bibliostructures

From an interview with Maya Lin at the Academy of Achievement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Were you the oldest or the youngest?

Maya Lin: I’m the youngest. I have one older brother.

How did that affect you? Did it matter?

Maya Lin: Always tried to impress the older sibling. What does the older sibling do? Always try to humiliate the younger sibling. We had a very healthy sibling rivalry and fought a lot, and are best friends. We’re very different and yet we’re very close, in fact we collaborated on an art work of mine. He’s an English professor and a poet. We did a piece for the Cleveland Public Library called “Reading A Garden.” The centerpiece is a pool of water, and the title of the piece, “Reading A Garden” is spelled backwards but reflects forward in the water, which clues you in that this is a poetry garden. It’s a poem laid out three dimensionally. It’s all about words and the directionality and weight of reading. So we didn’t fight the whole time. Collaborating on a work of art — when you have two artists — is very tricky. It took us 30 or 40 years to get to that point!

Photograph by jackace at Flickr.

The term “irrational exuberance” derives from some words that Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, used in a black-tie dinner speech entitled “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society” before the American Enterprise Institute at the Washington Hilton Hotel December 5, 1996. Fourteen pages into this long speech, which was televised live on C-SPAN, he posed a rhetorical question: “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

From Robert Shiller’s book, Irrational Exuberance

Irrational was a good way to describe the internet boom/bubble period. I remember just how goofy it all seemed with businesses desperate to find a way to transfer themselves online, to cut the tethers to the material world. However easy it is to manufacture material goods and set up an ordering system online the goods still have to be moved from where they’re produced to where the buyers are. In his essay The Social Life of Paper, Malcolm Gladwell looked at the phenomenon of the ‘paperless office’ and how the communications and computer devices that were meant to cut down on the use of paper actually increased its use, with backup copies of digital documents printed out and stored. He could write a companion volume about the double journeys of cardboard boxes.

I remember, too, how exhilarating I found the first Barnes & Noble book superstores when I was living in New York. It felt like every book in the world was available there and to be able to grab coffee and sit and browse through books and magazines made me feel like I was visiting a branch of heaven. In retrospect it astonishes me how quickly the thrill of the superstore wore off once Amazon.com opened, and how limited the Barnes & Noble’s superstore stock then seemed to be. Amazon.com seemed to have EVERY BOOK IN THE WORLD available to me, and once the “look inside this book” feature was introduced I found myself rarely going to superstores, and again began to browse, in the real world, in the hyper-specialised bookstore offering a limited but fascinatingly winnowed range of books and subjects.

The amount of prime retail space turned over to the Barnes & Noble retail enterprises with such a passive sales machinery made me gasp. What didn’t initially occur to me was how much actual space Amazon’s warehouses and shipping centres would take up. There’s no equivalence between online and material data distribution. A company like Akamai might have “edge” services, moving multiple copies of frequently requested data to far flung servers so that people in remote locations could get data quickly. There’s still an issue of storage space and power and needing machinery to make the data delivery happen. But what first drew me to Akamai was an ad that it published, just after the company formed, which had a blackboard filled with an enormous equation and the caption: “this time it’s rocket science.” Amazon and Akamai might both be driven by exquisitely calibrated chunks of mathematics, algorithms. But in Akamai’s realm advances in chip technology and storage and data compression make it theoretically possible for its business to grow exponentially while shrinking the amount of space its business takes up and reduce its material presence. When Amazon’s business goes up its need for storage space increases. However canny collapsible and pre-fab objects become they’ll still take up space.

e-Bay’s business model was different. The sellers had an online escrow service, through PayPal so that they wouldn’t have to divulge their financial information but the sellers shipped directly to the buyers. The “buy it now” feature changed the flea market quality of e-Bay, instead of hosting garage sales online people became able to sell multiple copies of the same item and the more successful this becomes the need arises for the sellers to have a warehouse, and staff to handle putting the objects in boxes and mailing them.

