Photographs And History: The Face Of Virginia

Posted By Mark on Dec 13, 2014

I do like to visit charity shops, mostly in search of weird vinyl, but anything related to photography will always catch my eye too and so it was with this recent discovery and purchase, a book titled The Face Of Virginia, a pictorial study by A. Aubrey Bodine. The man himself is described on the inside jacket thusly: Aubrey Bodine has been taking pictures for the Baltimore Sunday Sun for 35 years, and he is practically an institution in Maryland. He also has won national and international recognition for his work, including probably a thousand ribbons, medals, and trophies. One of his pictures won a $5000 prize, and fourteen of them are on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. No mean photographer then, and a look at just a few of the photos from the state of Virginia in this book will demonstrate that superbly. His write up on Wikipedia – A. Aubrey Bodine – is very interesting too, especially for his photographic techniques and his use of darkroom tricks to enhance some of his pictures. The book’s inner covers, both front and back, are decorated with a delightful hand drawn map by Richard Q. Yardley, cartoonist and fellow worker on the Baltimore Sunday Sun. And now for a small selection of Bodine’s photos from the book, all of which are accompanied by great historical information in the publication making it well worth tracking down and checking out for yourself should you get the chance: Astronauts! The first Americans into space trained with NASA at Langley Field in Virginia as seen in this photograph from August 1959 showing off four of the Original Seven. Left to right are John H. Glenn Jr (third up and first into orbit), Virgil I. Grissom (second up), Alan B. Shepard Jr (first up), and Malcolm Scott Carpenter (fourth up). One of 6000 ships shipping cargo from Hampton Roads to nearly 350 ports (“in the free world” according to the book) every year. At the time of printing about 200000 tonnes of tobacco was exported annually. A worker showing off a Smithfield ham. According to Virginia law only the four packing companies in Smithfield were permitted to produce it and its distinctive flavour came from feeding the hogs peanuts then hanging the hams over hickory log fires for weeks. Sounds gorgeous. A collection of religious buildings. Top left is Abingdon Church. Top right is Christ Church or King Carter‘s Church (because the cost of building was paid by him). Bottom left is Ware Church. Bottom right is One-Room Shrine, birthplace of Walter Reed, the physician who discoverd the cause of yellow fever. Falls Church...

Women In Computer Adverts

Posted By Mark on Dec 12, 2014

Hang on. I haven’t put up a post about sexist advertising in the computer industry yet? Really? Everyone else has. I must rectify this omission now! Women have been used to advertise inappropriately just about everything you can think of. Sex, so the saying goes, sells. No sex also quite likely sells but it’s nowhere near as much fun to storyboard as sex-selling advertisements. And so for as long as there have been marketing people and as long as there have been things that anybody might buy there have been adverts for those things featuring women. Scantily-clad women. Often with barely even a passing thought to a connection with the product being sold. I probably saw a great many of the following adverts for computer games and machines featuring provocatively-posed women in various states of undress growing up and yet I can honestly say that at no point did I ever consider the merits of a purchase based on the model showing off her wares alongside the main product. Perhaps I’m just weird or an outlier as far as the advertising execs are concerned, or perhaps the advertising execs just didn’t care and fancied some auditions and photography sessions with young starlets anyway. I’m pretty sure that’s at least partially true. Anyway, let’s marvel at some of the wonderfully awful means of promoting computer software and hardware over the past few decades. From a publication called Vidiot and maybe this was simply showing that gaming was as much something for women as it was for men. Maybe. Maybe the two references to “end” in the blurb on the picture as well as describing the gamesplayer as a “lovely miss” aren’t innuendo and sexist condescension respectively. Maybe. All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a centipede in shorts that tight and short. Although if I were in shorts that tight and short it’s quite likely any nearby centipede would scurry off in the opposite direction as fast as its multitude of legs could propel it. A roaring fire. A man in a suit – you can trust those sorts of men – and a beauty in quite possibly just bra and panties. And let’s have a read of the advert’s copy: Tuesday night Eileen dropped in and we balanced her checkbook on it. If you knew Eileen you’d know that’s a first. Wednesday, Judy and I computed the principal and interest on the new car she wants to buy. Someone fan me down; that copy is some hot, damn copy. Yeah, I think we all know what sort of balancing and computing’s been going on...

Prelude To A Bloodbath (1974)

Posted By Mark on Dec 9, 2014

Facing criticism from an increasingly hostile press that its television programming was not preparing the then-present generation of children for what many assumed was going to be the decade-to-come, the 1980s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (sometimes known as the BBC) began to toughen up its output in 1974 starting with this annual based on the popular Basil Brush TV show. In addition to connect-the-dot puzzles, brainteasers, jokes about gay diseases, and facts about fox encroachment in urban environments a number of picture stories entertained the pre-teens who were the target audience for the book all of which culminated in the cheeky puppet Basil graphically tearing his companions to...

Smokin’!

Posted By Mark on Dec 7, 2014

Fundamentalist Mormons At War

Posted By Mark on Dec 7, 2014

Mormon Fundamentalists: A reasonably long but disturbing and well-worth-reading account of inner fighting, ostracism, and threatening behaviour enacted on behalf of the now-jailed leader of a group of fundamentalist Mormons, Warren Jeffs. In recent years, this enclave has been ripped apart by a modern holy war, led by a divisive spiritual leader who ended up on the F​⁠BI’s Ten Most Wanted list and is now in prison. The majority of Short Creek residents remain loyal to him and his sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F⁠​LDS. But they are losing ground to apostates — those who either walked away from the church or were pushed out — who are starting to build their own community. To the F​⁠LDS, they are nothing less than an existential threat. The article includes quite harrowing details of the lengths to which the fundamentalist religious group go to in order to spy on people they consider outsiders, as well as details of the power that Jeffs and his supporters wield. One of the last sentences gives you a taste: [Jinjer] won’t leave their dogs — Buddy, Boots, and Rebel — outside for long; she’s convinced they’ll be...