Category Archives: Photographs

The Carnegie Library

Architecture

The idea of a great man.

Paso Robles Carnegie Library, built in 1908.
5D, 24-105 at 105mm, 1/500, f/6.7, ISO200

It’s said that the true measure of philanthropy is not how much you give but how much you have left. By that measure, Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) is the greatest philanthropist the world has seen, having given away almost all of his fortune at the time of his death. Inflation makes comparisons difficult, but if you figure wealth as a percentage of Gross National Product, Carnegie ranks fifth in America, after Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor and Girard (d. 1831 – trade and banking).

Carnegie mostly gave his money to build public libraries in the United States, England and his native Scotland. While I see libraries as essentially a waste of real estate in a digital world (the Library of Congress could be digitized for $1 billion, the space put to better use) there is an undeniable charm to a fine library and the tactile enjoyment of good books.

The small town of Paso Robles, a stone’s throw from my home in Templeton in central California, has a pretty town square graced with a Carnegie Library. Sadly, the brick building was damaged in the earthquake a few years ago and the City has finally come around to fixing the damage. While the whole is still surrounded with chain-link fencing, it’s possible to see the results of the rebuilding from a distance.

Many would denigrate Carnegie for his use of low paid labor in his steel mills near Pittsburgh. To me, the choices are simple. You take one or two generations of the poor and stupid, exploit them horribly and confer a priceless gift on the world. The next generation now has no excuse for being either poor or stupid. Or you do nothing and the poor and stupid continue being just that. It’s your choice, but there’s little arguing with the benefits of the Carnegie way.

A great man and a beautiful piece of architecture. Check out the brand, spanking new copper piping in the snap above. Gorgeous.

Except for a very small tweak in Photoshop to fix perspective, the picture has had no post processing.

Harvest time!

Photographs

An annual ritual.

The crew arrives at 6:30. It’s still dark.

For $7 an hour these great people work insanely hard and by noon we will have twenty of these bins containing 10 tons of the finest Zinfandel grapes in the world; the area where I live – the Templeton Gap in Central California – is renowned for its Zinfandel varietals above all else.

Then the vines will gracefully shed their leaves, the crew will return to prune them to a nub and another growing cycle is complete.

So, I find myself wondering, as a great American farmer, where’s my government subsidy?


A final check of Brix (sugar content)

The wine grower is required, by contract, to provide grapes with a certain Brix level – 25 to 28 for Zinfandel. I’m at 26.5 which is just about right. The tool in the picture is a refractometer, a nice optical device as old as Sir Isaac Newton. A drop of grape juice on the lens, a peek through the eyepiece and Brix is determined.

Back to the regular topics tomorrow. Now please excuse me, I have to go tread on some grapes….

Mother Russia

Photographs

Nothing changes.

What on earth can one make of Russia? For centuries it has stumbled from one brutal murderous dictator to another seemingly yet more heinous. Democracy, simply stated, is a concept they are incapable of embracing, preferring the cold clutches of the state and cheap booze. The current Russian poll to seek out the greatest Russian has Stalin in a healthy lead. Runner-up? Tzar Nicholas II. This from a nation that has given us Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Horowitz, Nureyev and on and on. You figure it out. I cannot.

So how is it that so cruel a system has given us much of what we think of as great art today, whether in music, painting, ballet, opera, architecture, you name it? Maybe it’s simply that the Slav creative gene only works well when depressed.

Click the picture for a beautiful monochrome photo essay by James Hill on the remains of agrarian Russia, appropriately published in that most socialist of US papers, The New York Times:

Game Boys

Photographs

Photo Essay by Shauna Frischkorn.

I quote from the original:

Eyes cast upward in ecstatic contemplation—500 or 600 years ago these expressions might have been found in a work by Raphael or Guido Reni. But Shauna Frischkorn, an associate professor of art at Pennsylvania’s
 Millersville University, has captured the agony and the ecstasy of our own age in a wide-ranging series of portraits: no monks or saints, just ordinary teenage boys playing Halo. She says that “while they seem passive, they’re actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split-second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.”

Whatever the frightening implications of this misdirected intensity may be, the essay is intensely original and worth taking a look. Click the picture for more.