Today in The New York Times Brad Stone has written about Amazon’s service that warehouses and ships people’s goods for them.

Fulfillment by Amazon, in development for the last three years, is one of the oldest efforts in the company’s stable of Web services. Unlike S3 and other recent initiatives, Fulfillment by Amazon involves the movement of physical goods instead of digital information.

Participants in the program, which is still in the experimental phase, can sign up on Amazon’s Web site and print out stickers that they put on their goods. They then send their products to Amazon, which stores the items commingled with its own. Amazon ultimately ships them to customers when they are ordered online (and charges the seller a variable fee based partly on the weight of the item and the shipping cost).

Sellers are effectively paying to ship their goods twice. But the program is aimed at small online retailers who have filled up the space in their basements and attics but want to avoid buying and managing their own warehouses.

In the Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan looks at the industrial food chain from the point of view of corn, a crop that’s warehoused when there’s an oversupply and shipped vast distances. He draws up an equation that shows that more calories of energy are used in the production of corn than are derived from eating corn products. Amazon’s mailer packages are probably about as streamlined as they can become in a cardboard form. But double shipping increases the packaging to book content of paper exponentially for every sale.

What we really need is print-on-demand technology and snap-together book components that work with regular home computers , if paper books need to be printed at all. And a way to give a double life to those cardboard boxes that do come into our lives, in the way that Jasper Morrison has created storage units based on wine crates.

Photograph by Dave Yoder for The New York Times.

“Jasper Morrison based his Crate storage system on a wine crate, an everyday object with what he calls “supernormal” qualities”

From an interview with Jasper Morrison in Frame Magazine.

The Crate Series seems to be a celebration of traditional carpentry.
‘Looking at the prototype during a meeting at Established & Sons I realized the impression I wanted was for the new Crates to give the impression they were home made, as if someone had had the idea and then made it for themselves. So although it’s very well made it has an exaggeratedly visible construction.’

In general, what do you consider to be good design?
‘Good design is an object in perfect balance with its surroundings, whatever they might be.’

What is your answer to those who have disqualified The Crate as a rip-off?
‘Try to get out more and eat plenty of green things!’

Books themselves may be beautiful vessels for words but books in the hands of the artist Su Blackwell freeze the fragile poetic impulse as the words are taking flight in the imagination of the reader. A pirate ship emerges from the pages of Peter Pan. Alice and her curious companions take tea in their wonderland. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly lion are led away from Dorothy’s house, just as it’s about to be consumed by a tornado, by the fearless terrier Toto. Delicate golden-hued trees and vines are grow out of a volume of The Secret Garden.  

In the artist’s statement on her website Su Blackwell describes her work as transforming “old books into three-dimensional theatres”.

This is poetry itself, tender and exquisite, not a solid illustration, as pop-up books are, but the imagination taken outside the mind, and modelled. It’s an old-fashioned concept of the fantastic, where great stories seize the heart, and come to life out of nothing but words and pieces of paper, a quality that’s increasingly rare and makes Su Blackwell’s book-worlds even more wondrous.

Do children still know how to play? The flourishing market for picture books that promote playing as worthwhile (and, yes, fun) suggests that many of us aren’t confident that they do, or that parents do enough to encourage them. Still, the impulse to “make believe” is strong at a very young age. Imagination animates toys, turns pots into drums, gives nature a role. As Dylan Thomas remembered in “Fern Hill”: “I was prince of the apple towns / … I lordly had the trees and leaves / Trail with daisies and barley / Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

Joanna Rudge Long. 15.4.07 The New York Times.

A snippet from an article from Forbes Magazine musing on a digital newspaper reader:

Newspapers have attracted readers because they have content people value and respect. Less staff means fewer fresh stories and ad-sponsored columns diminishes the credibility that has been the industry’s calling card since the first newspapers hit the streets in the U.S. in 1690…

So, if anyone is going to save the newspaper industry, it isn’t any of the moguls who think they can breathe life into a dying technology. It is more likely to be someone like Steve Jobs who can devise a really appealing way to make newspapers available digitally.

