Quote of the Day (Simon Gray, on Capturing the Present in Photographs)

"The present never seems worth photographing, only the past, when it's too late." — English playwright, diarist and novelist Simon Gray (1936-2008), on why he never used a camera, in The Smoking Diaries, Volume 3: The Last Cigarette (2008)

Quote of the Day (Susan Sontag, on the Impact of the Camera)

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.” —American essayist-critic Susan Sontag (1933-2004), On Photography (1977)

Quote of the Day (Jerry Saltz, on the Selfie as Folk Art)

“When it is not just PR, though, it is a powerful, instantaneous ironic interaction that has intensity, intimacy, and strangeness. In some way, selfies reach back to the Greek theatrical idea of methexis—a group sharing wherein the speaker addresses the audience directly, much like when comic actors look at the TV camera and make a face. Finally, fascinatingly, the genre wasn’t created by artists. Selfies come from all of us; they are a folk art that is already expanding the language and lexicon of photography. Selfies are a photography of modern life—not that academics or curators are paying much attention to them. They will, though: In a hundred years, the mass of selfies will be an incredible record of the fine details of everyday life. Imagine what we could see if we had millions of these from the streets of imperial Rome.”— Jerry Saltz, “Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie,” New York Magazine, February 3, 2014

The image accompanying this post, of course, was the selfie taken Sunday night at the Oscars, by host Ellen DeGeneres--or, as I like to think of it, "The Selfie Seen 'Round the World."

Artists’ Exhibit at Rockaway

A week ago, I journeyed out to Rockaway, N.Y., to Fort Tilden, at the Gateway National Recreation Area, for the opening reception for ArtSplash, a multimedia art exhibit by the Rockaway Artists Alliance, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) arts organization comprised of individuals who view the arts as vital to the health of our community.

The other day, a fellow blogger told me there hadn’t been much of compelling interest in the art world recently, but I think, as what anything else, that it’s just a matter of knowing where to look. The kind of paintings and photographs on display at ArtSplash show that fine art can be created--and displayed--anywhere, not simply in Manhattan.

(One of those whose works is on display is my longtime friend Stephanie. Her very, very fine landscape photographs were in a special display in a small building on the grounds, in the image accompanying this post.)

Stephanie's photos will remain on exhibit till this Sunday, Oct. 2, and the larger ArtSplash show till October 16. Both can be seen on Saturdays and Sundays only from noon to 4 pm. I urge anyone reading this to go out to view all these excellent works, as well as to support the Rockaway Artists Alliance itself.

Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, on His Camera Brand—And Mine)

“I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph.”—Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” from his There Goes Rhymin’ Simon LP (1973)

A little less than two weeks ago, preparing to go on vacation, I bought, with the expert assistance of a friend who’s a talented photographer, a new camera so that I could have a record of my trip, as well as any others I might take in the future.

I ended up purchasing the model in the image accompanying this post: a Nikon Coolpix S3000, even down to the green color. (With me being Irish-American and all, how could I resist that tint?) I wanted something a) digital, b) comparatively inexpensive, and c) most important, as uncomplicated as possible given conditions a) and b).

I can’t say that I’ve become the next Ansel Adams, but I HAVE been assiduously taking as many photos as I had hoped a few weeks ago. In the coming weeks and months, I hope to roll out some of the fruits of my handiwork.

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Advances in Republican Race With Cooper Union Address)

February 27, 1860—Abraham Lincoln—a railroad lawyer with a couple of terms in the Illinois state legislature, one term in Congress and no executive experience whatsoever—redefined his image over the course of 24 hours with an electrifying speech at the Grand Hall of Cooper Union and a photographic session with Mathew Brady. After the election, the candidate who had once been dismissed as a regional phenomenon would say, “Brady and the Cooper Union made me President.”

The Cooper Union speech was delivered in New York, a city that would resolutely turn its back on him until five years later, when the President’s funeral procession was viewed by thousands of grief-stricken Gothamites (including six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt) who finally understood what he stood for.

