s 1776, and that elusive 1968 that I can never find. It is a wonderful idea, and probably
something that could be expanded as a real collection.

I mention this because I was thinking about Big
Years, enormous years, the annus mirabilis. 1905 is the first date that springs
to mind in this category, but it is almost entirely dedicated to one
person—Einstein—and not that much miraculously else, though it can probably be
argued that those four papers in the Annalen were enough for enormous
contributions spread across four very big people. Einstein really did have that good a year.

I like the year (for the sciences, anyway) 1932.

It
isn’t thought of in the same way, say, as 1543, which was a great year for
things big and little. Nicolas Copernicus saw (finally, basically from
his deathbed) his “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”
(On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) published in Nuremberg,
while the Brussels-born, brilliant and troubled Andreas Vesalius had Johannes Oporinus print his
revolutionary treatment of the human body “De humani corporis fabrica“ (On the Fabric of the Human Body).
Copernicus said the things that any thinking person was thinking about the
structure of the solar system and universe at large, while Vesalius conducted
his brave overthrow of the deeply ancient Galenic system of anatomy.

1932
isn’t 1666, either, though 1-sign-of-the-devil’s stupendous nature was related
in a way to that of 1543. 1666 saw a
great heavenly event—the naming of the comet known as Halley’s—and a horrendous
biological one, with the great plague of London,
which killed upwards of 100,000 people.
(It was a bad year overall for the city—the winter of 1665 was terrifically
cold and was followed by the plague. At
the tail end of the plague came the Great Fire of London [the diarist Samuel
Pepys referring to it as ‘a most horrid malicious bloody flame’]). It seems more like an annus horriblius more than
anything else. Except of course for Issac Newton, who had a very fine year this
year.

And
1932 wasn’t 1453 or 1066 or 1968 or 1776 or 1918 or 1945. Perhaps it is close to 1859, which saw the publication of what may be the most revolutionary work of the 19^th century
in Darwin’ On
the Origin of Species. Bunsen and Kirchhoff
added spectacular content when they figured out (with the aid of earlier work
by Fraunhoeffer and others) the internal constitution of the stars with a
telescope equipped with A spectroscope—truly an unthinkable breakthrough to
even a well-rounded mid-19^th century mind.

What happened in1932 was another sweeping array of
discoveries in the large and small. Carl
Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron
and the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation (called “one of the most important
discoveries of the century… the consequences of the discovery of artificial
radioactivity are immense” from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199). Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent
f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons
and neutrons. Knoll and Ruska built the
electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors
of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s
two centuries earlier. Looking up and
out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars
while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy.
(Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler also had a big year this year.)*

It is tempting to include 16 months or so of 1925/6/7
in this list, if for no other reason than the people making the great innovations
were so very young–the term for these German physicists is Knabenphysik (boy
physics, boy physicists), and what they did was invent the new quantum
mechanics and change the face of physics. It all came about at the end of the era of the
old quantum theory (which comprised the years 1900-1925), and pretty much all
at the University of Goettingen. The 1925 players were Werner Heisenberg (age
23, with his PhD. under Sommerfeld), Paul Jordan (age 22 with his Ph.D. under
Born), Wolfgang Pauli (25, with his doctorate under Sommerfeld) and P. (aul)A.M.
Dirac (22, and who wrote the world’s first dissertation on quantum mechanics). The odd person out in this group though was
perhaps the strongest: Erwin Schroedinger was 37 in 1925, definitely the “Old
Man” of this set. On the other hand
there were three men of mountainous importance in physics who also made vast
contributions to the new physics, even though they were, um, more mature: Max Born (in his mid-forties), Niels Bohr
(about the same age) and Arnold Sommerfeld (who was 60 when he founded the
quantum mechanics of metals).

In any event, I like 1932. Next time we’ll look at another Big Year: 1948.

*Some of the books released in this year was also a bumper crop: Death in the Afternoon, Ernest
Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner;
1919, John Dos Passos; The
Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road,
Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder;
and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

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Physics
A Note on the History of Smiling

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Where do exhausted 1951 smiles go?

