anthropometrics – the Museo Cesare Lombroso
This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Anthropometrics – part of human factors design. Its roots lie in nineteenth century anthropological science, and forensics. Measuring the distances between eyebrows for evidence of criminality, correlating shapes of skulls with [...]
haunted media
Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now. They have haunted me ever since. It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [...]
Holmes 2009 – documenting the past?
It can’t really be called “period detail”. What impressed us about the new Sherlock Holmes movie [Link] was the way it handled the nineteenth century. It was the color space (very mannered, desaturated, toned) and the abraded, worn, littered look of the urban spaces. It just kind of felt like Victorian London. Of course, Victorian [...]
Thessaloniki 2006
I have been working on a portfolio of photos I had put to one side. They are of the old covered markets in Thessaloniki. I was visiting Kostas Kotsakis in April 2006. More at archaeographer.com
post mortem
Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century. Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.
Located Bodies
Antony Gormley at the Baltic Arts Center Wonderful stuff. Anthropometrics, collaborative work, community based, questioning representational forms. Allotment. Residents of Malmo measured and concrete boxes made to fit them in. All arranged in the gallery in social groups, and as a kind of miniature city scape. Domain Field. Whole body casts made of some 250 [...]
