Break: Disruption

Disruption is a series of digital images produced by a camera subjected to abrupt motion during exposure. The title describes the process of their creation, as well as their concern with the tension between the motion of the world and stillness of photography. The latter presumes to isolate an infinitesimal unit of time, yet is itself a continuum.

The camera was focused on a particular element—in one case a face,  in another an architectural intersection. It was then accelerated rapidly alone one or more axes using a variety of mechanisms, such as levers and pulleys, in the window of time during which the image was captured.

By Jake Seaton ’17

Disruption I

From the Archives: Navel-Gazing

The winter issue of the one hundred and twenty-seventh volume of the Harvard Advocate features six artworks, all of them photographs. The last of the six, printed on the last page, rises upward out of the magazine, monumental in form and content.

Horizonless Landscapes of Yellowstone

Study I [Yellowstone Canyon Walls, Sommer]

Mammoth II

 

Photographs by Isaac Dayno ’15

Moonshine: Culvert

By Isaac Dayno ’15

Cabinet

• In the TLS: How Muriel Spark revitalized the creator of Frankenstein.
• Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs, will be released tomorrow. Look forward to reading it!
  
• A conversation with Robert Silvers, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year.
• An amazing view of dawn by Yu Yamauchi. Find more pictures from Mount Fuji here.

Posted by Kevin Hong ’15

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

Cabinet

 

• The second installment of Daniel Bosch’s brilliant dialogues, on George Kalogeris’ Dialogos.
• Check out Joanna Walsh’s drawings of writers (among them, Clarice Lispector and Joan Didion) alongside their thoughts on portraiture.
• Artist Yang Yongliang adapts traditional Chinese painting to depict the industrial landscape.
• Vivian Maier has exploded into the photography world, and a documentary is forthcoming. Find the trailer here.

Posted by Kevin Hong ’15

Cabinet

In this weekly feature, we provide a curated selection of writing, events, and curiosities from around the Internet.

• Read Daniel Bosch’s fresh and funny review — in play form! — of Frederick Seidel’s poems.
• Slate revisits last year’s best photography exhibitions.
• For whenever you have an hour to spare: Beulah & the Hundred Birds is a simple and elegant game.
• I’m pretty obsessed with 50 Watts’s incredible collection of book illustrations, posters, and advertisements.
• Callooh! Callay! Here’s an essay by Zadie Smith on “joy.”