Artificial Incongruence

 

 

 

Deepfake before deepfake was cool.

 

 

 

 

Photo Finish (Not of This Moon Edition)

 

Earthrise, 1968

 The most influential environmental photograph ever taken.

--Galen Rowell, wilderness photographer

We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing was that we discovered the Earth.

--William Anders

Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders job on Christmas Eve, 1968 was to snap pictures of the lunar surface in preparation for the first manned landing sometime the next year, when he noticed this:

Black-and-white film was cheaper and more commonplace in the 1960s, which is why the first picture of the Earth taken in lunar orbit is monochromatic. However, a few rolls of color film were on board in case of a special occasion. Anders figured this was a special enough occasion and beckoned his fellow astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell:

Anders: Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.  

Borman: (joking) Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled.                                                                    

Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?                            

Lovell: Oh, man, that's great!

And that's how the famous color photo at the top of this post came to be, though Anders, Lowell, and Borman would have seen it from this angle:

 

       

Anders, 90, died yesterday when the plane he was piloting alone plunged into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state.                 

Lovell, Anders, and Borman

Near and Dear

 

Truman Capote (the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's), Audrey Hepburn (who starred in the film version of Capote's novel), and Mel Ferrer (Audrey's then-husband.) Where are they? In a photo booth! The rich and famous seemed to delight in them just as much as the proletariat. The first viable photo booths emerged in the 1920s, but it was really the introduction of Polaroid, i.e., instantly developed film, in the 1940s that these combination vending machines-kiosks took off. You could find them in arcades, amusement parks, train stations, bus stations, airports, and eventually shopping malls. Remember this was before cell phones, and thus before selfies. If you or a couple of your friends wanted on the spur of the moment to get your picture taken and didn't want to bug some stranger to hold the camera, you just ducked into one of these inexpensive little booths. One drawback, at least back in the 1950s when Truman, Audrey, and Mel flashed their smiles for the lens, was the background was always the same. No getting your photo snapped in front of the Statue of Liberty. It wouldn't have fit in the booth!

Photo Finish (Repatriation Redux Edition)

 

 

As has been observed and commented upon often, those who fought in Vietnam, unlike their World War II counterparts, returned to civilian life with very little fanfare, which can happen when the enemy forgoes an unconditional (or any kind of) surrender. Yet there was a notable exception to this lack of enthusiasm: Operation Homecoming, the 1973 Paris Peace Accords-negotiated return of 591 prisoners-of-war that began on February 12 and ended about two months later. Whether it was because of so many men in uniform coming back to the U.S. in such a relatively short amount of time (unlike non-POW servicemen, whose return from 'Nam was spread out over several years), or because it was a more agreed-upon hellish experience that better fit the requirements of a pro-America morality tale (unlike, say, My Lai); the POWs' repatriation was a major media event, best exemplified by the above Pulitzer Prize-winning picture, titled Burst of Joy, snapped by Associated Press photographer Slava "Sal" Veder on March 17, 1973 at Travis Air Force Base in Salano County, California. 

On the left is USAF Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Stirm, whose plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, upon which he was taken prisoner and not released until three days before this picture was taken. Running toward him with arms stretched is Stirm's 15-year-old daughter Lorrie. I haven't been able to track down ages of his other children but suffice to say I think they're all minors and were even more so minors when their father was shot down. That's son Bo Stirm (Robert L Stirm Jr) right behind Lorrie; daughter Cindy, wife Loretta (soon-to-be Stirm's ex as the absence failed to make her heart grow fonder), and lastly son Roger. Upon winning his Pulitzer, Veder made sure that everyone depicted received a copy of the photo.

Speaking of dollar gains, it's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but is it worth a thousand $$$$$$$? We now go to that bastion of capitalism, PBS, for an answer to that question: 

Watching that, I get the distinct impression Lorrie Stirm Kitching never had any attention of selling either the photo or her father's POW mementos. She just wanted to share with us some of that picture's thousand words.

Smart Art (Remains of the Day Edition)

 

Summer Days, 1936

I know we're well into autumn now, but artist Georgia O'Keeffe was born on this day in 1887, and that's as good excuse as any for me to show you the above painting, one of several she did featuring an animal's skull, in this case one that's floating above a New Mexico landscape. O'Keeffe was already a well-regarded painter living in Manhattan when she went to New Mexico on vacation in 1929. She must have liked what she saw of the state, because she kept returning again and again, on longer and longer vacations, eventually moving there permanently in 1949. By the time she died in 1986 at the age of 98, probably no prominent figure was more prominently associated with the southwestern United States, save Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. However, whereas the coyote can survive everything from falling off a cliff to getting run over with a semi to having a stick of dynamite blow up in his face, O'Keeffe's subjects are... 

