Lena Herzog's Lost Souls

I came across this by chance: another photographer, photographing Frederik Ruysch's amazing birth defect displays from the Kunstkammern of Peter the Great, as well as Vienna's Federal Museum of Pathology at the Narrenturm.  I have always admired Rosamond Purcell's photographs, but now there is Lena Herzog.

On Science and the Arts, she does a good job of talking about the true nature of the collectors of the old days, the ideals of morality and aesthetic considerations, the way that art and science were not so separate as they are now.  Check out her narrated slideshow here.

In the meantime, I recommend her book, Lost Souls, which sounds like an amazing meditation on the the abstract beauty of these items of study:

"The arrangements of the fetuses, the specimens, the anatomical skeletons, was highly artistic.  Ruysch was a true artist.  The images I have created, I took special care not to take advantage, not to speculate, on the macabre -- on the horrifying.  I wasn't interested in shocking anyone.  They are shocking by definition because it's such complicated territory.  They're dead, they're children, they were meant to live, they never lived -- so I truly wanted to follow in the footsteps of Frederick Ruysch, who took special care.  For example, he would hide the especially frightening parts with lace, revealing it only to his students of anatomy and to himself to study, in order to help humankind.  The morality of the cabinet makers was never in question.  They were highly conscious of the moral and human implications."

 The preserved fetuses are glimpses into the perils of health and science back when medicine was in its infancy, but she manages to capture some of their ephemeral beauty, and some of the qualities which Ruysch so carefully preserved: that of error and loss, of humanity and the need to understand.

Links:

More on Ms. Herzog and the book in the Paris Review,
and
A rather technique-heavy conversation with Ms. Herzog at the American Society of Cinematographers.

Diorama Extravaganza

Long, long ago, Nicholas Clayton wrote in to tell me this:

"Going off-post to point you to something that should intrigue any enquiring mind that is prepared, as yours evidently is, to be delighted. I can't find any note of it in your blog: the London Diorama.
Sitting in a taxi I saw the name blazoned on the pediment of the Nash terrace at Park Square East. This led to a fascinating article (The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s).

And the Diorama structure of building is still there behind the facade as can be seen on the Google satellite view [see picture]. I have yet to visit to find out how accessible it is to the public."




The diorama was a sensation in the early 1800s, the brainchild of Louis Daguerre, as in (you guessed it) the daguerrotype. Having apprenticed in architecture, theater design, and panoramic painting, M. Daguerre was a natural talent with a true skill for theatrical illusion. He became famous for his electrifying theater design, and at the age of 35 opened his first Diorama in Paris in July 1822.


"...the Diorama was a theatrical experience viewed by an audience in a highly specialized theatre. As many as 350 patrons would file in to view a landscape painting that would change its appearance both subtly and dramatically. Most would stand, though limited seating was provided. The show lasted 10 to 15 minutes, after which time the entire audience (on a massive turntable) would rotate to view a second painting. Later models of the Diorama theater even held a third painting.


The size of the proscenium was 24 feet (7.3 m) wide by 21 feet (6.4 m) high (7.3 meters x 6.4 meters). Each scene was hand-painted on linen, which was made transparent in selected areas. A series of these multi-layered, linen panels were arranged in a deep, truncated tunnel, then illuminated by sunlight re-directed via skylights, screens, shutters, and colored blinds. Depending on the direction and intensity of the skillfully manipulated light, the scene would appear to change. The effect was so subtle and finely rendered that both critics and the public were astounded, believing they were looking at a natural scene." [wiki]

Here is part of a review of one of the dioramas shown in London, from The Times, 4 October 1823:

“The warm reflection of the sunny sky recedes by degrees; and the advancing dark shadow runs across the water – chasing, as it were, the former bright effect before it. At the same time, the small rivulets show with a glassy black effect among the underwood; new pools appear which, in the sun-shine, were not visible; and the snow-mountains in the distance are seen more distinctly in the gloom. The whole thing is nature itself; – and there is another very curious sensation which this landscape-scene produces on the mind. The decided effect of the thing is, that you look over an area of twenty miles; the distant objects not included. The whole field is peopled: a house, at which you really expect to see persons look out of a window every moment – a rill, actually moving – trees that sem to wave.