“Death has suddenly opened the eyes of the people (and I think of the word) to the fact that a hero has been holding high place among them for four years,” observed diarist George Templeton Strong, “closely watched and studied, but despite and rejected by a third of this community, and only tolerated by the other two-thirds."

Strong was referring to the fact that the city and state of New York tended to vote Democratic. At least in early 1860, whatever Republican sympathies New York possessed went to favorite son William Seward, the state’s former governor and current U.S. Senator.

Nonetheless, Lincoln felt correctly that the city, as the growing media capital of the United States, could not be ignored. To make a good impression, he was willing to research his speech for months in the law library in the Illinois state house, take five different trains over three days to get to New York—then fidget while Brady lifted his collar and smoothed his unruly hair as far as possible before taking his picture.

And that was all before the speech.

I have been terribly remiss in not writing before about the terrific exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, "Lincoln and New York". The exhibit has been running since last October, but it will still be around for three more weeks before closing, and it’s eminently worth seeing. It highlights the circumstances behind the speech, as well as the President’s evolving relationship with the city that, then as now, is a) overwhelmingly Democratic, and b) fervently anti-war.

The venue for the event, originally Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, was changed at the last minute to Cooper Union (then known as Cooper Institute).

This was not an address, or a speaker, that would have gone over well in today’s 30-second soundbite, image-conscious rhetorical environment. Brady’s photograph, soon widely reproduced, gave the lanky Midwestern a physical dignity that many did not see upon first beholding him, including many in the audience. And that voice, when first heard, was high and shrill.

Even in the context of Lincoln’s subsequent career as perhaps the greatest of President-writers, this address is not filled with memorable phrases or sentences. But it fit in very well with a technique he had learned as a circuit lawyer in his state: play to the audience.

The Republican audience, in this case, needed convincing and reassuring—convincing of his credibility as a candidate, and reassuring that, contrary to Democratic charges, theirs was not a sectional party, that they were not guilty of instigating John Brown’s attempted slave insurrection, and that they had not engaged in historical fraud by insisting that the federal government had the right to ban slavery from the territories.

For two hours, Lincoln employed several means to make his case:

*set at work at once to go after the presumed Democratic nominee—his former rival for the U.S. Senate, Stephen A. Douglas—who had insisted that "Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now." Lincoln showed that, Douglas’ notion of “popular sovereignty” to the contrary, the federal government had banned slavery in the Northwest Ordinance.

* employed logic repeatedly to rebut emotional charges by slaveholders. After failing to win re-election to Congress, Lincoln, in an effort to improve his skills as a lawyer, mastered Euclidean geometry. The skill enabled him to reduce an argument to simple propositions that could be tested, proved or discarded. You can see it in the following passage from the Cooper Union speech:

“Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle [restricting slavery in the territories], put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that the principle which ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’ though so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's consideration.”

* used historical precedent to buttress his case. Lincoln cited not only George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—crucially, Southerners (and Southern slaveholders)—in support of his claims, but also alluded to Nat Turner’s insurrection in Southampton and even England’s Gunpowder Plot of the early 1600s.

* poured scorn on the opposition. To Southern Democrats who claimed they were supporting constitutional principles, but were prepared to leave the Union if a Republican were elected President, he noted: “In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’”

Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech might have been delivered in a different age—one willing to listen for a couple of hours to politicians spouting, yet regard the whole spectacle as entertainment—but he made sure it directly addressed voters’ concerns and respected their intelligence. It did not, however, try to compromise on principle.

In an interesting piece for the Huffington Post, Joseph Margolick argues persuasively that President Obama can use the same rhetorical strategies in rescuing his health-care program. Let’s see how that turns out.

Spring—Bang in the Face

“I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face."—Attributed to Langston Hughes

Yesterday, I jumped at the chance to experience spring without the rainfall and humidity that characterized much of the prior week. I took this shot at Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, in my hometown, Englewood, N.J.

