The Depression Era Photography of Dorothea Lange

A look at the work of Dorothea Lange who captured the Great Depression through her lens and created some of the iconographic images of that era.

At a time when women had had the vote for less than twenty years, Dorothea Lange was a pioneer. A professional woman who took photographs for a living. The Great Depression of the 1930s is best remembered, photographically, by the work of the FSA, for which she worked. She travelled the USA recording the deprivations caused by the failure of the economy as well as taking many uplifting images that showed that, despite the hard times, life and love went on.

It is probably best to start with an image of the photographer herself. Unlike some, Lange did not interpolate herself actively in her photographs – those that we have of her show her usually on her own in very much a framed composition. This shot from 1937 shows her in the field with one of her cameras, rather coquettishly positioned atop of her car. Short dark hair and a feminine yet somehow boyish dress sense, the beauty of this shot lies in the baseball boots she is wearing. Her job was not, after all, one that required heels on any sort so why bow to the fashion dictates of the time?

Haenyo – The Indomitable Diving Grandmas of Jeju Island

The calm of the shoreline is interrupted by a whistling noise. Then, a strange, sleek shape breaks the surface of the Korean Strait, clasping its quarry. Yet there is no need to call David Attenborough just yet – this is no strange new species of seal. In fact, it’s an elderly lady; one of the indomitable diving grandmas of Jeju Island.

Image Credit Flickr User DMac 5D Mark II

Image Credit Flickr User baraka50

They call themselves haenyo (pronounced hen-yuh), which literally means sea women and the whistling sound they made preceding their exit from the depths is called sumbisori. They are representative of a centuries old tradition, one which transformed their island in to a functioning matriarchy but a way of life which today is in danger of disappearing forever.

Mortys

This is an unusual take on Death! Usually Death is portrayed as a man – in fact I cannot think of any example where he has been portrayed as a woman – though I am sure I will shortly stand corrected on that. Yet here she is, Death in all her female glory – plus, it seems that she is also a single mum.  With an IT fixated kid who demands more time than she give the ingredients are all there for something to give. And oh boy, does it give!

Mortys was realised by four students of ESMA Montpellier :
Gaëlle Lebègue, Ness (Aurélien) Ronceray-Peslin, Nicolas Villeneuve and Mathieu Vidal. For a student work it is, I hope you will agree, of an astonishingly high standard.

Two of the students involved, Ness and Nico are now members of Bad Kidow Company, and audiovisual agency. This is a very cool animated short which combines a very clever script with marvellous, state of the art animation.

The Remarkable Rita Levi-Montalcini

April 22 will see the one hundred and third birthday of a remarkable woman. Born in 1909 and the oldest living recipient of a Nobel award, she still works every day and puts her remarkable longevity down to her own discovery – NGF (Nerve Growth Factor). So astonishing is her vitality beyond her centenary year that many have asked the question – does this woman have the secret of eternal life?

Not only that, as a Jewish woman her own life took many dramatic turns in the Europe of Hitler and Mussolini.

It is a life which, if depicted in a movie, would have many people incredulous that the makers would think they could get away with something quite so unbelievable.

Image Credit Flickr User Audrey_Sel

Her discoveries almost never happened. Her father, Adamo Levi, believed in the Victorian idea that women were not meant to go in to the professions and as such forbade his daughters to enroll at university. He relented finally when his daughter was twenty and she graduated with a summa cum laude degree in Medicine and Surgery from Turin University in 1936.

This was the same year as the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics when African-American athlete Jesse Owens thwarted Hitler’s plan to display Aryan superiority to the world. It was a plan in which Levi-Montalcini, as a Jewish-Italian, was later to be caught up. Inspired by the Nazis, the Laws of Race were laid down by Mussolini in 1938. She was effectively barred from her postgraduate academic work in Italy. She worked in Brussels for a time but had to flee Belgium on the eve of the German invasion in 1940.

Returning to Turin, she was forced to conduct her own research and astonishingly managed to build her own research unit in her bedroom. This was where her research in to nerves properly began. Her old tutor from university, Giuseppe Levi, another person in flight from the tidal wave of Nazism flooding Western Europe, joined her shortly after, ironically as her assistant.

Turin was destined to be bombed by Anglo-American forces in 1941 but undeterred, Levi-Montalcini moved to a cottage in the countryside outside of the city and rebuilt her laboratory there – resuming her experiments till the fall of 1943. Her work was interrupted yet again by the German invasion of Italy in 1943 which forced her to flee to Florence. It was there that she lived underground until the end of the war.

When Florence was liberated by the allies she was employed as medical doctor. Assigned to a refugee camp she dealt with the thousands of refugees escaping the still raging war in the north. Levi-Montalcini fought epidemics of disease at this camp, sharing the imminent danger of death from such illnesses as abdominal typhoid with her countless patients.

