Mr.
Matt
Spangler

Sunset - St. Tropez

spaceships:

Seagull 1963 - created for the Chinese Air Force | via nikkor

Richard Barnes Murmur project

“They put on breathtaking aerial displays above the city, banking in nervous unison, responding like a school of fish to each tremor inside the group.

The birds are beloved by tourists and reviled by locals - understandably, since the droppings cover cars and streets, causing accidents and general disgust. A flock of starlings is euphoniously called a “murmuration,” but there is nothing poetic about their appetites.Their ability to focus both eyes on a single object “binocular vision” allows them to peck up stationary seeds as well as insects on the move.

In the countryside outside Rome, they feast on olives. Like us, the birds are enormously adaptable but what we admire in ourselves we often abhor in our neighbors. Richard Barnes’s photographs capture the double nature of the birds - or at least the double nature of our relationship to them - recording the pointillist delicacy of the flock and something darker, almost sinister in the gathering mass. Many of Barnes’s photographs, which will be shown at Hosfelt Gallery in New York this fall, were taken over two years in EUR, a suburb of Rome that Mussolini planned as a showcase for fascist architecture.

The man-made backdrop only enhances the sense of the vast flock as something malign, a sort of avian Nuremberg rally. It is, of course, natural for birds to surrender individual autonomy to the flock; according to the Roman ornithologist Claudio Carere, who has identified 12 basic flock patterns, the starlings are primarily trying to evade falcons. But we project onto the natural world a large measure of ourselves. In ancient Rome, augurs studied the flight patterns of birds to divine the will of the gods; part of the fascination of the starlings is the way they seem to be inscribing some sort of language in the air, if only we could read it.”

Christina by the boat by Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn O Gorman. 1913 (via nowness)

“…Though color photography was not really popularized until the invention of Kodachrome film in 1936, color processes have been around since the 1860s. One of these early techniques was Autochrome, patented in 1905 by the Lumiere Brothers (who, incidentally, opened the world’s first public cinema in 1895)…Autochrome offers an vivid and surreal window on the past, its slightly too-rich colors imbuing each scene with a sense of fantasy.”

Beautiful.  I wonder how long before an agency tracks them down to get them to create a paid ad with this technique.

via peetypassion:

Paddy art: farmers create colourful rice murals in Japan

A group of farmers have created ‘murals’ by planting rice in different colours in Japanese paddy fields

No one knew where this was a from. It was taken in 1939, so it was likely taken by my Grandfather on his travels in the Navy.  He always said, during that time it was one of the only ways to really see the world.