You have, as far as the senses can be acted upon, all these things (realities) before you; and yet, in the midst of all this crowd of animation, there is a stillness, which is the stillness of the grave. The idea produced is that of a region – of a world – deserted; of living nature at an end; – of the last day past and over. Silence, in spite of Ariosto, seems to have found a resting-place – nay, at last, an empire – upon earth.”




The diorama in London was built the year after the first one in Paris, in 1923.

I did a bit of web-burrowing and came up with this information:

Arthur Gill (who throughout the 1960s and 1970s wrote a regular column in The Photographic Journal of the Royal Photographic Society) recorded an account of a visit he made to the Park Square East/ Peto Place building at a time when it was empty in the mid–1970s. He found what seemed to be the remnant of a filled-in well of about twelve feet (3.7 metres) diameter which he thought was originally used to contain the turning shaft on which the Diorama saloon had turned. A few years before, when the building housed a department of the Middlesex Hospital, the well had been filled with warm water and used for hydrotherapy of disabled patients. Mr Gill explored fully the empty building and “tried to imagine what the aspect would be like if the circumferential rooms and offices were absent... However, try as I would, my imagination was unable to sweep away the modern amendments and adaptions, and recapture the Diorama. Except for that concrete–filled well ... everything has gone beyond recall”. (Arthur Gill, ‘The London Diorama’, History of Photography, January 1977, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.31-36)

In the early 1990s it was being used to house the Diorama Arts centre, but later it became part of the national headquarters of The Prince's Trust charity. Lord knows what's inside the structure now.

Daguerre went on to build other dioramas, the last one being a diorama in a church in Bry-sur-Marne, just outside Paris, where he lived. Last time I was in France I tried to get there because they still have one hanging in the church; but apparently it was poorly restored over the years, and now they are trying to restore it from the restoration, so to speak, having lost a good deal of the transparency and effect in the previous restoration.

Daguerre, of course, was fascinated by visual representation in all forms, and ways of reproducing the reality of the world in a more permanent, frozen form. It was not surprising, then, that he became involved in the first photographic process:

In 1822 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent photograph (known as a Heliograph). Daguerre partnered with Niépce three years later, beginning a four-year cooperation. Niépce died suddenly in 1833. The main reason for the "partnership", as far as Daguerre was concerned, was connected to his already famous dioramas. Niepce was a printer and his process was based on a faster way to produce printing plates. Daguerre thought that the process developed by Niepce could help speed up his diorama creation.

Daguerre announced the latest perfection of the Daguerreotype, after years of experimentation, in 1839, with the French Academy of Sciences announcing the process on January 7 of that year. Daguerre's patent was acquired by the French Government, and, on August 19, 1839, the French Government announced the invention was a gift "Free to the World."
Daguerre and Niépce's son obtained a pension from the Government in exchange for freely sharing the details of the process.

The Wikipedia article on dioramas says that Daguerre was a manufacturer of mirrors, which is interesting for several reasons. One is that the plates on which the daguerrotypes were developed used a silvered surface; another is that his cameras depended on taking the light that came through the camera's lens and reflecting it with a mirror onto the plate, very much like a camera obscura. He never developed this camera much, and depended on this same essential concept for his patent. All part of the smoke and mirrors of good theatre, I suppose.


Many thanks to R.D. Wood's extensive work on the history of the diorama.

Rural Old New York

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.


Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Note: 5 out of 7 of the pictures in this post were taken by me, with my daughter's cheap instant camera. The quality of the photos isn't very good, but it doesn't seem to matter, which says much about the quality of their subject matter...

