2010-06-18

excavating meanings from a single photograph (1937 England)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127859150 [discussion about the following article]
 
 
For 70 years, this picture has been used to tell the same story – of inequality, class division, "toffs and toughs". As an old Etonian closes in on Downing Street, it is being trotted out again. But what was the story behind it? Ian Jack investigates
 
[From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010; http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ian-jack/5-boys]
 
Almost since its invention, photography has had the habit of turning people into symbols by accident. A painter might spend a year on a canvas, working up the personification of an abstract idea to its full visual glory ("Truth Triumphant" or "Temptation Denied"), but a camera could capture a scene in a fraction of a second, and if the scene was somehow striking and memorable – in its composition, its subject matter, its light – it might become "iconic", meaning that its particulars might be understood to suggest much more general emotions, conflicts and problems. When the shutter clicked, such a metaphorical future was rarely suspected either by the photographer or his subjects, who might not even be aware that a picture had been taken. The moment could be ordinary or extraordinary: a couple kissing in a Paris street, a sharecropper and her children in California, a burning child running down a road in Vietnam. It could happen anywhere, to anybody. It might happen even at an old-fashioned English cricket match.

Navaho - sheep - ecology & worldview

Sacred Sheep Revive Navajo Tradition, For Now

June 13, 2010 For as long as anyone can remember, Churro sheep have been central to Navajo life and spirituality. Yet the animal was nearly exterminated by the federal government, which deemed it an inferior breed. Now the Churro is making a comeback, but the old Navajo ways may not.
[National Public Radio broadcast, Sunday, June 13, 2010]

2010-06-17

underwater archeology, 1600s armed merchant, Poole Harbour (UK)

Bournemouth University in the UK recently started work on a rare and historically important northwest European armed merchant ship. It was wrecked in the approaches to Poole Harbour in the early 17th century. With almost 40% of the port side of originating ship being present this project has the potential to yield important information about merchant vessels from this time period.   The Swash Channel Wreck team has posted
its first two entries on the MUA and will provide periodic updates over the next few months.

project journal, ttp://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/mua/project_journals/swash/swash_intro.shtml

posted on edtech e-list, www.h-net.org from
The Museum of Underwater Archaeology, http://www.themua.org