Sony, Microsoft and others have tried to come up with digital readers but so far most people aren’t that excited. But suppose someone invented a digital newspaper, connected wirelessly to the Internet, that people actually enjoyed reading over coffee in the morning or taking along their morning train ride. …

Make no mistake: The only way to stop the slide of the newspaper industry into oblivion is to replace the traditional paper “form factor” with a technology that can compete with pay-per-click, per-per-action and contextual advertising. Anything less will only accelerate the industry’s decline.

David Evans. Forbes. 24.4.07

Satyajit Ray

In the Calcutta Telegraph today is an op-ed story based around a photograph teenage Satyajit Ray took of his mother and himself, posed with a photograph of his father, who had been dead for several years. Satyajit Ray has appeared in many of the stories I’ve been reading lately: an old editorial from the Calcutta Telegraph by the novelist Amit Chaudhuri, a reference to the train in Ray’s first film Pather Panchali, in an essay by Pankaj Mishra about a journey on the train that the Chinese have built that goes into Lhasa in Tibet, Satyajit Ray’s praise for an Indian silent movie from 1929, a dramatisation of part of the Mahabharata, is mentioned when the movie is screened with the live performance of a new score that’s been written by Nitin Sawhney.

Satyajit Ray wrote and designed books and composed music as well as made films. His grandfather experimented with new forms of photographic and printing processes. His father wrote books of nonsense verse and children’s stories. The joyful nature of the Ray family’s experimentation is mentioned by Aveek Sen in the story about the family portrait:

But behind the classical immobility of this photograph is a different order of fun as well — a hidden flick of the wrist. Nothing thrills an artist more than the adventure of finding solutions to the technical problems of his art. Ray’s caption to this photograph in Jokhon Chhoto Chhilam crisply describes how he devised a way of taking it by pulling on a piece of thread tied to his camera’s shutter. In this, he is living out, still in miniature, his kinship with a paternal line, which habitually delighted in the novelty of eccentric or pioneering contraptions. He grew up with pictures of, and poems about, fantastical, Heath-Robinsonian pulleys and cranes, with family elders immersing themselves in printing presses and block-making processes. Throughout the first section of his memoir, the account of Ray’s childhood absorption in visual devices, like the camera, magic lantern, stereoscope and bioscope, is interlaced with the story of his fascination with magic and legerdemain. Lightness of touch would later become an essential quality in this most Olympian of auteurs.

Ray’s image — together with his means of capturing it — alludes to, and subtly transforms, the overtly sentimental role of photography in his paternal and maternal families’ Ways of Death. He recalls his grand-uncle, Kuladaranjan Ray, being a skilled professional in making large photographs, usually of dead people, after extracting their faces from family group-photos. To be enlarged and “finished” by Kuladaranjan was part of the distinguished after-life of the Brahmo dead. Satyajit remembers seeing many times how such portraits would be taken out of their brown-paper wrappings and stood on tables, and the freshly bereaved would look at them and wipe their tears.

Satyajit Ray wrote many essays on film — his own and others — including a series of recollections about his series of Apu films. It’s his elegant and sweet curiosity about the world around him and his fascination with it, that most inspires me. These are his thoughts about sound in the Apu movies, including the railways that would later mesmerise Pankaj Mishra.

 In the time that we waited for money, I went back to the village with my ears open and made a note of sound effects which would be used. A breeze over a bamboo grove could make the tall bamboos sway with moaning music. A breeze over a lotus pond caused the flapping of lotus leaves. To suggest morning, there were the early bird calls, the cawing of the crow, for instance, while evening resounded with the far and near sounds of conch-shells and the chirping of crickets.Late nights were ushered in by the hoots of owls and the howling of jackals. A very important sound in the evening in the story is the sound of a distant railway train, which is brought nearer on just one occasion. Evenings were also marked by singing, much favoured by Bengalis, to the accompaniment of the box harmonium. All these I noted down.