This spring break I took two days to go to New York City with my elder daughter, aged ten. This is not a simple thing when you live in California. I sent her on ahead alone to stay with her uncle for a few days, then met her there. And one of the things she wanted to do was go to the American Museum of Natural History..

I've heard about this place (and even walked past it) for many years, and I always thought it was another one of those "New York things you're supposed to see," like Times Square (which really isn't much more than a touristy place with a lot of neon, like Piccadilly Circus or the Umeda district in Osaka - or, of course, Yasukuni-dori in Shinjuku, and the Akihabara area, both in Tokyo). But when we got inside, I understood why this museum is famous.

We came in via the subway station, so at first it simply seemed to be floor after floor of echoing halls, with little sense of how to get from here to there. Then I saw a gaping doorway which said above it "African Mammals," and I dragged my daughter inside, though she wanted to find the North American Mammals. As we walked into the darkness we were greeted by a huge herd of stampeding elephants, coming right at us, their size more stunning than I had thought possible; and then we began to walk around.


Much to my surprise, the dioramas were breathtaking, complete works of art which stunned both of us.

The taxidermy was beautiful and incredibly lifelike, thanks to the efforts of Carl Akeley, who developed a technique for insanely detailed and perfectly shaped taxidermy techniques. Mr. Akeley, who grew up on a farm and only had three years of school as a child, learned taxidermy and created the world's first complete museum habitat diorama in 1890. His Wikipedia page is absolutely fascinating - he changed not only how museums display things but affected publice thinking on the collection of specimens and farming and other encroachment on natural habitats.


Akeley's method was to insist his artists visit the field and take careful measurements of each individual specimen, along with plaster casts of each animal's body. They then brought casts, measurements, skeletons, and skins of the animals back to the museum. They then set up the skeletons and built perfect replicas of the musculature of the individual animals out of clay on the animal's own skeleton. Every muscle that should be flexed for the pose, was flexed, and every muscle that should be relaxed was relaxed. They then took multipart plaster casts of this, pulled out the clay and the skeletal remains, and used the mold to make a hollow papier mache form, on which the skins were then laid. It was the first time anyone had tried to replicate individuals rather than going with a generalized model of a typical specimen.


William R. Leigh, master painter in charge of the backgrounds in the African Hall, was hired by Akeley himself, and accompanied Akeley to Africa to do field sketches. He and eighteen other painters painted all the backgrounds in the dioramas in the African Hall, the North American Hall, and most of the other dioramas. They started in the 1920's and worked on through WPA times, crafting dazzling scenes with startling detail and accuracy; many of the North American scenes were taken from national parks, which were, at that point, in their heyday.


The interesting thing about Akeley and most of the other people who participated in the creation of the dioramas is that they saw, as they traveled, the habitats of the animals and the incredible variety and beauty of the places they were trying to represent; and all of them were touched by it. It became the goal of the museum to show the public this beauty, and to represent to them the delicacy and individuality of the habitats, so that the general public would understand the need to preserve these places. They predated nature photography and film, and were, as Stephen Quinn, the Senior Project Manager in the Department of Exhibitions, says, "an early form of virtual reality. Curators, who were concerned about vanishing wilderness and wildlife, were looking for a medium to nurture environmental awareness and raise concerns about wildlife species. The intent was to recreate nature within the artifice of the museum, to recreate that close incounter with wildlife that would move a person to care."


I can hardly see how a person could help but be moved: the care and detail evident in these loving recreations are so evident that we find ourselves caring, just because the creators cared so much themselves. I can't recommend it enough; next time you are in New York for whatever reason, take a couple of hours and check them out. Personally, I want to go back and spend a whole day there.



Links:

The AMNH website's very cool section on the dioramas, how they were made, and who made them, complete with interesting little videos of Stephen Quinn speaking about the exhibits (He is also the author of Windows on Nature, a book on the history and influence of the dioramas).

