History

August 1942. "Interlochen, Mich. National music camp where 300 or more young people study symphonic music for eight weeks each summer. Girl putting check on board to indicate she is in swimming." Photo by Arthur Siegel. View full size.

Circa 1908. "North End bridge, Springfield, Massachusetts." Points of interest include the signal light on the pole and sign on the bridge. 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.

Villagers installing a water pipe a few weeks ago in the town of Piedra Labrada in the southwestern Mexico near the Guatemalan border unearthed a granite stele depicting a player of the Mesoamerican ball game. The figure is 5’4″ high including the head which archaeologists believe was deliberately severed from the body during a ball game ritual. He’s a bow-legged fellow with his arm crossed over his chest. He is accessorized with a helmet, a yoke around his waist and round stones, possibly the precious greenstones known as chalchihuites, hanging from his ears. The statue was discovered in the north section of the town on the grounds of the biggest ball game pitch, an L-shaped court about 130 feet long. There are five ball courts in Piedra Labrada. Around twenty sculptures of snake heads, shells and anthropomorphic figures were found in three of them, but this is the first sculpture found in the north field and the only one that depicts a ball player. The Mesoamerican ball game was not simply a sport. The basic game fielded two teams who sought to put a rubber ball through a stone circle by bouncing it off their hips, but it was also an immensely important religious ritual with a number of ceremonial functions. Among these rites was a ritual marking the end of a calendar cycle during which sculptures were painted red and then ceremonially “killed” by having their heads struck off. The decapitated statues would then be buried around the court. The age of the stele is hard to pinpoint because Piedra Labrada has not been thoroughly excavated. Since the recent digs began a year and a half ago, archaeologists have been mapping the site. The pre-Hispanic town is 1.24 square miles in area. In addition to the five ball fields, almost 50 medium-sized buildings (10-16 feet high) have been identified as well as public plazas and sculptures. The sculptures that have been found thus far appear to be Mixtec (an indigenous ethnic group who have a documented history going back to 940 A.D.) in design, and their placement in the ancient town is in keeping with Epiclassic characteristics which could turn the clock all the way back to 600 A.D. Given the breadth of these discoveries, the many buildings, the ball courts, the big public squares, and now the unique ball player statue, there’s little doubt that Piedra Labrada was an important Mesoamerican city, a ritual center if not a political and population center. Archaeologists have submitted a proposal to the Archaeology Council of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) for an extensive excavation project that might reveal more information about the ancient city, its dates of use, the people who worshiped there. They’re hoping to unearth ceramics that can be dated and analyzed to determine their origin. If the project is authorized, it will be the first major archaeological exploration in the Costa Chica area of the Guerrero region. Since many of the pre-Hispanic sites in this area are intact, there is a wealth of new information about the Mixtec and other local Mesoamerican groups to be discovered. For now the stele is being kept in the municipal police station, which is probably the safest place. Until someone bribes a cop.

September 1942. "New York. Third Avenue elevated railway at 18th Street." The Shorpy Pub Crawl starts at Flynn's! Medium format negative by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information. View full size.

Another visit to faux New Rochelle: Mary Tyler Moore with Carl Reiner, left, and Jerry Paris on the set of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" in 1963. Photo by Earl Theisen for the article "America's Favorite TV Wife" in Look magazine. View full size.

Global overpopulation has recently returned to the public spotlight with the publication of Inferno, the latest offering from novelist Dan Brown, author of the 2003 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. A mystery thriller on the surface, Inferno is ultimately a piece of demographic fiction. As one reviewer notes, “The specter of a catastrophically overpopulated Earth, its desperate people grasping and ...This post is from GeoCurrents

June 1937. "Street corner. Black River Falls, Wisconsin." Medium format negative by Russell Lee for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.

http://cooper.edu/art/news/prof-sharon-hayes-wins-75k-alpert-award

To study closely a nineteenth-century lithograph or actually touch the impressions of type in the sheets of an eighteenth-century newspaper can be a magical, even transformative, experience. For years I have seen K-12 educators become engrossed and inspired by such activities. However it was only after we conducted a one-day workshop for K-12 educators on [...]

Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring). 1960. Sweden. Directed by Ingmar Bergman These notes accompany screenings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring on May 22, 23, and 24 in Theater 3. Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) had turned 40, and had already directed 20 films (including international hits like Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician), when he made his Oscar-winning Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring). Although he was an established director, there is, for me, a sense of breakthrough in The Virgin Spring. Bergman had worked with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist once before (on the excellent Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night), but with The Virgin Spring they embarked on a quarter-century-long collaboration and mutual dependence with few rivals in film history. As Robin Wood points out in his book-length study of Bergman, one of the great virtues of The Virgin Spring is the credible re-creation of medieval life, largely devoid of the mysticism and magic so dominant in much of Bergman’s work. The film thus makes him more accessible, and much of the credit must go to Nykvist’s ability to capture the textures of the natural world. For once, it seems Bergman is not manipulating his characters to present larger metaphysical truths in his obsession with his personal relationship with God. I don’t pretend to be an authority on Christianity or any other religion, but it seems that, over time, Bergman despaired of faith in a way the great Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer (Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet) did not. Ultimately, Bergman seemed to retreat to a realistic/autobiographical/non-cosmic milieu (as in Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander). Max von Sydow and Gunnel Lindblom are illustrative of another important aspect of Bergman’s career. Great directors (Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir) had historically relied on their own personal stock companies of actors. Von Sydow and Lindblom (today both well into their eighties) were there for him well before The Virgin Spring, and remained for decades. The former, of course, parlayed his Bergman connection into a highly successful international career, including two Oscar nominations and roles as varied as Jesus, Father Merrin (the exorcist in The Exorcist), and Ming the Merciless. Bergman’s reputation in America has undergone a degree of revisionism. By the time of The Virgin Spring he was considered, as Daniel Humphrey puts it in his new book Queer Bergman, “arguably the paradigmatic figure in the history of mid-twentieth-century art cinema.” In big cities and college towns, it was impossible to ignore the pervasiveness of his influence, even though a great many who venerated him were blissfully unaware that serious filmmaking was already a half-century old and that Bergman, himself, was singing the praises of a disreputable cowboy director named John Ford. It would have been impossible to foresee a time when a screening of Wild Strawberries or this film would meet with surprise. I must confess to a certain ambivalent respect for Bergman’s work. His serious films seem perhaps too serious, his comedies perhaps too unfunny; I feel strangely more comfortable with his operatic adaptation of The Magic Flute or the soap opera-ish Scenes from a Marriage. And, frankly, this may result more from my failings, not Ingmar’s. *************************************************** It might be appropriate here, while praising Bergman’s recreation of the medieval world, to take note of the passing of Ray Harryhausen. During his 70-year career, Harryhausen seldom took directorial credit for his films, but he managed like very few others (designer William Cameron Menzies or special effects guru and Harryhausen mentor Willis O’Brien, for example) to place a personal stamp on the work. In the process, he created his own world of the past (both archeological and mythological) and the future.