Satyajit Ray. My Years With Apu.

Mohandas Gandhi, whose political awakening began when he was expelled from a first-class rail compartment in South Africa because of his skin colour, condemned railways as carries of disease and disrupters of self-sufficient rural economies. But Gandhi’s political heirs did not share his suspicion of Western-style modernisation and development. Railways continued to expand in post-independence India, binding far-flung towns and villages into the fourth-biggest rail network in the world. In the film “Pather Panchali,” the first in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the symbolically charged arrival of the train in the Bengal countryside heralds the displacement of a rural family.

Pankaj Mishra.The New Yorker. 16.4.07

Waste Paper, Photograph by joseph_bolt at Flickr

I found a New York Times article that relates to an earlier post about the environmental impact of the printing and destroying of unsold magazines:

Because of its consumption of energy, the industry — which includes magazines, newspapers, catalogs and writing paper — emits the fourth-highest level of carbon dioxide among manufacturers, according to a 2002 study by the Energy Information Administration, a division of the Department of Energy. The paper industry follows the chemical, petroleum and coal products, and primary metals industries.

”Few people realize the sheer scale and magnitude of activities it takes to produce millions of copies of a magazine,” said Donald Carli, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, a nonprofit group in New York that is working to help advertisers estimate their ads’ greenhouse emissions. ”There’s a hidden life that products have, and one of the challenges of sustainability is to make these lives known.”

The life of a magazine or a newspaper starts with trees being cut down in a forest and ends with the burning or recycling of old magazines or papers. The most harmful part of the process is paper production. Breaking down wood fiber to make paper consumes a lot of energy, which in many cases comes from coal plants.

Louise Story. The New York Times. 26.10.06

Photograph by Soffia Gisladóttir at Flickr

I’m always waiting for a character who’s going to come in and confuse the plot a bit more or make it more interesting, take it another way, try to kidnap it. I think it’s a bit like doing collages. Billy the Kid had a kind of collage structure. I’ve been thinking about collage a lot. I love it. There’s something about it that’s not just to do with having a different colour, a yellow bus ticket next to a packet of Gauloises or something like that. It’s also the texture of the paper, the juxtaposition of things. It’s having to make all those things one unit. So if something comes and doesn’t fit in, another thing drops out…. Even though I’m trying to write a novel from A to Z — or A to X, anyway — there is an element of these different voices. And we don’t think chronologically.

Michael Ondaatje interviewed by Johanna Schneller. The Globe and Mail. 13.4.07

I’ve only been publishing my writing online for a couple of months and I find it hard to imagine going back exclusively or even occasionally to writing for publications printed on paper, unless there’s some way I can easily take the books or magazines apart and re-use the bindings or put fresh material into them. The more time I spend browsing on Flickr and de.licio.us I keep longing for a way to view the photographs and read the articles in a way that brings excellent graphic design into the equation. In just two months my reading manner has completely changed. I no longer print out articles to take to a cafe to read while having coffee: I make coffee at home and read newspapers, magazines and blogs online. Borders is on my route home from the library but I no longer linger at the magazine stand there: I save photos into my favourites file on flickr and browse through them. The way I write and read has profoundly altered. I used to write from an extensive outline on paper: now I have a sketchy outline on paper and use my notes to keep track of thoughts, non-sequiturs and tangents that I might put in later, or stray thoughts that are racing ahead of where I am in the story. I used to believe that the screen was for information and the book, printed, bound, fixed, was for deep reflective reading. Now I’m able to reflect equally well reading from a screen.

It’s the EXPERIENCE of reading that’s important to capture. It seems to me – an armchair consumer electronics and product design expert — that all of the materials and communications systems and software exists to make this magazine, all I need to do is establish a compelling need for it to exist so that someone will want to manufacture it.