How the American Museum of Natural History's model of a giant flea was made - Scientific American, 1914

News: Museums as Social Network

I just got an email this morning about a new social networking place called Creative Spaces, which looks like it's going be a really splendid and inspiring. Nine British museums have banded together to create a sort of Facebook/Flickr type of place where you create an account and then build collections of your own from the collections of some of the most famous museums in Britain. You can add comments, network with other people and start groups - and upload your own pictures and videos to your notebooks.

So, in a sense, you can become a virtual curator.

The project is part of the UK's National Museums Online Learning Project:

"The project aims to get partner museum websites better used, engage new audiences and transform the way they think about and use existing digital collections. We are developing a range of innovative and exciting online learning resources across the nine websites for pupils, teachers, and lifelong learners. These resources will provide greater access and usage of the museum partners' online collections, and utilise new technologies to encourage and support user participation."

The NY MOMA has something similar, but it's small and not very well worked out, and you can't add your own stuff. Plus it's just one museum. This one is much more well-thought-out and proves the British are, once and for all, no longer the hidebound Empiricist nation that they once were.

The project is still in serious beta, and it's apparent that a great deal of things are not quite there yet. The Search feature, for example, is not all it should be, and a great deal of the online collections are not quite as accessible as I would like. And I don't see a system for simply browsing as of yet. I do dearly wish the Science Museum were part of the list.

Still, it pleases me. It pleases me that I could have an online place to collect my favorite images, where I can see other people's choices; and I can download from the Mutter Museum, say, and then mingle them with the many things I find here, to share them with other like-minded people. Keep an eye on it, and wait: at some point, it will be less fledgling, and we can all get together and share.

Unready Reading Room

I was looking for images for a project and came across this amazing image drawn by Muirhead Bone, a Scottish artist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a picture of the British Museum Reading Room, under construction. It's a little confusing, because the drawing is listed as being done in 1907, but the Reading Room is listed as being in use since 1897. Go figure.

Just in case you're wondering what it looks like now, here's a recent image:



It's always stunning to me to get a glimpse into how these spaces were built. They appear so sublime - and yet, someone had to work to make them that way. In fact, if you want to humanize it a little, know this: the ceiling surface is a type of papier-mâché.

I'll throw in these other pictures of the British Museum (below) for extra fun. I love looking at old pictures of familiar places.

Getting Small: Toys and Miniatures

People have been fascinated by miniatures for millennia. The ancient Egyptians made miniatures of the things which a dead person should have in the afterlife; the Romans were very fond of lewd little figures for self-apparent reasons. There are endless tiny sculptures of gods and goddesses from the Stone Age through the Bronze age and onward.


There are, of course, mundane examples of miniatures, things that are neither romantic nor religious. I encountereded some when we went to Croatia: moving to another country with children is tricky. What toys do you take? What other supplies? Puzzle books? Journals? (No, this is not going to be a "parenting is wonderful" blog post).

My answer to that is: Playmobil. Plenty of Playmobil.

If you're not familiiar with the stuff, imagine a company that makes sets of what my family calls "little people," about two inches high, with almost any tiny attendant articles you could imagine for what my kids call a "set-up:" A roman colosseum, for example, with lion, tiger, gladiators, weapons, and even an emperor to give the "yea" or "nay". Knights and castles; pirates and pirate ship (including working cannon and cannon balls, guns, swords, and a little island with a skeleton); native americans with tipis and bits of rocky landscape, complete with plants and waterfall. And on and on.


My personal favorites are the Safe-Crackers, who all sport five o'clock shadows and come with a safe, money, gold bars, a suitcase, a flashlight, and a tank of acetylene. Or the HazMat people, with suits and masks and special clean-up vacuums.