I’ve been coming to this 150-acre preserve and education center since childhood, but—as reading Thoreau and taking a photography course have taught me—you can always find something new in all the old places if you keep your eyes wide open.

Eudora Welty, Photographer, on Her Centennial

Nearly 30 years ago now, at my college graduation, I saw Eudora Welty presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Columbia University--just one of a whole wheelbarrow full of laurels she received through the years. Most accrued from her writing career, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Everybody has a surprise in his or her background. A few years ago, I thought that Welty’s was her late (post-60) affair with hardboiled detective novelist Ross Macdonald (of the wonderful Lew Archer series). I didn’t guess that Welty’s talents might extend in another direction besides writing.

Over the winter, while visiting an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) on the Archdiocese of New York, I also got to see a smaller—but in its way, equally eye-opening—exhibit on Welty as a photographer. It closed at the MCNY a while ago, but this month it’s moved back down to the author’s home state, in Jackson.

If you don’t have the cash to head down there, you can still some choice examples from the show in an article by T.A. Frail from the April issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Today, on the 100th anniversary of her birthday, I thought it would be appropriate to examine this little-noticed part of her career.

Take a look at the photo accompanying this post, Sunday Morning. It’s not agenda-driven photojournalism, in any sense, but it does something exhilarating in its own way. The white dress of the young African-American girl testifies to her innocence—the humanity she shares with others, denied at nearly every turn by white society in the pre-civil rights era.

Whether taken in her own Deep South or the New York where she came in the 1930s as a graduate student and aspiring writer, Welty’s photographs reminded viewers of the full range of what Franklin Roosevelt called “the forgotten man.”

Considering her relatively privileged background, Welty’s work is all the more impressive for its lack of sentimentality and condescension. She is an example of an artist whose hobby served not as a distraction from her life’s calling—the short stories, novels, reviews and memoir that constitute her legacy over more than nine decades—but rather enhanced it. Her description in One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) of what the discipline of photography taught her is precise, like her work itself:

“Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it…And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived."

This Day in Photography History (Daguerre’s New Image-Making System Announced)

January 7, 1839—The art of creating true-to-life images advanced immeasurably with an announcement made at the Academie des Sciences in Paris that Louis Daguerre--best known before as an opera scene-painter and owner of a French spectacle featuring lighting effects known as the Diaroma--had come up with a new method that exposed darkened images to the light.

Technically, Daguerre did not invent photography (Nicéphore Niépce, who had become his partner, is generally credited with doing so). But his decade-long tinkering put the invention in a far more practical form than had been available before.

Daguerre, however, was not the one who made the epochal announcement of this new art form to the French academy. That task was left to the astronomer-physicist D.F. Arago.

Notice in the prior paragraph my use of the phrase “art form.” That’s how I, and many others, think of this use of light and chemistry—that is, when we don’t think of it as a hobby.

Despite the strong interest of writers, painters and newspaper editors, however—the very people one might expect to think of this as an “art form”--Daguerre had been unable to sell his invention. Arago’s intercession with the scientific community is what finally allowed Daguerre to begin making money from all his experimentation.

And money was something he could use. The Diaroma had become something of a sensation in Paris. Yet by the early 1830s, Daguerre had run into financial difficulties. From 1832 to 1835, in fact, he had been bankrupt.

Why did Daguerre’s approach to scientists succeed when his overtures to artists failed? Because scientists recognized in his process a means of examining objects with a level of detail never before realized. Journalist Hippolyte Gaucheraud surely spoke for many of them when he marveled at the image of a dead spider photographed through a solar microscope: "You could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; [there is] not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine."

It would take another eight months before the daguerreotype process (named, of course, after its creator) was announced publicly and not just to scientists. By that time, the French government had bought the rights to it.

More important, Daguerre finally had something to show for his labors. His government had awarded him a pension of six thousand francs a year for the rest of his life. He didn’t add anything new to photography after his discovery, but that didn’t matter from then on—other entrepreneurs from all over the world were ready to make improvements, a process well begun by the time of his death in 1851.