 THE HARDWARE: an accordion

Plastic Logic is already making flexible screens that resemble paper into glorious representations of books and newspapers.  They would be able to take a l-o-n-g piece of electronic paper (something as cashmere soft and faintly creamy, like the paper-substitute Yupo®) bend in tiny accordian folds that would create ’pages’ (the circuitry can be applied to the back of these folds) and snap a bamboo-mixture spine onto the folded accordion. The covers would be made of an organic (upcyclable) material that soaks in light for the solar-powered batteries and would be a ghostly overlay of the last fifty articles or images the magazine uploaded. It would have the effect of an artwork that William Gibson describes in Pattern Recognition,

On the wall to her left is a triptych by a Japanese artist whose name she forgets, three four-by-eight panels of plywood hung side by side. On these have been silk-screened, in layers, logos and big-eyed manga girls, but each successive layer of paint has been sanded to ghostly translucency, varnished, then overlaid with others, which have in turn been sanded, varnished….The result for Cayce being very soft, deep, almost soothing…

William Gibson. Pattern Recognition

THE EDITORIAL POLICY

The most radical thing about this magazine is the editing software. There’s no “editorial” content in Reflect. It’s just an empty electronic shell that people fill with their own content, it reflects the readers interests, not the editors, but there would be an “issue profile” on de.licio.us that show how various readers, including the editors of the magazine, are compiling the content of their own magazines, that anyone could upload to read.

The name of the magazine, Reflect, suggests a careful thoughtful reading of articles or images, but there would be design prompts coded into the images and articles downloaded that would ‘reflect’ the intentions of the writers and photographers and magazine designers. Although Flickr has an option that allows a photographer to show the photograph in several sizes and suggest an optimum size, Reflect could take things further, and make colour and texture adjustments (matte or glossy) and position the image on a page, much in the way that movies are letterboxed to show how they originally appeared on a larger screen.

And a feature I absolutely want and hope that someone reading this can tell me how to achieve is something I’ve seen for the first time in the online edition of Conde Nast’s new business magazine, Portfolio.

Red-haired and impish, the 32-year-old wore jeans, a wrinkled white dress shirt, and a pair of navy Converse sneakers. During lulls when documents were being printed, Kavanaugh played Blackhawk Striker, a computer game that he’d somehow figured out how to display on the room’s 13-foot screen.

The words that are underlined appear to be a link, and when the cursor hovers above the link a box appears (like a snap preview box, but it leads to a block of text, not another page) with these words in it: “But when negotiations hit an impasse, at least once an hour, Kavanaugh turned away from the imaginary helicopter cockpit and swung into action.”

This is the most minimal and elegant way I’ve seen to place quotes and blocks of text into an article, to bring in other voices, while still being able to write a composed, polished narrative in my own voice. I desperately want to be able to do this. This is the final piece in the puzzle for me, the only other thing I wanted this badly was the most radical and remarkable form of an index, the tag cloud, and I’ve achieved that by saving all of the articles (across my sites) into a de.licio.us profile and showing the tag cloud on the front page of my main site, Yamazaki’s Notebook.

THE PAYMENT AND ROYALTIES SYSTEM

I want someone to develop a PayPal like system that makes it possible to pay a monthly subscription fee (ten bucks say) to read or listen to or view anything on the internet. Pieces of music and movies and articles, anything that currently requires a subscription fee, would have a radio tag code embedded into it and a phone could be beamed at it and register a payment, or a universal code number loaded in or it could respond to a voice prompt. But the payment algorithm would register that this object had been seen, read or listened to and immediately send a royalty to the artist and publisher.

There’d be none of this 99c to own a music track, you could just listen to it any time you liked included in the fee. If you want to download a piece of music, or save or print an article a microtransaction fee would apply … charged to your phone bill (the monthly subscription fee would include a certain number of downloads & prints and you could pay extra to have more).

