Evolution

There are a vast array of sources available online and via documentary film and other sources on theories of evolution, much of it celebrating Charles Darwin as the father of the theory. Not only are these ideas key to our current understanding of human biology and the genome project but they often mobilize a fascinating series of visual techniques from photography and film to scientific illustration and the newer techniques in animation.

Links: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Commemorating Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday. WGBH 2001.

Mali Train Vendors

Mali train - 04 - vendors
Originally uploaded by photographer695

This seems so special. I like.

The Art of African Exploration at The Smithsonian

Sir Richard Francis Burton. Illustrations (sketches and drawings) from his many book documenting his explorations of the African continent in the 19th century. Some of these from Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast.

Artistic skill was an important tool in an explorer’s kit in the days before modern photography. Expeditions to Africa often included an artist to record the landscapes, wildlife, and peoples encountered on the journey.

In 1854 the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London advised travelers to carry everything from a sextant and compass to drawing materials and paints. The traveler’s goal was to make “imperfectly known countries” better known. Recording their observations through sketches, journals, and maps was an essential part of the journey.

Drawing upon his experiences in Africa, scientist Francis Galton expanded on the RGS’s advice with a wealth of practical tips in his book The Art of Travel (1855). The book proved popular with armchair travelers and seasoned explorers alike. The intrepid British explorer and scholar Sir Richard Francis Burton carried a copy during his own travels in Africa.

Quotation and Description of Page.

The address of African Exploration Images is http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/ArtofAfricanExploration/travel.cfm

Smithsonian Blog

Announcing a photography initiative "The Bigger Picture" at http://blog.photography.si.edu. This should be useful. Will take a look for myself and get back to this.

FSA Color--Belle Glade, Florida

This is a migrant worker dwelling in Zora Neale Hurston's Florida, Belle Glade 1944 taken in kodachrome color by photograph Marion Wolcott.  Fascinating.

Afro-Americans in the 40s--Color FSA Photos

These are photographs from the color collection of the FSA at the Library of Congress taken by Marion Wolcott and dated 1944.  These first three were taken in Belle Glade, Florida and illustrate some of the living conditions of migrant workers in Florida.  This is the kind of location Zora Neale Hurston would have visited in compiling her Mules and Men (1935) and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

This next photograph is also by Marion Wolcott in 1944 of a dwelling occupied by "mulattoes" in Louisiana.  You can see such photographs for yourself at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsowhome.html.  This is the front page of the color collection of the Federal Security Adminstration Collection, 1939-1944.  One can then browse the subject index (African Americans or Negroes), Creator (Marion Wolcott) and/or geographic location (Belle Glade, Florida or Louisiana).

This photo is also by Marion Wolcott and is taken upon the occasion of a picnic in St. Helena, South Carolina, obviously a picnic.  The people are moving naturally, not posing.  Also in the 40s. 

30 Americans: Rubbell Family Collection

“Thirty Americans” contains a near-comprehensive repertoire of the tropes of black postmodernism and the African-American sublime, in which the negativities of slavery, Jim Crow, blackface minstrelsy, racism, sexism and sexual slavery are constantly invoked and interrogated for the rich, dark spaces and designs that their still-warm undersides may reveal. Every African-American artist I can think of whose work I admire finds some way to signal his or her existential outsiderness. In a dominant visual culture in which blackness is often viewed as a negation of both culture and worth, the outside holds as much interest and cachet as the inside. We black people always want to know, regardless of our education and family background: What relation does your work have to the outside where most black people continue to be found everywhere you can look?

30 Americans: Rubbell Family Collection, Miami, Florida: 2008.