This Day in Photography History (Death of Dorothea Lange, Who Documented Depression-Era America and DeValera’s Ireland)

October 11, 1965—Dorothea Lange, who created tightly composed, fiercely compassionate images that struck at the conscience of Americans as the photographer of poverty-stricken rural Americans during the Great Depression and interned Japanese-Americans(Nisei) after Pearl Harbor, died of esophageal cancer at age 70.

Time and again, Lange – well-educated, urban, of German Protestant stock –photographed subjects whose backgrounds in almost no way resembled her own. No leap of the imagination was required for me to view her as the champion of the disadvantaged and despised – a Joan of Arc with a camera, if you will.

All the more surprising, then, when I discovered that in the fall of 1954, on an assignment for Life Magazine, Lange had taken photographs of Ireland – especially County Clare, the western coastal region where my father was born and spent his first 31 years. Suddenly, a photographer whose work had interested me on a largely dispassionate historical level had reached me in a place much closer – psychologically and spiritually, if not geographically – to home.

A reevaluation of Lange’s career seemed in order. It involved not devaluing her justly acclaimed output, but more clearly understanding its wellspring: her ability to penetrate, without prejudice or condescension, the lives of disparate groups who seldom shared her ethnicity, spiritual outlook, urban sensibility, or educational level.

Many of the best of the 2,400 images from Lange’s Life assignment appeared in Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (1996), by Gerry Mullins. The images inspired an artist in another medium, Irish-American film director Deirdre Lynch, to retrace her steps in the 1998 documentary, Photos to Send. (Amazingly, forty-four years after Lange’s assignments, Lynch found many of her original subjects still alive.)

The “Celtic Tiger” and Culture
Lynch’s retracing of Lange’s steps occurred when Ireland was well-launched into a commercial and creative flowering. Suddenly, Celtic had become not just cool but sexy. The growth of a highly educated young population, entrance into the European Community, and a less punitive tax structure produced a “Celtic Tiger” that was the envy of other European economies. Cheap airfares helped fanned tourism and exposure to continental visitors and workers resulted in a more cosmopolitan outlook. Novelists and playwrights such as Roddy Doyle and Martin McDonough won international acclaim, filmmakers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan brought luster to the native moviemaking industry, and Riverdance became a transatlantic phenomenon. At the same time, revelations about priest sex abuse and the “Magdalene laundries” (asylums for “fallen women” run by nuns, where the young women were held for years in conditions of extreme cruelty) so rocked confidence in the clergy that it became commonplace to speak of “post-Catholic Ireland.”

The images from Lange’s Irish sojourn differ in tone not only from this environment, but also from the Technicolor scenery and picturesque inhabitants of John Ford’s classic film The Quiet Man or the often gritty, priest-ridden misery of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. In contrast to these other depictions of mid-century Ireland, Lange portrays a country facing difficult challenges with an ancestral faith and a hard-won dignity. In her striking portraits of young and old, she presents a visual counterpart to William Blake’s songs of innocence and experience.

DeValera’s Ireland—and My Family’s
At the time of these photos, Ireland was still largely under the influence of its longtime leader, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Eamon de Valera. Only six years before, it finally became an independent republic, capping 32 years that featured, at various points, rebellion, civil war, neutrality during WWII, and half-steps and compromises toward nationhood. Perhaps because of its agonizing birth struggle, Ireland remained uncertain—abroad, subservient in trade with Great Britain; at home, puritanical enough to enact strict obscenity laws that often drove its best creative artists to distraction or exile.

In Western Ireland, land remained of central importance – sustaining life, but often not in abundance. The experience of my father and his six siblings was not uncommon. My paternal grandfather owned approximately 50 acres, but they were seldom fertile to yield enough for all of the family. As a result, several of the children were lent out to childless couples – relatives or neighbors – to bring in more money.