OTHER TITLES FROM THE SAME PUBLISHER

Another electronic publication I would want would be called RESPOND that would allow me to write onto electronic pages, or see the text appear there while I’m using an infra-red keyboard, and that would allow me to interact with Ken Goldberg’s telerobotic art projects. A new one goes online today:

 A new website will allow players to earn points by taking live photos and classifying wild birds. CONE Sutro Forest (CONE-SF) combines a remotely controllable robotic pan-tilt-zoom video camera with live streaming video, image database, and point system.

Conceived by Ken Goldberg, artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, and Dez Song, professor of computer science at Texas A&M, and funded by the National Science Foundation, CONE-SF automatically computes the optimal camera viewpoint that satisfies dozens or hundreds of simultaneous players, including both experts and amateurs. Managing large communities is the specialty of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who will host the camera from his San Francisco residence overlooking the Sutro Forest.

CONE-SF is free and open to the public. To play, visit: http://cone.berkeley.edu.

The thing that astonished me watching Blade Runner again, after not having seen it for a few years, is how much PAPER there is in the movie, how many BOOKS! My view of the computer age is utterly and completely cliched: William Gibson’s novels, the Apple personal computer, Blade Runner, punk rock music, the Sony Walkman. But I remember that when I encountered each of those things, at the time they were released — 1984 is the magic and mythologically charged year – the world stopped spinning for a moment, and when it started again everything had changed.

Blade Runner became especially real to me, as if the movie was an implanted memory, grafted onto my own experience, when I lived in Los Angeles for eleven years. Down-town Los Angeles was part of my life. I borrowed books from the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, ate noodles in the Japanese district, bought cheap electronics from the stores on Broadway. In the movie Los Angeles is digital taffy stretched skywards but the street level is recognisable: J.T. Sebastian lives in the Bradbury Building, the tunnel is a main traffic artery in and out of downtown, the police station is the Railway Station, the hotel flophouse looks like many of the actual decaying hotels, Deckard’s apartment building seems to be based on a Frank Lloyd Wright concrete block building near Hollywood.  

My memory didn’t embellish any of the texture of the landscape of the movie, what’s fascinating to me is how I’d mentally upgraded the communications technologies and completely failed to register the prescience of the biotechnology in the movie: the serial number at the molecular level from the scale of a bio-engineered snake. The 1930’s and 1940’s film noir touches are stylistic references to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s books and the movies made from them, right down to the wooden filing cabinets, people use pens and pencils, have overflowing ashtrays on their desks and the silhouette of the replicant Rachael’s clothing is the padded and moulded shape of 1940’s screen-siren dresses. Blade Runner is set in 2019 and when I watched it again last night I thought, this can’t be Los Angeles in the future. No-one has a Blackberry, everyone’s smoking.

Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner, Deckard, reads an actual broadsheet newspaper. These days the L.A. Times is an endangered species, in any form, perhaps the Spanish language daily La Opinion might still exist in 2019, but on paper??? His apartment is full of books, hardback’s without their dustjackets, with fraying cloth covers, and yards of what might be Encyclopaedias running along one wall. The manufactured “memories” of the replicants (of whom Deckard, it is hinted, is one) are photographs on paper and postcards. The enigmatic dandyish policeman played by Edward James Olmos folds paper into origami exclamation marks and clues – a chicken, a unicorn — that he leaves for Deckard to find at significant moments in the movie. The streets are full of trash, old newspapers, cardboard packaging.

I’d also forgotten how strong the symbolism is in the movie: a dove fluttering into the sky as the replicant, Roy, dies. Deckard, as he looks around his apartment at the family photographs and remembrances, after being visited by the replicant, Rachael, dreams of a unicorn. Is he, too, a strange mythical creature without a mate? And Edward James Olmos has left an origami unicorn in the stairwell at Deckard’s apartment, that he discovers as he’s escaping with Rachael.

