Category: Sculpture

Books and a telegram

I just posted something at Samizdata about a talk I’ll be doing for Christian Michel this coming Sunday, i.e. January 6th. A rerun of this, basically, but with my thinking somewhat further advanced.

In the course of my homework for this posting, and for the talk itself, I came across these two rather fine images, which nicely illustrate the two history dates loom large in my story, the invention of the printing press …:

… and the invention of the electric telegraph:

I found these images here, and here.

Note how all the books are German. A major impact of printing being nationalism.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Hippo bottle opener

Samizdata Supremo Perry de Havilland likes hippos. A rather disconcerting thing that happens to you from time to time if you are a Samizdata contributor is that if you do a posting, but forget to add categories to it, the default category that gets added automatically is: Hippos.

So, anyway, yes, Perry likes hippos, so a friend of his gave him a hippo for Christmas. It was presented to him at Chateau Samizdata on Christmas Eve, where I was also present.

I photoed it:

Trouble is, the hippo is all black, and my camera didn’t do very well. (The above result reminded me of this Samizdata posting that I did last year, about a very black sort of black.)

I tried lots of photo-editing, but I’m not sure that this was really much of an improvement:

But yes, this really is also a bottle opener. (I’m pretty sure it’s this one.) The friend who got it told me beforehand that it was a bottle opener also. Would Perry really want it, if the bottle opener turned out not to work very well. I said: if it’s a hippo, Perry will want it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

From ridiculous to sublime

Ridiculous:

Octopus shorts. Photoed by me in the Kings Road.

Not so ridiculous and just a little bit sublime:

It’s this shop, in the Fulham Road, a few hours later.

Sublime:

Sublime compared to the Octopus Shorts anyway. If Jeff Koons did that, it would change hands for millions.

Not photoed by me. A friend featured that photo at her Facebook site recently, she having photoed it. My friend says that this unicorn is something to do with fundraising for Great Ormond Street Hospital, despite not being close to that Hospital. More the Gloucester Road area. But even given all that information Google could tell me nothing about it.

I’m guessing that, what with unicorns being very big business, this unicorn, even if it is on the www, is buried under a million other unicorny images and products and general nonsense, which have all paid Google to put them first. Such is the internet. If you aren’t paying, you’re the product.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Exit 60 coathangers

Today I continued with chucking stuff out, including these sixty or so coathangers, which have been accumulating in my clothes cupboard, for no reason other than they seemed like they might one day come in handy. For a sculpture perhaps? But I’m not a sculptor.

I say chucking out. These coathangers are still in my living room. But, they are in a black plastic bin bag and ready to go. So, nearly.

That’s it for here today. But I did manage a posting at Samizdata, after what I suspect may have been my longest gap there since I started in 2002. This posting started out as something for here, but then I thought: no, there. I really want to do more for Samizdata. I know I keep saying that, but I do. Thank goodness for Natalie Solent, who seems to be responsible for well over half the Samizdata output these days. Here’s hoping I can alter that ratio a bit.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Statue with roof clutter

You know how it is. You go hunting, in your voluminous photo-archives, for a favourite recent photo, and damn it, you can’t for the life of you find it. But you find other nice photos, and you stick them up on your blog instead. We’ve all been there.

But today I did the opposite of that. I went looking for some nice photos to stick up here, and discovered a very favourite photo, which I had previously searched for without success.

This photo was photoed outside Westminster Abbey and looking up Victoria Street. You can surely see why I like it.

Number one, it’s a statue. I like statues, because I do, and in particular because they tend not to be mass produced, which means they immediately tell you where you are. You are next to this statue. There it is. You can’t be anywhere else. Knowing where you are is, I think, greatly to be preferred to not knowing where you are. But even worse is when by the nature of the objects around you, you cannot learn where you are, because all the objects in your vicinity can tell you is that you could be anywhere.

And, number two reason why I like this photo is that behind the statue, and with the most prominent bit of it clearly lined up to be directly behind the statue but safely above it, there is roof clutter. Not roof clutter that is uniquely voluminous, but still pretty good. And mistily lit, in such a way that the building upon whose roof the clutter is cluttered does not upstage the statue by rendering it invisible.

The greenery on the right and the building bottom right I am less keen on, but they are, I hope you agree, not too annoying. To the left, there was some somewhat more annoying stuff, which meant that the cropping on the left isn’t ideal. But all-in-all, I like it a lot.

The statue is this one. And the building behind it is called, at any rate by people trying to sell you office space in it, Windsor House. I know it as that quite Big Thing next to the Albert.

This being Friday, is there a Cats or Other Creatures connection? Well, yes: cats. Big cats. Four lions which are to be seen at the bottom of the column upon which the bloke scratching his back with a backscratcher is perched. These lions do not appear in my photo, but there are there, at the bottom of the statue.

Also, the bloke on the top who seems to be scratching his back with a backscratcher is actually St George, and he has a dragon under his feet, which he is getting ready to clobber with a sword.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Chimney pots and blue sky

October 21st of this year was a good photoday for me. There was this, and then this. Now let me show you nine chimney pot photos, taken on that same day:

The first four were photoed in the vicinity of South Kensington tube station. Then I tubed myself to the West End, which is where the rest of these photos were photoed.

