Yes, but, is it photography??

[claudiocambon]

Greg,

When you say, 'they' want to control the common man, who do you mean? I doubt it is the scientists who are by and large ignored by society, and who don't have a power stake in any political or economic control. Do you think they are all in on some big conspiracy to misinform us? Why would 'they' want us to believe something that data didn't support? Was Jonas Salk lying when he said he found a vaccine for polio? Again, the only voices I hear within the scientific community in denial are these pseudo-scientist "experts" quoted in media articles who end up being oil and car industry stooges, who clearly do have an economic and political interest in their ideological viewpoint.

The only control I see is our current government encouraging us to consume as much oil as we can, waging a destructive foreign policy to keep that addiction going, touting mirage solutions like hydrogen cars (which under Carter already, were just 20 years away, if you remember), not investing in more plausible, efficient technologies and research.

As far as the data you quote, I am not a scientist, but many of the examples you offer are specious. Our biomass and ensuing temperature are not tipping the earth's atmosphere. Our consumption of resources is. That biomass has always existed; it used to be called biodiversity before we started replacing other species with our own fat arses. All I can tell you is every time I put one of these examples to my scientist friends, I patiently receive an explanation of why it's wrong.

[Greg Lockrey]

Greg,

When you say, 'they' want to control the common man, who do you mean? I doubt it is the scientists who are by and large ignored by society, and who don't have a power stake in any political or economic control. Do you think they are all in on some big conspiracy to misinform us? Why would 'they' want us to believe something that data didn't support? Was Jonas Salk lying when he said he found a vaccine for polio? Again, the only voices I hear within the scientific community in denial are these pseudo-scientist "experts" quoted in media articles who end up being oil and car industry stooges, who clearly do have an economic and political interest in their ideological viewpoint.

The only control I see is our current government encouraging us to consume as much oil as we can, waging a destructive foreign policy to keep that addiction going, touting mirage solutions like hydrogen cars (which under Carter already, were just 20 years away, if you remember), not investing in more plausible, efficient technologies and research.

As far as the data you quote, I am not a scientist, but many of the examples you offer are specious. Our biomass and ensuing temperature are not tipping the earth's atmosphere. Our consumption of resources is. That biomass has always existed; it used to be called biodiversity before we started replacing other species with our own fat arses. All I can tell you is every time I put one of these examples to my scientist friends, I patiently receive an explanation of why it's wrong.

"They" is those that are in control of the government....it doesn't matter which political party they come from either. The scientists are just willing dupes that spout the "party line" in order to get their think tank funding.

Don't get me started on Carter. I was stationed in Chaleston, SC when the "Oil Crisis" was at it's highest. Tankers as far as the eye can see were trying to get into port only to be told that there was no room to drop their loads. The whole thing was a fabrication. As far as cheaper alternatives, if there is one, you'd be using it.

As for oil being renewable, there is a theory in the geophisics world that states the oil is constantly being manufactured by the internal actions of the earth itself. It is not a result of decaying animals. There are numerous "played out" wells in operation today. If this knowledge ever got "accepted" what would you think the price of oil will be then?

For a last little brain teaser to help in understanding of what "global" means: assume the earth circumfrence is 25,000 miles (40,000 km). There is a steel band wrapped tight on the circumfrence. Now add just 10 feet (3 m) to that steel band and move that band equidistant off the earth. Will you: A) Be able to walk under the band B) crawl under the band on your hands and knees C) barely slide a piece of paper under it? Have fun.

[kmgibbs]

"They" is those that are in control of the government....it doesn't matter which political party they come from either. The scientists are just willing dupes that spout the "party line" in order to get their think tank funding.

And there are truck loads of money to made by scientists and environmental groups. See, no crisis=no funding. My brother is an astro-physicist working in Arizona on a government (taxpayer) funded project. The 'holy grail' of science today is not discovery, it's getting funding. Either from the taxpayer or some private source. So yes, 'voodoo' science does take place and more than many would believe. If a scientist does tow the popular line, he/she is not going to get funding for their research. This is fact not fiction.

By the way, I am not anti-science just anti 'voodoo' science and far too much that is merely theory is being stated as fact. That's not science, it's speculation.

Now this gravity thing. That's something I can get my head around.

As to the photos in question, I find them very well executed but trite, cliche' and condescending.


Kent

[neil poulsen]

One thing I like about these photographs is the combination of near to far and of sequence. Both of these are time honored in photography; both are done in a different way. This approach also plays with the concept of pixel.

[Kirk Keyes]

For a last little brain teaser to help in understanding of what "global" means: assume the earth circumfrence is 25,000 miles (40,000 km). There is a steel band wrapped tight on the circumfrence. Now add just 10 feet (3 m) to that steel band and move that band equidistant off the earth. Will you: A) Be able to walk under the band B) crawl under the band on your hands and knees C) barely slide a piece of paper under it? Have fun.

Answer is "B".

2*pi*r = circumference. Solve for "r", and the all you really need is the difference in the two circumferences to do the calculation. So:
3 meters/(2*pi)= 0.477 meters => 1.56 ft

So really more of an army crawl than hands and knees...

I personally suspect long term changes in solar flux (output) to be the driving force for planetary temperature. Stars are constantly changing in output, and it takes so little for it to change in the course of a a few hundred or thousand years to make a potentially big change in the temps here. And we only really have about 20 years of high resolution data (from satellites) and about 600 years of low resolution data (from sunspot counts) at this point that I think this theory cannot be discounted.

And I'm not a geotech scientist, just a chemist. But I took my thermodynamics classes in college.