When I was writing for the British architecture magazine, Blueprint, I visited the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There was a wooden railing running around the control room, behind Captain Pickard’s chair. The wood is symbolic I was told, connecting the voyages of the Enterprise with the explorations made in sailing ships. It now occurs to me that books, the paper variety, hardback with their boards covered in fraying cloth, are symbols of wisdom or dreams and hope in science fiction: The presence of books in science fiction movies probably doesn’t say anything at all about the actual communications devices of the time they’re set in, they’re purely symbolic. Clothbound hardbound poetry books are in the version of Solaris that starred George Clooney.

In Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the classic, romantic age of science fiction from H.G. Wells and Jules Verne is outlawed and smuggled onto the off-world colonies as contraband.

“And then I met Horst Hartman, who at the time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps: there’s so much time on your hands that you’ve got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly. And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction.”

“You mean old books?”

“Stories written before space travel but about space travel.”  

“…there’s a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonisation. You can’t imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to have been like. Canals.”

“Canals?” Dimly, he remembered reading about that; in the olden days they had believed in canals on Mars.

“Criscrossing the planet,” Pris said. “And beings from other stars. With infinite wisdom. And stories about Earth, set in our time and even later. Where there’s no radioactive dust.”

Lynn Davis’s “Iceberg #6, Disko Bay, Greenland, 1988.”

There is an exhibition of Lynn Davis’s photographs at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. I viewed the plates from the exhibition catalogue online, and while the photographs themselves still made a strong spiritual impact, invoking a sense of inner calm, and stillness and silence, what was missing was the texture. So I went across the road to the State Library and looked at the Lynn Davis book that they have in their collection, Monument, which features some of the photographs that are in the Rubin Museum of Art exhibition

A story about the exhibition in The New York Times talked about the precision and care of her printing technique:

Her work changed dramatically in 1986, when she first traveled to the Arctic to photograph icebergs floating in Greenland’s Disko Bay. At the time several of her friends, including Mapplethorpe and the photographer Peter Hujar, were dying of AIDS, and the mood in New York seemed dismal and bleak.

“I was trying to find an outer manifestation of what I was feeling,” she recalled. “When I saw the ice, something clicked. It was like the beginning of another journey.”

That journey kept her on the road, usually alone, for about six months of every year. Using an old Rolleiflex camera, she photographed from the backs of horses and camels, from boats and helicopters. Back in her studio, she rendered her negatives as exquisite, large-scale black-and-white prints, toned with gold and selenium to shift the neutral grays toward blue or sepia.

The golden-blue shimmer on the photograph of a pyramid was dazzingly beautiful. And it made me pause for a moment, in my enthusiasm for electronic paper, to think about how it’s going to need some haptic qualities to suggest the sensual quality of touch, and that photography (or even writing) on a page is so much more than just what the image suggests visually.

One of the joys of going to a library or bookshop is finding things you weren’t looking for. My eye was caught by a book of Irving Penn’s platinum prints, and there’s a detailed technical description of how he achieved them, that’s beautifully written, by Sarah Greenough. Irving Penn lamented what was lost when his photographs appeared only on the shiny surfaces of fashion magazines, and he spent years perfecting his platinum printing techniques.

Prized for its rich, subtle tonal range and its wealth of fine detail, platinum was a popular method of making photographic prints at the turn of the twentieth century, when pictorial photographers such as Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Steichen, or Frederick Evans employed it extensively…. Because the chemicals used in platinum and gum bichromate prints could be applied and developed with a brush, suppressing some areas while highlighting others, they believed that these processes gave them greater freedom to express their ideas. With platinum, in particular, they were entranced by the way in which the light sensitive salts were absorbed into the paper fibres, giving the print a sensuous texture dramatically different from the glossy, and in their minds, more commercial surface of either albumen or gelatin silver prints.

Irving Penn carefully detailed the different papers he experimented with and how they reacted to the chemicals and his printing process.