Subtly and unsentimentally, Lange uses linear perspective in “Country Road” (see the photograph accompanying this post) to suggest the physical and psychic toll wrought by the economically and socially constricting environment that induced my father and so many of his siblings to journey beyond their ancestral home.

Anatomy of a Photograph
One lone habitation appears in this image: a white farmhouse, much like the one my father grew up in, with a thatch roof – a substitute for the slate roof that people in their circumstances could not afford at the time, but that their descendants can.

Nearly half of this photograph consists of foreground, and not a particularly appealing one at that: an unpaved bohereen, or “small road.” The most visible form of plant life is not a crop, but roadside turf – a metaphor for the hardness of life. Not a single automobile is in sight, in keeping with an era when auto ownership was more unusual than it is now. In the distance stretch rolling hills – the kind with spectacular emerald vistas featured on millions of postcards. Here, however, the hills appear small against the road, and the beauty of the wet, limy soil has been muted into more monochromatic shadings. (Lange might have used a heavily colored filter over the lens to lighten the green grass and darken the blue sky.)

The dark hat and overcoat of the old man in the photo imply the damp Irish climate. The figure is walking away from the brightest point in the photograph, the farmhouse –and, given the longtime Irish predilection for emigration, one can’t be sure that he’s not leaving for good. In fact, his weatherbeaten attire recalls that of Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps in a tragicomedy that premiered only a year before the publication of this photo – Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman expatriated to France.

Combined with the fact that this figure is all alone against an all-encompassing background, this picture could be viewed at first as highly foreboding – except that it is redeemed by what local photographer and Lange assistant Dennis Wylde called “God’s light.” Moreover, the walker is traveling along a road that significantly widens ahead of him – an element of incurable hope.

“Country Road” is central for appreciating the physical and emotional environment Lange was trying to recreate through film. It also exemplifies one of her best-known summaries of art as photography: “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

The other photos from Lange’s brief but highly creative Irish sojourn, like this one, demonstrate a love of the problematic, yet simple Irish tradition – a way of life now under assault, in a manner that neither the photographer nor her subjects could guess at the time, from every conceivable direction.

This Day in Baseball History (Babe Ruth’s Last Appearance at Yankee Stadium)

June 13, 1948-- Dying slugger Babe Ruth appeared at Yankee Stadium for the last time, to commemorate the retirement of his uniform and, not coincidentally, the 25th anniversary of the stadium. The occasion was memorialized in the first sports photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize, Nat Fein’s “The Babe Bows Out”—an iconic image that not only records an elegiac moment in the history of baseball, but is, compositionally speaking, brilliant.

With good reason, Yankee Stadium had been designated "The House That Ruth Built," since his acquisition from the Boston Red Sox immediately doubled the franchise’s attendance, enabling the team’s management to build a 62,000-seat stadium – the largest built up to that point. Ruth’s presence also inaugurated an era of dominance by a single franchise unequaled by any other professional sports club in history.

A transformative figure in baseball history, Ruth boldly made his mark with on-field achievements as outsized as his off-field appetites for food, drink and women. At the time of his retirement in 1935, his 714 career home runs were double that of the next closest batter, teammate Lou Gehrig. He turned a game characterized by "small ball" – the stolen base, bunts, moving the runner over, and low scores – into a high-scoring offensive exhibition capped by the home run. 

He is often credited with rescuing the game from disrepute following the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, in which several players conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series.

Just as Ruth imposed himself on the landscape of the game, he imposes himself on the composition of this photo by New York Herald Tribune photographer Nat Fein (1914-2000).

The viewer's eye sweeps in a broad left-to-right curve that follows the shape of the stadium – from the lights overlooking the upper-right-field stands to the photographers, players and league officials on the first-base line.

The only factor subverting this horizontal movement is the Babe – not just his tall 6 ft. 2-in. frame but his cap and bat, both extended straight downward, and the vertical lines of his pinstriped uniform. The line in the background is somewhat grainy, only underscoring Ruth’s dominance.