Horse with Pink Rose, 1931

...much less permeable. Such as this unfortunate equine whose demise may have resulted from nothing more than natural non-ACME causes.

So just what was it with O'Keeffe and animal skulls anyway? Might as well ask what it was with Monet and water lilies, Hockney and swimming pools, Warhol and consumer products, or Lucien Freud and out-of-shape naked people. Some artists are just inspired, and if they do their jobs well, we buy into their inspirations, when we otherwise may not have given the matter much thought (or looked the other way.)  As for where O'Keeffe found her inspiration, i.e., all those skulls, well, I'm told they can be found here and there in the desert, though she didn't necessary paint them in the desert. As the below photograph by hubby Alfred Stieglitz will attest, O'Keeffe sometimes...

...brought her work home with her.

Haunts of the Very Strapped

 

Following a recent showing of Barbie, a fellow moviegoer ventured the opinion that what we had just watched was an "art film." I felt it necessary to point out that a major Hollywood studio, in this case Warner Bros., isn't likely to shell out a reported $145 million dollars on anything that's not an arguably guaranteed crowd-pleaser, and an art film is rarely that. Nevertheless, Barbie's plot, a good deal of which takes place in a land where dolls come to life, necessitated loads of abstract imagery which may have made the whole thing accidentally avant-garde. And I wonder if that could work in reverse. An ambitious--in terms of story--science-fiction saga with a lower-than-Death Valley budget, could in the end resemble an art film, albeit unintentionally. Which brings us to 1957's Plan 9 from Outer Space. Yes, there are those who say it's the worse movie ever made, but the film's slapdash, flea market dreamlike imagery has always held my attention, an 80-minute workout that prevents the eyeball muscles from atrophying. The above photo, culled from a movie memorabilia auction site, is a behind-the-scenes portrait of some of the characters, and we can all agree that they were characters, involved in the making of Plan 9. The good-looking, dapper young prole crouched in the foreground is not Johnny Depp, but the film's producer, director, and writer Edward D. Wood Jr. Moving clockwise from Wood we have Swedish professional wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson, who plays a zombie under the control of disdainful space aliens; local LA horror movie TV hostess and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark precursor Vampira (Maila Nurmi) as another zombie; the movie's narrator, the Amazing Criswell, a local LA television psychic; and just above Wood, cinematographer William C. Thompson, who had begun his career in 1914 and lived long enough to witness the advent of the drive-in movie. Conspicuously missing, mainly because for some reason he seems to have been cut out of the picture, is Bele Lugosi, who according to the photograph's ballpoint penned copy should be standing to the left of Wood. Plan 9 from Outer Space was Lugosi's last movie (in fact, he died in the middle of filming and was replaced by a younger, taller man holding a cape over his face!)  Also missing, conspicuously so only because it seems rather odd that someone would have had it deliberately removed, is some nondescript prop, maybe a pile of nondescript props, situated between Vampira and Criswell. The imagination reels! I suppose there's some enterprising digital wizard out there who could make this photo once again complete, but I'd advise against it. Incompleteness was crucial to Ed Wood's art. It's what made him, however unintentional, avant-garde.  

Nice try, Eddie, but it's not nearly as scary as the 118th Congress. 

Photo Finish (Everyday People Edition)

 

Then we saw the blanket--“Oh my lord, that’s us!”

--Nick Ercoline, unaware for an entire year until the album came out that photographer Burk Uzzle had snapped a picture of him and his girlfriend--later his wife--Bobbi at some point during the famous 1969 three-day music festival. Bobbi Ercoline, 73, died last week after a year-long illness. 

Vital Viewing (If You Can't Beat the Paparazzi, Join 'Em Edition)

 

1927-2023

First off, I have to give a shout-out to Mistress Maddie because that's the blog I clicked on at 3:15 in the morning and found out of the passing of Italian actor (I was told the other night that the term "actress" is now passé) Gina Lollobrigida. Gina was a photographer as well as an actre--actor. She talks about her second career in this clip from the 1980s:

Gina mentioned Yul Brynner so let's show a film the two of them made together, 1959's Solomon and Sheba. A toupee-wearing Yul plays the former, and Gina the latter:

As Bob Dylan sang, everybody must get stoned.