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

Chris - I'm curious as to how one makes images like this - you must start with the larger image that has been digitized so it's made of pixels. Then you must assign new images to each pixel based on the color content of the original pixel. Is there some software what does this in a semiautomated fashion or is a pretty hands on process?

[neil poulsen]

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

Define photograph.

[chris jordan]

Hi guys, I was wondering if someone would ask how I make these. Each one is a bit different; a couple of them were made with the help of photomosaic software (such as the Denali piece). For that one I took about fifteen photographs of the logos on the sides of variously colored GMC Denali cars, and processed them in Photoshop into a stepped series of small identically-sized images from black to white. Then I used the photomosaic software to create the final image of the Ansel Adams photo. The original Denali logos are all photographs, and the Ansel Adams image I used as the source image was a photograph, and the final print is a Type C photographic print. But whether the whole thing adds up to a photograph is another question (and I'm not sure if the answer really matters either).

I used a similar process for the aluminum cans piece. First I photographed about 40 aluminum cans in my studio, each from several different angles, and made 160 identically-sized small digital images that were the source images for the mosaic. The mosaic came out pretty rough looking even after many tries, so it took some cleaning up afterwards by adding cans manually. I then laid the Seurat painting image as a layer over the top and faded it in various different ways. I think it would be really cool to construct this image with actual cans some day. It would be 70x100 feet in size.

The others are made differently. For the prison uniforms, valve caps and office paper and some others I'm working on right now, I collect a bunch of that item in my studio and photograph it over and over. For Office Paper, I bought 8 reams of paper and stacked them on my studio table and photographed them with a digital SLR. Then I unstacked them and restacked them, and photographed them again. I did this about a hundred times, and then processed each image individually so I had 100 different photographs of paper that were all identically cropped and scaled.

Then I manually assembled all of the small images into the huge image, and cleaned up all the edges. It is pretty painstaking manual work; once I did all the photographic part, the digital assembly took something like 30,000 mouse clicks. Like the Denali piece, the Office Paper, Valve Caps, and Prison Uniforms all started with photographs that I took, and are printed as photographic prints, but I'm not at all sure that the final product can be called a photograph.

For the Ben Franklin piece I scanned a hundred-dollar bill (which is probably a crime but hopefully the Feds will get that it's for a non-criminal reason...), and compiled it into the huge prints pretty quickly. Then I made a very high-resolution scan of only Ben Franklin's portrait on a brand new hundred-dollar bill, and spent about a day cleaning up all the small errors that the engraver made (which are invisible on the bill because Ben's face is so small). Then I laid the portrait of Ben over the top of the three panels and faded it various ways until I got the fractal effect I wanted.

That one started with a scan and ended up as an inkjet print, so although it looks like a photograph, there isn't anything photographic about that particular piece. Same thing with the Suicide Mandala-- I made about 40 little watercolor paintings of the word "Life," and scanned them, and then spent about a week assembling them manually into the mandala shape, which I designed as I went. The only part of that piece that I could automate at all was filling in the black background, which I could do in sections of 10x10 tiles instead of one by one, but otherwise it was a purely manual process from beginning to end. I even got to use paints, which was fun; for a moment there I felt like a real artist!

Every one of these takes a lot of math in advance, to determine how many of that particular thing I can fit on a print, and how big each item needs to be to acheive the visual effect I am looking for. I make a bunch of test prints of valve caps, for example, at different sizes, until one looks right; then I calculate how big the final print has to be to portray the number I have in mind.

The resulting prints are as sharp and finely detailed as small prints made from 8x10 photographic originals, and yet the prints are enormous. It's a cool effect-- you can walk right up and put your nose on the 10-foot-wide print, and the closer you get, the more you see, like a contact print almost. For me it's an interesting metaphor for our consumerism-- it looks like one thing from a distance, and then when you start to zoom in (so to speak) it looks like something different. There is no place you can stand and see it all; you can stand back and see the whole picture, or you can walk up close and see the details, but you can never see both at once. Of course this effect is only visible when you see the prints in person. The little JPEG's look like they are giving away the essence of the pieces, but all they really do is show the underlying idea. The full-sized prints are quite shocking to see in person. I made the first one yesterday (Ben Franklin, for a show in Texas) and was quite amazed at how huge it looked sitting on my studio table.

Okay that's probably far more information than anyone wanted so I'll sign off...

~cj

[Kirk Gittings]

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

They are photographically based art, much like collage, as in Ulesmann's work, but with the obsessive qualities of a Philip Glass composition.

[kmgibbs]

I used a similar process for the aluminum cans piece. First I photographed about 40 aluminum cans in my studio, each from several different angles, and made 160 identically-sized small digital images that were the source images for the mosaic. The mosaic came out pretty rough looking even after many tries, so it took some cleaning up afterwards by adding cans manually. I then laid the Seurat painting image as a layer over the top and faded it in various different ways. I think it would be really cool to construct this image with actual cans some day. It would be 70x100 feet in size.

So this wasn't 100's of thousands of cans? 40 cans? So this is a contrived scene? Rather misrepresentative isn't it?

When I was in the USAF I remember building beer can mountains against the squadron barracks wall. But it took a couple of hundred people at a squadron party to accomplish. Wasn't near 70x100 either.

I do tend to agree with the solar output theory though as at least partially responsible. Even a very slight increase in output could very easily significantly increase surface temperatures of land and water on the earth.

Kent

[tim atherton]

So this wasn't 100's of thousands of cans? 40 cans? So this is a contrived scene? Rather misrepresentative isn't it?.

Kent

that's the nature of photography - it's a wickedly deceptive medium. It would be pretty boring if it wasn't