In any case, the best thing about Playmobil is that, if your kids are (like mine were) stuck in a foreign place with no friends, they can get really creative with it. In fact, it wasn't until we did go away that I fully appreciated the power of childrens' play and the incredibly flexible possibilities in that kind of miniature universe. Not so much that the HazMat crew can become astronauts, but that the fence-panels can become a tree-platform can become a house can become a raft, with the onion bag from the kitchen as a fishing net. And so on.

But most importantly, they are small. Whole worlds can be created, stories unfolded, and imaginary landscapes enacted. It is better than TV, because it is under your control. The tininess allows you to make things happen, and if you're someone (like a child) who has little say in what happens around them, it is a boon.

One short story which had a great impact on me when I was a kid was Microcosmic God, about a man who creates his own race of tiny, intelligent creatures, whose generational span was very small, and who could therefore evolve fast enough to tackle all kinds of problems and discoveries. He has a way of communicating with them which was a bit like a teletext machine to God. When the government finds out what he's doing, they send bombers to destroy the island, so the scientist asks his little people to protect him: and they do. A smooth, impenetrable wall is erected, bomb-proof and pretty much anything-else-proof, and so there he is, trapped in there forever with his little people.

This story kept coming back to me when my kids, isolated from Croatian children's culture and unable to make any headway at the local parks, would retreat to their room and take up the little people. Voila! Protection, microcosmic-style.


Controllable mannikins aside (where is Mini-me when you need him?), there is something about tiny reproductions of our inner and outer life which continues to fascinate us. Wandering around in Napoli, Italy, on the way back from the wonderful Ospedale delle Bambole, I got lost, and found myself in a district where they sell all kinds of tiny figures and items to do with the creches, or nativity scenes, of which the Neapolitans are so proud.


There were tiny baskets of fruit, tiny wagons, tiny tools, tiny trays full of tiny fish; there were miniature sausages and angels and people burning in hell (what that has to do with nativity scenes, I have no idea). There were political figures (in varying sizes) and teeny-weeny loaves of bread. The creches themselves, I learned, are traditionally made from natural materials: cork bark, wood, and moss, and are prized for their natural-seeming rustic quality.



They were completely absorbing: we looked at tiny things for literally hours. The array was stunning. You could barely walk from one shop and you'd find another shop, with entirely different sets of the same kind of stuff. They even had DIY bambole (dolls):


(Curiously, sprinkled in among them were other strange and tiny things, things that couldn't possibly be related to creches. For example, tiny versions of the red peppers that seem to be symbolic of some very particular Neapolitan magic, whether for good luck, or fertility, or what, I could never tell -


- except I got the sense that it was related to the Comedia del Arte's Pulcinella character - the precursor to Punch - a personality whom the Neapolitans clearly identify with. There was one display which had statues of Pulcinella as well as relatively large models of his mask, with a long nose, and larger (nose-sized) red pepper things - and several rather similar things which were decidedly phallic, leaving me wondering what, exactly, the symbolism of the peppers might be.)


Later, in the Archeological Museum, I came across this mind-boggling miniature Pompeii, the ruins of which lie just across the Bay of Naples. It is a perfect 1:100 scale model and shows the excavation as it was in 1879, complete with some of the paintings before they were worn away.


After I walked around it for awhile I noticed a little info plaque which told me it had been made from cork-bark and bits of wood - just like a creche (and thus, by conjecture, made by local model-makers in the creche tradition). It reminded me of the work of Charles Simmonds, who in the 1970's used to build tiny buildings out of teensy clay bricks into the neglected buildings and odd urban corners of Manhattan. I only know of one which survived, and it's in the stairwell at the Whitney, left over from his show there.


What makes people so obsessed with making tiny scenes? Prisoners building bridges and towers out of toothpicks, boys and their model airplanes. There is a level of control, as I said - one only has to look at the wide world of gaming miniatures and dioramas, famous or fantastic battles modeled on a 1" to 6' scale, to see a desire to manipulate worlds, to be the microcosmic god and step back from the painful intimacy of everyday life (I am ignoring the strategy side of this hobby, but still... actual miniatures are not necessary to the study of strategy - they just make it more fun).