I think my favourite is the fifth, or perhaps 3.2, depending on how you prefer your numbering to be done. But I like them all, or I’d not have shown them to you.

The final one, 9 or 3.3, was taken from the inside of the top of Foyles.

I’ve called this “chimney pots” because all these photos have that in common. But there are many other kinds of roof clutter also on show. I rejected including “roof clutter” in the title, because although most chimney pot arrays do indeed become very cluttered, as in randomly varied and chaotic, that cannot be said of photo 4, aka 2.1.

The satellite dish in 1.3, aka 3, looks, to a casual observer, aka me when I first encountered it in the directory (not when I actually photoed I), the moon.

Which I like. And I also like it when there are chimney shadows, as in 1.1 (1), and 5 (2.2). And there are other sorts of shadows in 6 (2.3).

Plus there’s a crane (7 (3.1)). and a pigeon (9 (3.3)). But, not any scaffolding that I can see.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The original Sloane

Yesterday I found myself in Duke of York Square, which is just along the King’s Road from Sloane Square. So, what with the Duke of York being one of Britain’s most under-rated military leaders, at any rate according to this book, I thought that, this might be a statue of the Duke himself.

But a closer look at the plinth told me different:

Wikipedia tells us more about this, the original Sloane, from whom, of course, Sloane Square took its name, and because of whom Sloanes are called Sloanes. Sir Hans Sloane, it seems, was the collector of scientific specimens who first got the British Museum started. Plus, this:

He is credited with creating drinking chocolate.

Blog and learn. Here is a rather more artistic close-up of this same statue:

This statue is a recreation by Simon Smith of a statue carved in 1737 by John Rysbrack. Smith’s new statue was unveiled in 2007:

The original statue, now deteriorated, is housed in the British Museum, with a cast in the Chelsea Physic Garden. The sculptor, Simon Smith, said: “`I wanted the sculpture to show Sir Hans Sloane as a kind man with a sharp intellect and an enquiring mind. An approachable man of principle and logic, who’s morals and philanthropy are still of benefit to us today.”

The light yesterday was very dim, even early in the afternoon. But whereas buildings often respond well to bright sunlight, I find that statue photos are often deranged if sunlight is unimpeded, and better when the light is more spread around and is coming from lots of different directions, as happens under cloud. Less light, but of the right sort, does the job.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Lorry on roof

So, Friday, and something about cats, or dogs, or other creatures. Dogs, as it turns out.

I took the following two photos a month or two ago, when rootling around in East London in the District Line DLR sort of area, where the City of London is busy turning into Docklands. And I am pretty that this first photo was intended, in my mind, to be of the notices in the foreground:

But then I noticed the background. Was that a lorry? On top of a building? For no reason? With no obvious way back down?

Yes it was:

Not an entirely clear photo, and it was also getting dark which didn’t help. But trust me, there was no easy way up, or down, for this vehicle. A lot of trouble was gone to, by someone. But, why?

No, I don’t know either. But sometimes mysteries are the funnest things to photo.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Albert Memorial photos

Today I was at the Royal College of Music, to see GodDaughter 2 performing in an opera. More about that later, maybe, I promise nothing, etc. etc. Meanwhile, I also walked past the Albert Memorial, because some shopping had caused me to come to the RCM from Kensington High Street tube rather than the usual South Kensington tube. The weather was good, so I photoed:

I know that the world already contains a zillion such photos, and that I am accordingly breaking one of my personal photography rules, which is to try to notice, and to photo, things that others mostly don’t notice and don’t photo. But, I do like this extraordinary sculptural edifice, not least because it is so very colourful and so very well looked after, as colourful things out of doors tend to need to be if their colours are to remain as originally intended.

However, although photography is light, there is such a thing as too much light. Here is a photo I took over a decade ago now, in July 2007, of the sculpture cluster on the right of the main body of the Memorial, of a lady sitting on an elephant, known, it seems as the “Asia group”:

Maybe it’s just that the light was coming from a different direction. Or maybe between 2007 and now, this sculpture has been cleaned. Whatever the explanation, you can clearly see on that photo that the lady on the elephant has had a breast implant. Her right breast.

This closer-up photo I took moments later makes this even more clear:

That’s more my style. Not so many billion photos of that on the www, I surmise. But still quite a few. More about all the sculptures at the Albert Memorial here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Sardar Patel goes large

I do like Dezeen. Mostly it’s just Posh Modernism, but every so often it reports on something a lot more interesting.

Like: what is now the world’s tallest statue, four times the size of the Statue of Liberty, recently erected in Gujarat state, India.

This looks for all the world like it’s Photoshopped, but it truly isn’t:

Vallabhbhai Patel (31 October 1875 – 15 December 1950), popularly known as Sardar Patel, was an Indian politician who served as the first Deputy Prime Minister of India. He was an Indian barrister and statesman, a senior leader of the Indian National Congress and a founding father of the Republic of India who played a leading role in the country’s struggle for independence and guided its integration into a united, independent nation. …

Prediction: a Global Big Statue Race.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog