Study I [Yellowstone Canyon Walls, Sommer]
Mammoth II
Photographs by Isaac Dayno ’15
Horizonless Landscapes of Yellowstone
Category Archives: Photo
Moonshine: Culvert
By Isaac Dayno ’15
Antique and Medieval Southern France
Picture This: Photographic Media in the Harvard Advocate
The history of photography in the Harvard Advocate is an ongoing and rich one, a confrontation of the enduring question: How does the image find its place in a literary magazine? To commemorate the launch of The Harvard Advocate’s Winter 2013 issue, “Origin,” we have traced the emergence and changing role of the image in the Advocate and the ways in which the photographic image has been read on the page.
Although photography had emerged in print in the early twentieth century, photographs only first began to appear in the magazine during the fifties and sixties as illustrative content and as advertisements. A portrait of T.S. Eliot was included in the centennial issue, used as a visual reference to one of the Advocate’s most esteemed alumni. All of these examples speak to the then secondary, supplementary nature of visual media to the magazine.
Origin is Here
The Harvard Advocate is proud to announce the launch of its winter issue, Origin. Below, photographer Finbarr O’Reilly tells the story of Origin‘s cover photo. Origin launches today; you can subscribe at www.theharvardadvocate.com. Learn more about O’Reilly’s photography at www.finbarr-oreilly.com.
From 2,000 feet above the flats of Senegal’s Sine Saloum peninsula along Africa’s West coast, shallow circular holes scooped from the earth by salt miners resemble craters punched into a lunar landscape. Brackish water seeps into the troughs from the surrounding ocean and, tinted by bacteria, mirrors the midday sun in pools of red, yellow, blue and green — a jumbled planetary Damien Hirst spot painting.
My vantage point is from an Ultralight “plane,” which is more like a bicycle with floppy canvas wings and a propeller on the nose. There are no doors, just a motorbike-style windscreen and the noisy rush of air shaking the frame of this flimsy sky machine.
From this height, tiny stick figures can just be made out, bent laboring at their tasks beside the swimming pool-sized holes. Smaller white mounds of salt dry under a blinding sun that burns black skin even blacker. From up here, I can’t see the sweat on the brows of the workers – mostly women, some with babies strapped to their backs – nor the cracked skin of hands and feet rubbed raw by millions of tiny, jagged crystals. The corrosive power of the salt eats through metal pans used to scoop the saline water, turning them first to rust, then flakes, then dust.
The women down there gather salt by hand into 110-pound sacks, which sell for about $2 or are traded for sugar with neighboring Gambia, where salt is mainly used to preserve fish in areas without electricity. Trade is informal and vendors elude corrupt tax and customs officials by slipping through the maze of mangrove swamps along the liquid border, exchanging goods between wooden canoes in the hidden shallows.
The scale of my aerial view dwarfs such toil on the salt flats leading out to sea, a view interrupted only by clusters of ragged palm trees that shade thatched village huts dotting the coastline. Out there, the sea, too, reflects the sun, glinting hard and white over a vast, rippling emptiness. But far below my feet, in those murky pools, color glows from the earth. And people scratch a living from it.
By Finbarr O’Reilly
Origin: Keoni Correa
In anticipation of the Advocate’s upcoming winter issue, Origin, we present a week’s worth of supplemental material to the magazine. Keoni Correa’s photograph, Arc, is featured in Origin, which will launch on Saturday, March 2. Here he describes Arc‘s creative process. Subscribe to the magazine to see the final version.
This piece resulted from an assignment to make a collage. I was interested in finding a way to combine newspaper cutouts into one pictorial space, and the idea of using a liquid suddenly occurred to me. So I borrowed a dining hall tray and started taking photos while pouring liquids into it and moving the cutouts around.
Harbor: English Summer
The Mount, a lichen-like stone promontory. Not a promontory to be exact, but not an island either. When the tide is out, a fleshy mudland connects the Mount to the shore, and a delicate concrete thoroughfare rises, complete with besmirched scales. Continue reading
Envoy: Morocco
By Molly Dektar ’12
The Harvard Advocate Blog 