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AsmaGate

Hall of Shame

Vogue is stupid. Doubly so.

It’s dumb enough profiling the sartorial tastes of a butcher’s wife, one Asma Assad, an English girl on the make who decided a clothing budget and a palace beat any sense of moral compass. And profile her Vogue did, in its February 2011 issue of the famous fashion magazine, the repository of all that is best in fashion photography. The piece, captioned “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert” profiles the wife of the Syrian dictator who, like his father before him, has been torturing and butchering his people for many years now, albeit with renewed zeal recently as the threat of democracy has raised its ugly head.

The piece is made worse by the fact that somehow Vogue suckered in ace war photographer James Nachtwey to take the snaps. Hopefully Nachtwey stayed on to capture some of the carnage wrought by Assad, as that is the photographer’s specialty. As a minimum he would have saved his employer a round trip air fare.

It’s impossible to excuse Vogue’s judgment and even harder to understand how a seasoned war photographer, who surely has a decent grasp of international situations, could be suckered into this train wreck. Excuse me, Mr. Nachtwey, but do you even read the papers in which your work is published?

But it gets worse. Denying the realities of the Internet, Vogue has now compounded interest in its poor judgment by deleting the article from its database. And while no one except its editorial staff would think that Vogue is a current affairs publication, the act of censorship can only be said have its foul goals exceeded by its stunning stupidity. Tens of thousands of Chinese censors will tell you it can’t be done, Vogue. Just admit your error, take the high road, and leave it out there with an editorial message saying ‘Sorry. We screwed up badly and as contrition our Editor is donating her salary this year to help the oppressed people of Syria’.

Search the Internet for the piece and this is what you get at Vogue:

Click the picture to download the article.

Click the picture above and the article will download and you can open it in Safari.

In ordinary circumstances, even as great a stranger to ethics as Rupert Murdoch would have fired Vogue’s Editor, Anna Wintour, on grounds of shockingly bad judgment, not to mention a total absence of taste, the magazine’s raison d’être. But Ms. Wintour is sacred, the Dirty Digger does not own the magazine, and Condé Nast – which does own Vogue – took the coward’s way out and tried to censor the piece.

Thus, Condé Nast, Anna Wintour, Vogue and James Nachtwey are dishonorable inductees to this journal’s Hall of Shame.

Meanwhile, you can look forward to these future thrilling profiles in Vogue; grab them before they get erased:

  • “Svetlana Stalin: What my father taught me about humanity and dressing well”
  • “My life and sartorial times with Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević – a wife’s tale”
  • Discovered: Previously unpublished pictures of Eva Braun’s wardrobe, with love notes from her future spouse.

SX-70

Cameras

The invention of an American genius.

This wonderful advertisement for Edwin Land’s Polaroid SX-70 instant camera is thrilling to watch.

Click to play. Refresh browser if not visible.

Almost eleven minutes long, and reveling for a considerable part in the fabulous technology of the machine, there is no better way, other than using one, of appreciating what Dr. Land had accomplished with his magic machine. The sheer simplicity of the SX-70’s user interface would not be rivaled until the iPad came along forty years later, and having used both, I can assure you only one is magic, and it’s not the product designed in Cupertino.

The film was made by Charles and Ray Eames, whose other accomplishments include architectural and furniture design. Talent is seldom evenly distributed.

Film for the SX-70:

A bunch of criminally insane people in Holland got together, bought out the old Polaroid film making hardware and got down to making film for the SX-70, and you can still buy it here. Bless them!

Hubble

Paintings, Photographs

Beautiful images.

Needless to say, once America comes up with an invention of genius, the small minds pervading the corridors of Congress see to it that the modest cost – and hang the benefits – becomes a political football and the project is mothballed.

I’m talking about the Hubble space telescope of course, perhaps the costliest camera ever made. Look at this image of the red spot(s) on Jupiter:

Jupiter from Hubble. Early 21st Century.

Vincent Van Gogh would be proud.

Van Gogh. Starry Night. June 1889.

The Hubble book is from National Geographic and you can buy it from Amazon by clicking the picture below. I get no click-through dollars if you do that; it will be a cold day in hell before I resort to that disingenuous and pathetic ‘business’ model.

Click the picture to go to Amazon US.

I bought the paper copy as no one at National Geographic has yet realized that interactive iPad books are what the consumer wants. Al Gore’s outstanding Our Choice is the standard here.

A quick Facebook rant:

Sadly, PushPop Press, the maker of the app for Gore’s book, has been acquired by Facebook, sponsor of the largest crime against privacy and the individual in the history of the world. In totalitarian Russia the KGB at least had to search you out. With Facebook, the innocent masses volunteer their most private information at no cost, no threats, no torture, no truth serum, whereupon it is resold, without their knowledge, to law enforcement, prospective and current employers and any advertiser with a check book. Careers are ruined by a single, childhood indiscretion, in a medium that can never be erased, but can most certainly be subpoenaed.

Meanwhile Facebook pays ever-increasing amounts for inventions which threaten its very existence – like the $1 billion just paid for the nonsensical Instagram – in an attempt to maintain its hegemony. A business doomed to fail as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, with minimal barriers to entry and subject to the whims and wants of a fickle, youthful consumer. Too bad PushPop Press will likely go down with it. Why Apple did not acquire this business beats me – the book publishing app, like the Hubble, has been mothballed.

Fotopedia

iPad, Photographs

How a picture book should be done.

Our son was doing a homework project on the Spanish Missions in California and the one assigned, which he had to profile, was Mission San Gabriel. In contrast to the others whose roofs rest on adobe walls, San Gabriel has the roof resting within the walls, the latter reinforced by over a dozen vertical buttresses – large stone columns to bear the side load of the roof on the walls. It was an interesting project and we both learned a lot doing it, but at the conclusion I had to put the boy to right.

“Winston, old man”, said I, taking the lad aside, “when it comes to roof supports, there are buttresses and there is Notre Dame.”

And this is the picture I showed him.

Notre Dame, ÃŽle de France, Paris. Flying buttresses.

Seldom has there been a more perfect marriage of form and function than in these flying buttresses, light and airy, as befits the City of Light. Gazing at this of course made me long for Paris, and there is no better way of seeing that gorgeous city through photographs than by downloading the free Fotopedia – Paris app to your iPad. The app is custom designed for the iPad, and will not run on laptops, desktops or Zunes.

The design is a masterpiece, as you might expect from the former chief technology officer of applications at Apple, Jean-Marie Hullot. There’s an interesting piece on the man in the NY Times Blog. The app is not about hotels, or sightseeing or boat trips or restaurants. It’s about showing the most beautiful city in the world on the best display device in existence. I have run it on both the iPad1 and iPad3 and it works well on both.

The photo below is from Fotopedia – Paris by Magnum photographer Jacques Bravo and is of the roofs of Rue Mouffetard in Montparnasse, a particularly pleasant reminiscence for me as it was a snap of that very street which saw me first published in Leica Fotografie in 1974. On an iPad, touch the picture for the Fotopedia app. On a laptop or desktop, you can save by clicking on the picture and then syncing your iPad using iTunes.

Touch the picture on your iPad to download Fotopedia – Paris.

There are several other Fotopedias, but after this one, who cares? Oh yes, there’s one about the US National Parks for all those who believe landscapes start and end in Yosemite. Good for the Saint Ansel set, I suppose. And there’s one on North Korea (what?) for manic depressives. But Paris is the one to get for this street snapper.