I won't go too far into the idea of actually shrinking real people so that they are miniature versions of themselves, like in the Twilight Zone, where the people discover the sink doesn't work and all the food is made of plaster. But think of the old wives' tale about the witch who put her husband in a bottle. And then, of course, there's the miniature of a real person, containing nail clippings or hair from that person, said to be so powerful in voudun. How satisfying, to reduce your enemy to doll-size and then inflict all manner of misery on them! Of course, there's always the chance that they will do the same to you... and I have to admit to a creeping horror of anything small which might be alive (see my post on puppets and humuncula).

...But miniatures are not only about godlike manipulation. Maquettes, for example, are models built to help explain an architectural or sculptural commission to people who are no good at understanding arm-waving and verbal explanation: "[A maquette] is used to visualize and test shapes and ideas without incurring the cost and effort of producing a full scale product. It is the analogue of the painter's cartoon or sketch." [wiki] By building a scale model, the sculptor or the architect can make a layman "see" what they're getting - and at the end of the day, some maquettes become valuable in their own right, and are displayed by such museums as the Museo dei Bozzetti, in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Similarly, traveling salesmen as far back as the 1700's would carry perfect miniatures of their products so that prospective buyers could examine the merchandise before putting in an order. If you wanted a set of chairs, for example, you would look at the miniature to see how well it was put together. If the miniature was good, chances were that the real thing was good, as well. This was especially handy for such things as iron fireplaces and ceramic fixtures, like toilets, which were carried about the countryside to sell product to far-flung individuals.


In the seventeenth century, at about the same time that Wunderkammern were in vogue, "baby houses" - a precursor to dolls' houses - were all the rage among European women, comparable in obsession to the cabinets which housed their husbands' collections. A woman might spend as much money on one of these "cabinet houses" as a real house would cost. The one above "...was commissioned by Petronella Oortman, a wealthy Amsterdam lady. The house is remarkable in that all of the components are made exactly to scale. Petronella ordered miniature porcelain objects from China and commissioned furniture makers and artists to decorate the interior." (courtesy of the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam).


Then there's Queen Mary's doll house, made on the whim of "...the queen's cousin, Princess Marie Louise, who discussed her idea with one of the top architects of the time, Sir Edwin Lutyens at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1921. Sir Edwin agreed to construct the dollhouse and began preparations. Princess Marie Louise had many connections in the arts and arranged for the top artists and craftsmen of the time to contribute their special abilities to the house. As a result, the dollhouse has an amazing collection of miniature items that actually work... The bathrooms are fully plumbed that includes a flushable toilet and miniature lavatory paper. In addition, well known writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote special books which were written and bound in scale size, and painters provided miniature pictures. Even the bottles in the wine cellar were filled with the appropriate wines and spirits, and the wheels of motor vehicles are properly spoked."


And that, I think, is taking it too far, although my 6-year old daughter (the proponent of Playmobil) might disagree.



Links:

- Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves: this is wonderful and amazing.

- Playmobile as prep for an operation

- Playmobil re-enactments of news items:



- A very interesting, if dense, article about miniatures, childhood, and fetish in the Quay Brothers' Street of Crocodiles.

...And lastly, I came across this extremely creepy video when looking for stuff on the Opedale delle Bambole - look carefully, and shudder

Ospedale Delle Bambole

This place is wonderful. If you are ever in Napoli, I highly recommend you swing by. It's small, and doesn't take much time, but the nearby neighborhoods are pretty great, too. I often find dolls somewhat creepy, but there was something familial about how they were all crowded together.

Some highlights:











These last two were standing on the ledge next to the stairs down to the very dark and interesting looking basement, which was essentially a hole in the floor.

Familial atmosphere aside, I wonder what happens there at night, when it's all locked up, and the lights are off....?