    

 

Photo Finish (Street Musicians Edition)

 

I'm sure a good many of you can identify the above photo. Obviously, it's the famous cover of the Beatles 1969 album Abbey Road, the last they ever recorded as a quartet (though not the last released; Let It Be, recorded earlier, made its debut in 1970, and, of course, there's been dozens of anthology albums, including a boxed set titled Anthology.) But look at the cover closely. Nowhere does it say the name of the album or the name of the band that made the album. How do you know it's the Beatles? Weren't you paying attention? Because it's FAMOUS, that's why! Even if you were paying attention, do you know how this cover came to be? I'm here to tell you.

Let's start with Abbey Road itself. Just so happens to be the location of EMI Studios in London. The idea of naming the album but not naming the album after the thoroughfare came from John Kosh, a man not connected to EMI but the Beatles themselves through what was originally intended as a tax shelter by their recently deceased manager Brian Epstein, the now-famous (if never all that particularly productive) Apple Records, itself a division of the larger tax shelter, Apple Corps. LTD. Kosh was Apple's creative director, but he didn't take the photo. That was a man by the name of Iain Macmillan, pictured above. Ironically, given the mood of reconciliation that surrounded the recording of the new album, Macmillan entered the Beatles world through a connection that in the very near future would come to be seen, perhaps unfairly, as the main cause of the iconic music group's eventual breakup: Yoko Ono. In 1966, Yoko had commissioned Macmillan to photograph an exhibition of her art at London's counterculture Indica Gallery. Paul McCartney was a friend of the gallery's owners, did his best to promote the gallery, and encouraged John Lennon to pay a visit, which he did just as it was showing the aforementioned exhibition by the young Japanese avant-garde artist. Little did McCartney know that John and Yoko would hit it off. If he had known, he probably would not...Hmm, this post was meant to be about Abbey Road's cover art, and now it's veering into something else. Let me get back to my original intent. Yoko eventually introduced Lennon to Macmillan, and the two of them also hit it off, if not in quite the same way. Three years later, Lennon asked Macmillan to photograph the album cover.

On August 8, 1969 at about 11:30 am, Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr arrived at EMI records and took their walk across the street. There were actually six walks across the street, as nobody was quite sure what they wanted, while Macmillan sat on top a ten-foot stepladder with his camera, a policeman directing traffic behind him. Since there's some squinting involved, I'll do my best to describe them. Clockwise, the first photo has John, followed, left to right, by Ringo, Paul (in sandals), and George. The second photo has John, followed, right to left, by Ringo, Paul (in sandals), and George. The third photo is John, followed again left to right, by Ringo, Paul (barefoot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and George. There's some traffic buildup (HONK! HONK! "%#@^&*+%# longhaired freaks! Don't they know it's almost lunch time?!") If you know the physics of repeatedly crossing the street, then you'll have by now figured out that photo number four is right to left, led by John, same order. Paul's sandals are back on. Most of the traffic is now gone, though one of those London double-decker buses has stuck around to watch. Photo number five, again left to right, this time in formation, rather than everyone walking whatever the hell way they please. Paul has a cigarette dangling from his hand (I do hope a hot ash doesn't fall on his once-again bare foot.) The sixth and final photo is one last right to left, the double-decker bus now headed in the opposite direction.

It had been Paul's idea that they should all cross the street, so he got to be the one to choose which of the six photos to use. As you saw, he chose, going clockwise, photo number five. It was a fateful decision. Partly because quite a few people took it to be a fatal decision, as Paul's bare feet was taken as a sign that he had died! I've never understood this. If was Paul was laying collapsed on the road all green and bloated with bits of bone poking through decomposing flesh, then, yeah, I could see where an intelligent person might conclude he had died. But bare feet? Since when is that alone a sign of rigor mortis? Am I now to assume all those people I see on the beach this time of year are zombies? If the Abbey Road cover wasn't enough, the back cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album of two years earlier retroactively was added to the Paul-is-dead rumor since his head is turned away as John, George, and Ringo face forward. Then there are those who think the whole thing was a publicity stunt, that McCartney just wanted people to think he was dead to sell more albums, as if that was ever much of a problem for the Beatles. Such a stunt, which I don't think it was, would have been doomed to fail. From sometime early in 1964 to the present day there's always been paparazzi waiting to snap a picture of Paul, thereby proving his continued existence. It's not like he's Andy Kaufman.