Ruth is standing at home plate. Clearly visible are the right-field stands where he poked the great majority of his epic home runs. Nearly every seat appears filled – a reminder of Ruth’s drawing power at the gate. The background of the photo further testifies to the “Sultan of Swat’s” importance by featuring several World Series banners and the small group of photographers crouched down on the right, preparing to take his picture.

One of the beauties of Fein's composition is that it allows the viewer sufficient imaginative space to fill in the rest of the scene. Current Yankees are lined up along the first-base of the field, but just out of the line of sight, the opposing team, the Cleveland Indians, are also paying tribute on the third-base sideline.

Most important, unlike the other photographers crouching for an upfront closeup shot, Fein shoots Ruth from behind. The viewer never sees his face and, in keeping with Yankee tradition, the slugger's name is not on the uniform.

But Ruth was such a dominant figure in baseball lore, and, even, in world culture (a crowning insult of charging Japanese soldiers in World War II was, "To hell with Babe Ruth!"), that people, even non-fans, required neither the face nor the name to recognize him. Equally important, Fein has caught the essence of the photo assignment: the importance of the man’s uniform.

The slugger's bat represents a particularly poignant element of this photo. In his prime, Ruth swung an unusually heavy bat for his era – 36 inches and 42 ounces – but could whip it around like a toothpick. That bat, however, is not the one in this photo.

This one, only 36 inches, borrowed on the fly from the visiting team's batting rack, belonged to future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller. After a two-year battle with throat cancer, Ruth had dropped more than 60 pounds from his playing weight of 215 pounds. The boy-man had become old overnight, and he needed this bat not to clobber fastballs anymore but simply to steady his spindly legs on the way to the plate.

Since the game was played in early afternoon and the picture was black and white, photographer Nat Fein had no opportunity to use a setting sun or late-afternoon shadows to imply the slugger’s twilight. But he still manages to capture Ruth at the moment when vulnerability and majesty met – when the Sultan of Swat, head bent and shoulders sagging in exhaustion, stood to acknowledge the roar of the fans he loved.

Two months later, Babe Ruth was dead. But in his last moments in Yankee Stadium, he had revisited the field of dreams that became his field of glory. Compositionally, Nat Fein evokes how even this vastly weakened legend still managed to fill this cavernous cathedral of sports with his outsized presence.

Photo Discovery of Helen and Teacher

Take a close look at this photo and its subjects: the little girl with the doll, and a young woman. Their high-necked, ruffled clothing indicates that this probably comes from the late 19th century, which, without something else intrinsically interesting, would make this picture only of antiquarian rather than historical interest. Sure, you’d expect this from the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, which turned up this gem and announced it last week.

But examine this more closely as you take an imaginative leap across more than a century. The woman – judging from the unlined face and trim body, probably no older than her early 20s—gazes slightly away from the camera—you can’t tell if she’s looking directly at her charge or at another point off in the distance. Or maybe her eyes are bothered by the camera flash so much that involuntarily, she’s forced to look away.

And yet, despite everything, she keeps those eyes open, the way a realist does—the way you would, too, if you had endured the loss of a mother to tuberculosis, abandonment by an abusive, alcoholic father, or one painful eye operation after another.

With her simple white dress with the brooch at the neck, she appears indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of other young women of Irish descent. Who’d ever think that the actress who achieved immortality as sexy Mrs. Robinson would win an Academy Award for playing her?

Those pensive eyes maybe ponder the secrets of the child, thinking that taking her outside on a day like today, where she can soak up the atmosphere and play with others her age, might help.

The firm lips hint not just at the sense of resolution that any adult needs in dealing with a youngster, but also the iron will not to yield in the face of difficulties that would daunt anyone—particularly outbursts so prolonged and terrible that as a last resort to putting this girl away, her parents have written in desperation from all the way down in Alabama up to Boston, pleading for someone knowledgeable enough to break through to their daughter.

