Yearly Archives: 2017

A new year

Photographs

Commencement Day at NMH.

A new year starts at Northfield Mount Hermon school, where my son returns as a sophomore. Set in the bucolic Berkshire Hills of central Massachusetts, some 2 hours from Boston, the school’s 1500 acre campus exemplifies all that is good about New England schooling – a gorgeous campus, outstanding faculty and administration and a caring and nurturing spirit. Academic standards, along with those in the seven other Ivy League New England prep schools*, are ne plus ultra. The matriculation rate to university is 100% for all these schools, reflecting early and aggressive culling of sub-par performers. Winston couldn’t wait to return.


A perfect azure sky is backdrop for the welcome tent, early morning. The Memorial Chapel, built from local Connecticut River stone, is at top left.


Winston registers for the sophomore year in the Forslund Gym.


The Gym sports two basketball courts, here covered for the registration process.


Blake Hall is the student center. Last year my son’s work-job duties included cleaning it! All students are required to participate in manual labor tasks.

* Hotchkiss, Andover, Deerfield, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Lawrenceville, Choate and NMH.

All snapped on the iPhone 6 which always does a number on azure skies.

Lewis Hine

Photographers

A man who changed America.

Great men change societies for the better in various ways. Some do it through political action (FDR – Medicare, Social Security, WPA), others through large capital transfers and aggressive leadership (Bill Gates and his Foundation). Lewis Hine (1874 – 1940) was neither a powerful politician nor a Master of the Universe. This highly educated man (University of Chicago, Columbia, NYU) was instrumental in changing child labor law in the United States through his searing photography of young children put out to work.

The Guardian has a fine spread of his work which you can see by clicking his iconic image of the power house mechanic below.


Click the image.

Sadly Hine died destitute, living on welfare. The great nation which he had helped reform had turned its back on him.

Jules Aarons

Photographers

Street photographer and scientist.

Jules Aarons provides concrete proof that talent is not equally disposed in the world of homo sapiens.

The scientific work of Aarons has much to do with the accuracy of the Google Maps app on your iPhone. But it’s his street photography which is of greater interest here. A long time resident of Boston and, like all educated men***, a devoted Francophile, his street snaps in Boston and Paris are luminous and delightful.

*** Aarons studied physics at Boston University, earning his M.S. degree in 1949. In 1953 he won a Fulbright scholarship and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Paris – Wikipedia.


Paris


Boston

You can see more at his web site here.

Elliott Erwitt in Pittsburgh

Photographers

Before the transformation.

These newly discovered images of Pittsburgh by Elliott Erwitt document the old city built by the little Scots immigrant and his Carnegie Steel, before its transformation to the vibrant metropolis of today.

Erwitt is incapable of taking a bad photograph as this wonderful slide show attests.


Click the image.

Sadly, it’s many of the descendants of these same immigrants pictured here who would deny the opportunity of immigration to the United States to those who will only help make America greater. “Now that I’m here, stay away” being the thinking. That’s not the America which welcomed me with open arms on November 16, 1977, a day second only to my son’s birth in my memories.