She resumed her academic position at the University of Turin at the conclusion of the war. Yet like many scientists, the cessation of hostilities in Europe led her to America, to the city of St Louis. The proposal there was a repetition of the experiments she had performed on chick embryos a year earlier.

She accepted the position and the rest is history, both literally and metaphorically. Planning only to stay for the duration of the initial experiments, which was a period of ten months, Levi-Montalcini would remain in the United States until 1977.

In 1986 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for her research in to NGF. Specifically, she studied the amino acids and proteins in cells which enable them to grow. The studies also involved the specialization of these elements of cells. Her vitality today, amazing for a lady of such advanced years, may well be down to NGF.

Every day, Levi-Montalcini, doses herself with eye drops, which is not unusual when people grow older.

However, her eye drops are special. They contain NGF. It emerges that the molecules have a direct impact on brain function. NGF helps neurons to survive for much longer. As neurons in the brain start to be lost during our teenage years, it is thought that the eye drops have helped Doctor Levi-Montalcini to retain her neurons and their related activity much longer than the average person. Present findings indicate that eye NGF application may represent an alternative route to prevent degeneration of NGF-receptive neurons involved in disorders such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons.

Image Credit Wikimedia

As someone who suffered under the far-right regime in Italy in the thirties and forties, if Dr Levi-Montalcini is capable of feeling the joy of revenge (or perhaps schadenfreude) then it came in 2001 when she was made a senator for life in her native country of Italy.

Between 2005 and 2007 (when 98 years old) she played a pivotal role in keeping the center-left government afloat and earned the chagrin of the right-wing opposition.

This time, however, they could not persecute or bomb her.

Doctor Levi-Montalcini, we salute you.


Image Credit - First photograph

The Fantastic Flights of Sophie Blanchard

This is an incredible story which really demands to be told and to reach a wide audience. Until I came across this video a short while ago I had never heard of Sophie Blanchard which is a little strange when you realize what she achieved during her life.Her achievements are extraordinary and why she her story is not taught in schools is, frankly, beyond us!

The first female professional balloonist, she made more than sixty ascents and was famous in her day throughout Europe. She was also, alas, the first woman to die in an aviation accident.  All of this was achieved not, as you might imagine, in the twentieth century but at the beginning of the nineteenth. Blanchard was born in 1778 and died in 1819. Yet although her life was cut short Sophie truly followed her own dreams.

Now, award winning director and animator Jen Sachs wishes to realize her own dream, which is to create and complete a semi animated documentary about Sophie Blanchard. As you can see from the pitch above, some of it has been completed. While this venture has received some grants it is mostly self funded – and this is where you (hopefully!) come in!

A small donation from you will enable Jen to bring additional animators onto the project.  These artists will work alongside her to create animated scenes based on the established style and storyboards and bring the project to completion.  To learn more about how you can help, please go to Jen’s indiegogo pitch.

White + Black = Red

Conflict is something that we see around us every day. Yet if one lesson we learn from the past is that conflict is perhaps inevitable then we can also see that reconciliation is also possible, if not inevitable. The story is about an argument between two opposite characters: one white and one black who, by the end of the film, learn how to respect and love each other.

It’s a simple tale but made in a rather complicated manner! It is entirely stop-motion animated on two female bodies, a pale one and a darker-skinned one. It was created, lovingly and laboriously, by Simone Giampaolo, who is a student at the National Centre for Computer Animation in Bournemouth (UK). Hats off to the extremely patient models, too, Sheela Clericetti and Sophie Hepp.

Tracy Caldwell Dyson in Space

Image Credit Flickr Users Joelinsouthernca

There are some pictures that just grab your attention - and this is one of them. Tracy Caldwell Dyson recently spent six months board the ISS (International Space Station) as a NASA astronaut. A chemist by training, she is a Ph.D and has been working at Nasa in a variety of roles including working with the Russian Federal Space Agency.  She has been up in a shuttle before (Endeavour) back in 2007.

Yet we think it quite likely that this is the picture she will show her grandchildren in the future - it quite simplt stunning.  There recently completed viewing window opens up the earth for Ms Caldwell Dyson and thanks to photography we get to see what she saw (in a way!).  Fantastic.

A Homage to Edwardian Sportswomen

The World of Sport currently features a very cool post about sportswomen at the turn of the last century.  Rather than being the timid and demure creatures we often see depicted in TV dramas about the Edwardian Era, these women had a huge amount of guts - and many of them allowed the (by our standards) primitive cameras of the day to capture them in their sportswear. 

From boxing, wrestling and tennis to soccer and cricket - and many more - these women were engaging in sports which many at the time must have thought the height of unladylike activities. 

Click on the picture to get to the post.