And there is the young girl, sitting straight up in her high-backed porch chair, far more inscrutable than her teacher because she’s turned sideways, not focused on anything at all—and, with her eyes almost closed, perhaps completely unable to do so. But even at the age of seven, in profile, she’s already showing signs of the beauty she could become as an adult—a beauty she might never be able to appreciate—and of dimensions so profound that Mark Twain would call her 10 years later “the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since Joan of Arc.”

Above all she’s comforted, maybe even transported, to a realm only she, sightless and deaf as she is, can comprehend, as she cradles a doll with far more ornamentation in its dress than either the adult or the child. How did she get this doll? From her parents? Or maybe from this young woman, as a kind of welcoming gift, an expression of openness to someone who doesn’t invite it?

Did you notice the hands clasped together? They reveal much, too—of a bond forming between teacher and child, of care and concern, of ways of communicating beyond simply the fingerspelling in the palm that forms part of the sign language the girl might have to master to break out of her isolation.

By now, you can see that this picture doesn’t spill its secrets about time, place or even people. They have to be teased out as you imagine these two and their world, of what it must have taken to cross this threshold into something they could never anticipate—public astonishment in their time and even ours, and emotional complications in the journey of two people who achieved so much.

Well, you can read about them, not just in the news articles explaining this photo discovery, such as this one, but in substantial biographies like Joseph P. Lash’s Helen and Teacher. Then you can enter more fully—emotionally this time—into this picture of Helen Keller and her redoubtable teacher, Annie Sullivan, the “Miracle Worker” who proved how much of a difference one human being—a teacher, maybe even you—can make to others.

Appreciations: Sierra Club Photography at the New York Hall of Science

Out here in the wilds of New Jersey (even the northeastern corner of the state, with plentiful access to roads and public transportation), Queens can seem like the far side of the moon, so I doubt that I've been out to the New York City borough more than a dozen times in my life.

On Saturday, though, I had occasion to do so, and I urge you all my faithful readers (both of you!) to follow my lead out to the Corona area of Queens, at 111th Street, to the New York Hall of Science.

Maybe my parents – or maybe one of my aunts and uncles from the Tubridy side of the family -- took me and my two older brothers out to the World's Fair in 1964. (Didn't all area resident parents of baby boomers do so then?) But I was a young whippersnapper, giving my long-suffering folks no end of grief. (Internal editor: Oh, like you don’t anymore?)

So I have no recollection of this much-ballyhooed event, and I had only the vaguest recollection until recently that a remnant of the fair– the New York Hall of Science and the Space Park – still stood on the old grounds.

This past weekend gave me an excuse to fill this gaping hole in my education (yes, I know, it's one of many such gaps; but, as the Chinese proverb goes, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.")

The occasion was the opening of a special exhibition of photographs produced by members of the New York City Sierra Club Photography club. This juried exhibition lasts from now through April 27, so it gives my readers a reason to take the Long Island Express or #7 Train to this area of Queens for something besides their Santana-signed Mets.

A very brief description of the Hall of Science's current exhibitions is here. Scroll down the downloaded page and you'll find a brief notice of the Sierra Club photography event, along with a picture taken by my wonderful longtime friend, Stephanie Schmidt.

As someone who has admired photography but struggled to create my own, I can only stand in awe of Stephanie's mastery of the craft. You may not have come in contact with her work yet, but I'm sure that her talents will take her so far that you will eventually.

Amazingly enough, Stephanie’s perfectionism exceeds her wanderlust, which has taken her to every continent except Australia. (And I expect to hear her talking knowledgeably about kangaroos and “shrimp on the Barbie” any day now.)

The rock formations captured by Stephanie and the other photographers come from far and near. Yes, there are New York area shots, even from the likes of Central Park.

But the real exotic wonders in the exhibit, I believe, come from much farther away – the Rockies, Greenland, and, in Stephanie’s case, Antarctica. These photographs underscore the truth of Henry David Thoreau's observation that "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

In a time of growing concern about global warming, these works should remind us why our world is so magnificent, and so worth our efforts to save it from development.