I don’t know when the first illustrated advertisement appeared, and I don’t know when the first picture of a smiling human face was used in that in order to sell a product displayed in a mass market printed publication. My sense though is that the smiling, happy (and too-happy) face was first used in the first or second decade of the 20^th century, but that the general, templated use of the eagerly over-sized mega-toothed smile topped by wide-spirited painted eyeballs came into play in America right after the end of WWII. The enthusiastic smiled-upon objects seem to become more slight and mundane as time passes, coming to a point fairly early on of the mysterious basis for this happiness over such modest products. The smiles and happiness brought by these items was surely short-lived, the smile becoming a fossil, a relic, to simpler times and simpler consuming needs.

Breezing through a hand volume of LIFE magazine for 1951 finds many examples, and quickly too: how exciting can a bottle of 7Up possibly be? This entire family seems to be serenading the object of their collected desires, the father certainly being the most moved of the bunch. Baby has its own bottle and, of course, drum.

Is that Jerry Mathers smiling so contentedly at Mother brining in his hot water bottle? (The doggie is staring at something to Mother’s left, probably focused on some trainer threatening/rewarding it to make it seem interested in the hot water bottle, too. ) It is hard to image this item bringing a smile to anyone’s face, at least from this standpoint in the future. Its a simple rubber bag, brought to a simple room. In a weird and unexpected King of the Hill neighborhood sort of way, the whole scene seems very comforting. Maybe its the cowboy holster at the foot of the bed and the perfectly folded blanket that seals the deal.)

Pumps? This is actually half of an ad featuring a number of very accommodating couples allowing themselves to be happy while looking at women’s shoes. I can’t tell what is going on in the background, but in the foreground there are several of men infected with broad-beam smiles brought on by looking at a glass case filled with pumps. The glass “treasure chest” seems to be guarded by garishly-festooned black men, a sign of the un-lliberated LIFE magazine times.

This man seems overly exuberant with the pleasure brought him by his underwear, though he is at least alone while experiencing this private Underwear Emotion. (In many other ads by Jockey there’s a man & boy setting, each usually with big smiles, straddling things to show the comforts of their underthings, caught in what seems today to be pre-porny trash poses of extremely dubious ease…no one today would ever come close to publishing such a thing in today’s (legitimate) advert community.) So too for the woman who seems to match appreciation for her new engagement band with the fortitude of her bra–it isn’t exactly clear that the ad is celebrating uplifted pointy breasts with marriage proposals, but it doesn’t take too much of a leap to get there.

There was a time that the *something* that made us smile didn’t make us smile any longer. The smile is gone, gone to where smiles go once they’re no longer needed, replaced by thin-lipped satisfied need.There was a time in 1951 when advertisers thought their products to be so appealing that they used monumentally misplaced smiles to convince the buying population of the United States to purchase their product, expecting I guess to produce that photographed smile onto the face of every purchaser, or at least to image the smile in the consumers’ noggins. That smile didn’t last long—after all, we’re just talking about 7Up and underwear.

I wonder about the issue of the impossible smile of promised pleasures like these, and how it changed over the years. As a casual observer of millions (?) of these sorts of things over the years, my own general impression is that the smiles are era-dependent and semi-generational. Or not.

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Bad Ideas
Blank, Empty and Missing Things #44: Missing Detail in Illustrations

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The History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things #44

In America
and Europe for much of the 19^thcentury
books with illustrations received their color by the labor of small-handed
women and older children. For popular,
inexpensive and widely distributed books engravings and woodcuts were often
given their color by an assembly line process:
one person applying the red, another the blue, the third the green, and
so on, until image was completed. This
was a fairly quick process—more than five colors was rare—and once done the
sheets were left to dry before being sent off to be cut, folded, sewn, trimmed
and bound. The colorists wouldn’t really
survive past the 1880’s or so, being replaced by machines and different sorts
of coloring processes—the last book to be published for the mass market being
the 1896 edition of Johnson’s Cyclopedia.

This sort of distribution of artistic labor was not new to
the 19^th century by any means.
Guilds dictating the strict observance of a painting’s preparation—making
the canvas or preparing the wood, gathering the ingredients for making colors, making
the colors, and so on—stretches back at least 600 years.

I’m wondering about this because of an illustration that I
found of extremely uneven accomplishment.
It occurs in Quintus Curtius Rufus
The Life of Alexander the Great (“translated by several Gentlemen in the University of Cambridge”) and printed for Gilbert
Cownly in 1687. (I can never let it pass that this is the year that modern
science really began, with the publication of Newton’s Principia…
.) The engraving is the book’s
frontispiece, and shows Alexander on horseback.

Of course there’s no real portrait of Alexander, though his “likeness”
appears on coins from that period. But
the face in the engraving just doesn’t match up to the quality of the rest of
the image. The horse is a little nicer
than standard for the period, and there’s a fair amount of detail in the
background.

The face of the great
Alexander though is pretty bad, drawn in almost as an afterthought even though
he is the subject of the book. Maybe the
engraving’s elements were divided and distributed in the workshop to, say
someone good at horses doing the horse, another good at executing armor doing
that, and so on, until someone realized that no one was there to engrave the
face. And so perhaps it came to pass that Alex received this cheeky/jowly face with a single-muscled skinny neck. (I notice that none of the riders in the background have faces.) Maybe there was only one artist, and they just got tired or figured this face was good enough, and moved on to the next project; perhaps there was just one engraver who was late for dinner and did a too-fast job on the face. And maybe the face was just good enough, no matter who did or or how many people worked on it. I’ve seen this sort of uneven effort, this missing detail in a detailed work, many times over the years, and I’ve always wondered what the story was. And I guess I always will.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
The Finnegan’s Wake of the 15th Century

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Since I had a go at early illustration earlier today in this blog I thought to write something about a book that is probably one of the most beautifully printed books not only of the Renaissance but of all time. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream) by Francesco Colonna was the greatest achievement by the greatest printer of the Renaissance (Aldus Manutius in Venice), a spectacular combination of story and type and design and illustration; an imaginative, secular Humanist self-romance like no other printed to that time. ) See the entire text HERE.)

Hypnerotomachia means “the strife of love in a dream”, and the reference to Poliphili refers to the narrator of the story, Poliphilo, telling of the love affair between Polia and Poliphilo—the master text of the whole story though is a description of ancient art and architecture, all told in a wonderful ”macaronic mélange” of Italian and Latin, and which were the “exact accounts” seen in Poliphilo’s dreams about Polia.. It is a modernist book for being printed in the last year of the 15^th century (1499), and stands for vitality and grace and superb design, and according to George Painter was the Finnegan’s Wake of the fifteenth century. Painter continues, and writing that “Gutenberg’s forty-two line Bible of 1455 and the Hypnerotomachia of 1499 confront one another from opposite ends of the incunable period with equal and contrasting pre-eminence. The Gutenberg Bible is somberly and sternly German, Gothic, Christian and mediaeval; the Hypnerotomachia is radiantly and graciously Italian, classic, pagan and renascent. These are two supreme masterpieces of the art of printing, and stand at the two poles of human endeavor and desire! “(Cited by Alan Thomas, Fine Books, 1967, pp 71-4).

Martin Lowry in his The World of Aldus Manututus (Ithaca, New York, 1979) makes another interesting statement on this masterpiece: “(Hypnerotomachia) was a linguistic and literary debauch, choked with recondite imagery, erudite periphrases, and exotic verbiage: a work so bizarre that many critics have felt a certain uneasiness at Aldus’ agreeing to print it.”

It is truly an astonishing accomplishment, and its significance in the design of type and of the book really cannot be underestimated. As E.P. Goldsmidt stated (in The Printed Book of the Renaissance, 1950, p. 52): “In the North an astonishing proportion of all Renaissance ornament and accessory design can clearly be proved to derive from Colonna…”

The book is summarized here and below:

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A History of Dots: Images of the Unbelievable, 1944

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The History of Dots, Part 12

This is a detail from an unintentionally
astonishing photograph made in 1944—the last line of its caption forming the
basis of the title of this post. (“Click on the dots below for photos from the
Album depicting events which took place at those points.”)

It is the ultimate insult to consider these dots to be dots–though to some analytical eyes this is all they were; in extreme and unutterable cases, this is what they remain.

As you scroll down through
these four images their origin becomes clear.

This photograph was one of a series made on 31 May
1944 by the 60 Photo-reconnaissance Squadron of the
South African Air Force under the direction of the U.S. Army Air Force–the purpose being to identify Nazi bombing targets, the principle object in this case being the
IG Farben complex near the border town of Auschwitz.

The base data reveals that sorties were flown and
photographs made and presented from missions of 4 April, 31 May , 26 June, 25
August, 14 September, 21 December (1944) and 14 January and 15 February 1945. (See
HERE for the rest of the photographs.) The
images were evidently captured as a result of the standard method of filming:
taking pictures several minutes before and after reaching the target area to
ensure that the primary objective is actually photographed; some of the sorties
were executed to find the target, and others enabled to survey the damage done
to the target (and to also see how quickly the targets were reconstructed). The
“side” result is a record of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, the
significance of which seems to have escaped notice at the time, although the
camp of Auschwitz III was indeed labeled as a “Concentration Camp” in the original.

IG
(“Interessengemeinschaft”, standing for “Association of Common Interests”) Farben
was a massive business concern composed of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and other
German pharmaceutical and chemical companies,
whose main political benefactor was the NSDAP and whose roots go back to
the very formation of real Nazi power in 1932.
The basis for this mutual interest was principally the production of
synthetic fuel and chemicals, but as the time pressed on that capacity expanded
to many other roles essential for the functioning of the German military and
the basis of Nazi power. It is not
possible to understate the importance of Farben to the production of the Nazi
state and the waging of the war.

After 20 years of back and forth historians have come to the
conclusion that major industries/industrialist such as Farben didn’t actually
“back” Hitler in the early days (1932/3/4) per se—that is to say that large
amounts of capital didn’t flow into the NSDAP bank accounts from Big Money
sources, though they (the every large majority) certainly did acquiesce to the
social programs of Hitler. Business in
general certainly did well under the Nazi regime before 1938. The giant bonuses for both the government and
business/industry came after the attacks and conquests beginning gin 1938—it
was at that time that these businesses rolled into the cities of the conquered
land and took the tools of industry, the raw material and any else of value to
expand themselves and to also help support the war effort. The utilizeable means of production did not
limit itself to goods: the captured
population was also put to work as slave laborers and worse. And this is where Farben really makes its
pact with the devil, as it was far and away the worst offender of putting
humanity into its industrial oil can, making expendable people all together more
so, using them as another piece of machinery; the prisoners were worked and
starved to death, and once they no longer provided some sort of value to Farben
(and etc.), they were sent to be eliminated at the extermination centers.

These workers were generally “sold” by the SS to private companies, though
officially it was known as a “fee”. This practice broadened as the war grew on and
the labor supply o these companies was drawn off by the army; by 1944 there
were in fact millions of foreign workers doing labor in Germany itself, with
companies like Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, Krupp and Siemens taking solemn and
completely lecherous advantage of the captured slave labor pool.

Back to the photograph:
these “dots” were the humans who were the expendable slave worker units
who were burned up like an old rag once their utility had been maximized. The official reason for this mission was to
locate the Farben synthetic rubber works and petroleum plants, some 2k from the
Auschwitz compound.
One of the last images shows the destruction to the camps by the Nazis who
were trying to hide what had been going on there as they prepared for the inevitable arrival
of the Soviets (who would arrive two weeks later).

The arrows and annotations in these versions are the result of a reinterpretation of the images in 1978 by two photographic image analysts/interpreters at the DIA and did not appear of course n the originals of 1944. The arrows pointing at the “dots” were actually long lines of prisoners; there were arrows pointing to a rather long train heading off from a complex of tracks; there was the enormous barracks evidently housing a very large population within a town center; and there was the production of a fair amount of smoke from a not-small building. It is a mystery why these images–one of which actually had Birkenau labeled as a concentration camp–didn’t produce a military reaction by the Allies, the question producing its own considerable amount of interpretation and study. remember now these annotations were made in 1978.) The photo does show how nestled the camps were in the town and in the
busy countryside; the main entrance to the camp was (and is today)
located on a busy street. The walls around the compounds remind me of
the walls around the Warsaw Ghetto–if you needed not to see the obvious, you wouldn’t. Except at the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps there was also the smell…. Revisionist Holocaust deniers have actually employed these images to their own evil ends, using a feeble analysis to support the notion that the Allies didn’t act on the camps because the extermination and liquidation end of it didn’t exist. This would be the extreme (gamma ray) end of the spectrum of interpretation, and an ultra-violent, criminal and instantly disposable way of reading history. In Part II of this post I’ll have a look at some of the positions.