Image Credit Flickr User Powerhouse Museum

Four Women in Space at the Same Time

Today marks the day when more women than ever before are working in space.  

Four women will rendezvous at the International Space Station - the largest ever gathering of women in space.

Today may be just a footnote when people look back in a thousand years but it is possibly the day historians note as the day when gender equality in spaceflight finally became a reality.  

So, who are these women in space making history?  

Take a look at these remarkable women as Mission STS-131 gets properly underway.

Tracey E Caldwell Dyson

Image Credit

Arriving at the International Space Station yesterday on board the Russian Capsule, Tracey E Caldwell Dyson is a chemist by training.  She is a Ph.D and has been working at NASA in a variety of roles including working with the Russian Federal Space Agency.  She has been up in a shuttle before (Endeavour) back in 2007.  

She is California born and – consequently perhaps not unsurprisingly – is the lead singer for an all astronaut rock and roll band, Max Q.  Born in 1969 she was selected by NASA back in 1998.  She has worked closely with the Russians throughout her career – in 1998 she was a Russian Crusader and helped to test and integrate Russian hardware and Software for the International Space Station.  In 2003 she was transferred to the Astronaut Shuttle Operations Branch and hit space in 2007 on the 119th space shuttle flight.  

She is one of the few people on the planet to have celebrated her birthday (number 38 to be exact) in space.  Caldwell just happens to be the first astronaut born after Apollo 11 – which we only hope has brought her – and will continue to do so – lots of luck above the atmosphere.

Stephanie Wilson

Image Credit

Give yourself a slap if you just whispered the word Uhura under your breath.  Stephanie Diana Wilson is the second African American woman to go in to space, flying her first mission on Independence Day 2006 (Mission STS-121 to be exact). Born in 1966 and a native of Boston, she is an engineering scientist – her BSc at Harvard and her Masters at the University of Texas.  

NASA came calling in 1996 and did two years of training, qualifying as a mission specialist.  At first she performed technical duties in the AOSSOB (Astronaut Office Space Station Operations Branch – we knew you would look it up otherwise).  Then it was over to Mission Control as a prime-communicator with on-orbit crews.  This is her third mission in to space, the second being to deliver a connection module to the ISS.  Known as STS-120 she covered the 6.25 million mile round trip in fifteen days.  

Wilson is married but has no children at the moment – a shame if only because then they could say they had the coolest mum on earth – and in space.  This mission’s primary payload is the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module for the ISS, extremely important indeed.

Naoko Yamazaki

Image Credt

Yamazaki does have a daughter, so there is one kid who can look up from their bedroom window this evening and say goodnight to their Mom in space.  Living testimony to how far the American-Japanese relationship has come in fifty years, she is a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut.    

She was born in Matsudo City and graduated from the University of Tokyo with a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering in 1996.  She was selected by JAXA in 1999 and has been an astronaut since 2001.  She has also trained as a flight engineer in Star City, Russia and taken part in the development of the hardware and operation of the Japanese Experiment Module of the ISS.  All this is pretty cool, of course, but there is more.  

In Japan there is an anime TV series known as Rocket Girls – which began airing in 2007.  Produced with JAXA’s assistance, Yamazaki appeared as herself in episode seven.  Well, we say appeared – it’s a cartoon after all, but she voiced herself.  She was born in 1970 which would perhaps make you think that she will be the youngest woman on the mission.  You would be wrong.

Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger

Image Credit

A former schoolteacher, Metcalf-Lindenburger (who is known as ‘Dottie’ as her friends – not the best nickname to have on a space mission, but there you go) is the youngest of the four women in space, being born in 1975.  She is an Educator Mission Specialist – which is possibly the coolest job in the world if you can’t actually be a full on astronaut.  

The job is designed to spur excitement among the youth of today in maths, science and all things spacey and exploratory.  In order to get there she had to go through some serious training – some of which looks like glorious fun.  She has a Bachelor from Whitman College, Washington in Geology which she received in 1997.  She has been with NASA since 2004 where she started out as an Astronaut Candidate.  She completed this in 2006 after shuttle, ISS, physiological, flight, water and wilderness and survival training.  

It’s a wonder she has the energy to go in to space to be frank.  Before assignment on this mission she served as technical support within the Astronaut Office.  Possibly her coolest moment came in July 2009 when she sang the US National Anthem at the Houston Astros V St Louis Cardinals game to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Astronaut Training Image Credit

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Space Shuttle Concept Art of the 1960s and 1970s

The idea of a spacecraft returning from space to a horizontal landing had been around for decades before the first operational space shuttle flight in 1982. A proposal had been submitted to NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s predecessor) in 1954, just eight years after the Second World War. That proposal would ultimately become the X-15 aircraft but classified studies in to the next generation of space transportation systems continued.  Here is a very cool collection of the concept art used in planning what would be the Space Shuttle.