Penn became part scientist, methodically recording all of his trials and noting the relative strengths of his chemicals. But he was also always the artist, imgaining the possibilities of his craft and willing to explore any alternative to achieve his vision. Thus, he tried many different kinds of paper from England, France, Italy, and America, with varying surfaces — matte or glossy. Rives was his favourite, although he also experimented with Arches, Chatham, Milbourne, Strathmore, Crown and Sceptre, Fabriano, Hagle, and Whatman. Few, however, were able to withstand the repeated and lengthy exposure to chemicals: Chatham “went to pieces”‘ Whatman “bubbled”; while Strathmore had “a mechanical look.”

l’Homme Au Parapluie – The Umbrella Man. Photograph by yveslorson at Flickr.

There are a number of new glossy magazines on business about to hit the newsstands. The first of these is Portfolio, from Conde Nast, on newsstands in America today and online at http://www.Portfolio.com.

With Portfolio business journalism becomes a branded luxury item. It follows the Vanity Fair formula of a celebrity photographer (Annie Leibowitz, for example) and a celebrity writer (Tom Wolfe, for example) writing about a powerful creature (a CEO or CFO or CIO or COO or the heir to a multi-national family corporation) and giving the whole enterprise what Diana Vreeland, or the magazine editor that Kay Thompson portrayed in Funny Face might have called Bizzazz!!! 

Bono formed a venture capital company, Elevation Partners, and bought a part of Forbes magazine which is reputed to be bringing out a business magazine for women. Tyler Brule, the founder of the lifestyle magazine Wallpaper* is introducing a business magazine called Monocle.

I’ve written a long article about the editorial philosophy of this kind of business writing, at Yamazaki’s Notebook, contrasting it with the sparkling innovations of Outside.in and WorldChanging.com bringing sophisticated, intelligent and witty business writing to the community newspaper (that usually would have been marooned in its own neighbourhood). Local writing is compounded by these two outlets — Outside.in is a gateway, organised by zipcode, to local writing all over America and soon the world. WorldChanging.com started out providing links and now is shifting towards more of its own reporting, intimate and conversational reports about what’s happening to heal the planet.

What caught my eye in a story today in The New York Times about the launch of Portfolio was a reference to the paper it’s printed on:

Fortune is putting out a redesign of its venerable Fortune 500 issue today with heavier paper stock (not as heavy as Portfolio’s) and may redesign the whole magazine.

The New York Times. 16.4.07

Whenever I’m at the Borders Store next door to my apartment building when the new issues of the magazines are being exchanged for the old I’m astonished by the density of magazines, by the weight and bulk of all that shiny paper. Then my mind starts to spin as I imagine this scenario being played out all over Melbourne, then Australia and the world. I can’t imagine a trash heap large enough for all of these magazines.

There’s a study by the H. John Heinz Centre for Science, Economics and the Environment, made available late last year as a free pdf download, that looks at the environmental impact of the printing and distribution and destroying of magazines, from the forest the paper is made from to the unsold magazines being moved to rubbish tips (where they break down poorly and make the soil anaerobic, due in part to the clay coating on the covers). The Heinz Centre, with the co-operation of Time Inc. looked at the fate of issues of Time and InStyle.

In 2001, Time Inc. printed 22,539 tons of InStyle magazines, of which 56% (12,632 tons went to newsstands and 44% (9,907 tons) went to subscribers. On average 41% of the newsstand copies of InStyle (5,178 tons) were not sold. Approximately 7,869 tons, or 35% of total annual production of InStyle magazines were recovered an recycled, but only 17% of subscription magazines were recovered. The sum of unrecovered newsstand and subscription magazines was estimated to be 14,670 tons. We estimated that approximately 13,203 tons of InStyle magazines were placed in landfills, based on an industry-wide average of 90% and 10% of unrecovered magazines which are landfilled and incinerated, respectively.

The Heinz Centre Report