[Reading list in the continued reading section, below]

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History of Lines: Human Queues, Fascist Italy

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 635 Blog Bookstore

In my imaginary History of Lines there is a subsection for
humans-in-line(s). In the history of the
world, the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century—the 1930’s and ‘40’s—were
big ones for human lines. Big does not imply
good, because as we all know lots of humans lined up for all manner of
unspeakable nastiness during this time and well more than 100 million didn’t
make it out alive (considering all of the wars, purges, revolutions and
stupidity).

The lines here are a little more benign, though with
shriveled overtones of corrected respect.

Oppressive obedience in a well-designed environment is still
like dressing your ear-infected 14-year-old St. Bernard/Jack Russell (?!) mixed
breed in baby booties—its just not right, and these images attest to this simpy comparison. All of these photographs
come from a delightful manufacturer’s catalog for linoleum products (Il
Linoleim nelle Costruzioni Scolastiche), which was printed in Umbria in 1935.

I’ll undoubtedly write a post on this stylistic
beauty later on, but suffice to say for right now that it really is a lovely
thing. If only we could forget the
Mussolini part. Now I’m no fan,
necessarily, of linoleum, but if I had
to live on a linoleum island far removed from civilization and I had to choose
a design for my world, I would choose the designs from this catalog, without
hesitation. They’re spare, well-proportioned, beautifully design utilitarian designs;
they are also very shiney and cold with a dispirited order, but so it
goes. The catalog seems to speak for its
times, the inspired design bowing to the weighty needs of the flatulent state.

Even though the people (mainly child people) are in very
structured environments, they still look as though they really don’t believe in
whatever it was was happening.

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Perception
The Wartime U.S. Soldier as Advertising Commodity: Ads in LIFE, WWII

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 569

I was making my way through LIFE magazine for 1943 and was struck by the ratio of the number of advertisements using the war as a backdrop (and American soldiers as convenient props) for sales against the actual space dedicated to war reporting. Concentrating on just two randomly selected weekly issues (November 1 and November 15 1943) I was surprised to find 28 ads (most of which were full-page); there was no war reporting in November 1 and just half a story (on the history of the Prussian General staff) in November 15. Most of the ads were directly war-related, the companies mostly relegated to vast production of war goods, like General Motors, Cadillac and Boeing. The others were less clear, like the ad pictured here for Green Giant peas and corn. This company was informing the home front that if there were shortages of their product it was because they were selling it to the Army or Navy–others were more adventurous for their spirited attempt at patriotism. I’m not sure that Wembly Ties really needed to include a GI in their ad, nor did I like the use of American soldiers to sell Interwoven socks.

There was a growing sense of sordidness to me, this use of images of wartime American soldiers, who were dying by the tens of thousands, being used to sell socks, ties and corn. This was particularly ironic since the magazine wasn’t finding anything to “report” in its full pages for the war for those two weeks–which is bizarre, because by that time in late 1943 there was a global FUBAR shitstorm happening to the east of NYC and to the east of San Francisco.

Some ads did have high propaganda value and were related to the general winning of the war. The vast majority though were singling out their product for purchase.

Just for the record, the advertisers employing an American soldier to help sell their product for these two weekly issues included Goodyear, Cadillac, Alcoa, Scotch Tape (for sealing boxes of tank parts), Sperry, Old Gold cigarettes, Lockheed, Schaeffer pens, Victory Airpower, Excide batteries, Camel cigarettes, Electric Power and Light companies, Oldsmobile, Cashmere Bouquet, ANSCO color film, Pontiac, Willys JEEP, Vinco (foodstuffs), Cavalier Whisky, Interwoven socks,Texaco, Eversharp pen, Wembly ties, Boeing, Black and White whisky, Ray-o-Vac, and Coke. Seems like a lot for two weeks, no? I’m not doing content analysis on this, just a passing interest, really, but when you look at similar issues for The Illustrated London News there’s very little of this sort of thing going on; even less so for the Illustrirte Zeitung (Lepizig).

I’m curious now to check out popular magazines for WWI. It seems to me that there was a bit of this going on then, too. Outside of cigarette and whisky ads, a lot of this sort of advertisement drops off during Korea; and by the time of Vietnam, these sorts of images have all but disappeared.

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Bad Ideas — Militaria