Category: A Symbol Life

Evans: Among the Stacks

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, book shelf, on photographers

Two books after reading the Chauncy book. The Stott book is satisfying. It took me to places and situations that encouraged further readings. “Foursome” provided a view of people I had wanted to like, since I like their work. Instead, I’m glad I didn’t know them. At least the “them” of this book.

The work isn’t the life, it is the life after death. The artist, even life-artists are never the artwork. We do not become fully merged. In many cases that is best, or so it seems.

Is it possible that people hate art because they hate artists? That they don’t understand them; maybe they want to be them, but can’t. Perhaps, the art-haters do so to suppress their impulses to move across the floor, pass thru life differently. In watching those who fail, I’ve discovered a core set of failure points. It is far easier to fail, the ways are so widely shared, so easily shared that we have more failures — those passed by. Many creatives are cowards — at least timid.

The first failure, as well as the lasting, strongest defense of the long term anti-artist is simply that they don’t trust words. They form them, sometimes that is all they do — these are words without the driver of thought — without the strength of self awareness. Many of those people don’t trust words, as well, these days, they don’t trust pictures.

  • The Last Years of Walker Evans ISBN: 0-500-54210-4
  • Walker Evans: A Biography ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0618056729
  • Walker’s Way ISBN: 1576873625
  • Walker Evans, James Mellow. ISBN 046509077X

My work is closer to Strand, yet my life, my way, my acceptance is Evans.

Chasing Clouds

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, minimum daily requirement, picture post, visual mind

walking with clouds. everyday, seemingly, I walk looking up then down. clouds and shadows.

walking between cloud and shadow.

either they’re getting faster or i am getting slower.

Skin Color..

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, morning wood, the meta

the color of my hand. It changes as I age, and as I move inside, outside, in darkroom .

I’ve just been sorting old notes on my local drive, finding collected articles that I think must have been for something — just don’t know what. That doesn’t worry me, I collect so much more information, background to some midnight idea that is gone by the morning walk. That walk provides a different direction for the day.

“Despite the importance of reliable skin colour measurements, very little is known about the variability of these measurements and their dependency on the acquisition parameters. The main purpose of this article is to quantify the effect of these factors on the measurement reliability. Knowledge of the instrument settings that produce highest repeatability is useful for other researchers involved in skin measurements, and data on the inter-instrument agreement allows the meaningful comparisons between data sets obtained with different instruments. ” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/col.22230

“Background: Accurate skin colour measurements are important for numerous medical applications including the diagnosis and treatment of cutaneous disorders and the provision of maxillofacial soft tissue prostheses.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/srt.12295

“Human skin colour measurements from four ethnic groups including 188 subjects were accumulated. Five to ten locations of each subject were measured by using two different instruments, a tele-spectroradiometer and a spectrophotometer. Three repeated measurements were accumulated for each
location. Repeatability of the measurements at different locations from different ethnicities was examined using the mean CIELAB colour difference from the mean (MCDM). The colour distribution between different locations of different ethnic groups was also studied by plotting the data in a* b* and L* C*ab planes. Systematic trends were found between different ethnicities and instruments.” http://www.imaging.org/site/PDFS/Reporter/Articles/2016_31/REP31_1_2015CIC_WANG_PG230.pdf

“The principles of color measurement established by the Commission International d’Eclairage have been applied to skin and the results expressed in terms of color space L*, hue angle, and chroma values. The distribution of these values for the ventral forearm skin of a sample of healthy volunteers is presented.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X92903477

So, those are some of the papers gathered. Several more follow the same tenor — I never finished where I was headed, I think, because that work isn’t going anywhere. The use as diagnostic? What I probably wanted had more to do with retouching, color sensitizing, attitude measurement based upon clearly gathered perceptual datasets.

Bringing this all out is the recent form of bullying —

Back to making profiles of photons on paper.