 

Aside from Paul McCartney's bare feet, there are a few other details about the cover I'd like to point out. Since the photo was taken in a public place, some members of the public inevitably ended up in the photo, such as those three little dudes just above Paul's head. Of course, that's all a matter of perspective. The three were in fact normal-sized and standing some distance away from Paul. They're Alan Flanagan, Steve Millwood, and Derek Seagrove, three interior decorators out on a lunch break. Across the street, not quite as far away but far enough, a man appears to be to the left (but in fact is to the right) of John Lennon's head. That's 57-year-old American tourist Paul Cole. Bored with museums at that point, he told his wife to go in one alone while he wandered about outside, and that wandering led him to the photo shoot. Now, it's not just people who ended up in this picture, but, as you might expect since it is a roadway, automobiles as well. In particular, a Volkswagen Beetle parked not too far from where George Harrison takes his stroll. I don't think you can quite make it out in the pictures I provide here, but had you had the album in your hand--remember, it's a vinyl LP--the license plate is clearly marked LMW 281F. Clear enough to be seen that the plate was repeatedly stolen from the car after the album was released. Oh, well, at least the hubcaps were left untouched. 

Finally, I said at the beginning of this post that the cover says neither the name of the band nor the name of the album. Well, it doesn't say those things on the front cover. Flip it over and the information is readily available. After John, Ringo, Paul, and George were finished with their multiple road crossings, Iain Macmillan set about looking for a street sign. He found one on an old wall. The Beatles name was cleverly superimposed at a later date (a crack on the wall runs through the S), but I understand that it really did say Abbey Road. However, if you happen to be in London, don't go looking for it, as the wall has since been demolished. But it was there for Macmillan's purposes. He stood in front of that wall, made sure his camera was loaded and snapped the picture, only to look up and find...

...somebody had gotten in the way! This is said to have pissed off Macmillan greatly, and he went on to take another picture, but, as you can see, the botched photo ended up being used anyway. Probably someone at EMI or Apple figured that if a photo shoot must be disrupted, there are worse disruptions than a young woman in a minidress. Her identity remains unknown.

The Photoeccentric Effect

 

When I was in grade school, the standard comeback would have been, "No thanks, I use toilet paper." Of course, you really shouldn't say that to one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century. But then, why is one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century sticking his tongue out in the first place? Well, you first have to look at the...

...bigger picture.

It's March 14, 1951, Albert Einstein's 72nd birthday. Princeton University's Institute of Advanced Study, his place of employment for the past 18 years, had thrown a party for him. Also in attendance were two friends of Einstein's, Frank Aydelotte, a former director of the institute, and his wife Marie. Once the party had wound down, the three of them walked out of the institute to a waiting limousine, followed all the way by a group of reporters and photographers, the reporters asking Einstein (but not the Aydelottes) for quotes for the next day's editions, the photographers asking him (but not the Aydelottes) to just stop and smile for the cameras. But, you know, before we go any further, maybe we should look at the reason why these reporter and photographers were so interested in Einstein (but not the Aydelottes) in the first place.

 

Albert Einstein had been a celebrity, a household name, ever since a 1919 solar eclipse had shown the stars to be in a different place in the sky than they had been hours earlier, thereby proving Einstein's theory of a few years before that starlight doesn't travel in a straight line, that there's no such thing as a straight line in the larger, gravitational scheme of things, that outer space is less like the Great Plains, where you can have your car (or starship) set on cruise control for days on end, and more like San Francisco, with streets that go up and down, the lights in the sky, not just the stars but also comets, meteors, and natural satellites, all just runaway cable cars, relatively speaking. Now you may be wondering if this has something to do with Einstein's famous equation  E = mc². While one begat the other, they're really two different theories, though both with the word "relativity" in their names (probably to emphasize the begetting.) E stands for energy, = stands for equals, m stands for mass, and c² stands for the speed of light squared. Basically energy and mass are two sides of the same electrodynamic coin, and the speed of light squared is a calculation on just how much potential energy can be derived from a particular object. Say somebody rubs two sticks together at 186,282 miles per second. The resulting flame would be visible from low Earth orbit. Fortunately for anybody in the vicinity, not least the person holding the sticks, nobody can move their arms that fast. However, a person can rub the sticks just fast enough for some of the wood to whittle away and cause a spark to appear: mass converted into energy (of course, people were rubbing sticks together to start fires some one hundred thousand years before Einstein came up with his equation, but they didn't know the science behind it, and instead paid homage to the god of camping.) Einstein coined the term E = mc²  in 1912 (though the theory itself preceded it by seven years.) While it was well-known among physicists, the phrase didn't become part of the layman's vernacular until 1946 when Time magazine put the equation on its cover along with an illustration of Einstein himself and a fungus-shaped cloud. This was a bit unfair to Einstein as he wasn't anywhere near Los Alamos in the 1940s (some of his left-leaning political statements had cost him a security clearance), but it certainly contributed to his fame. And maybe to his notoriety as many readers of Time were left wondering if American citizenship had been granted six years earlier to a mad scientist.

 Getting back to his 72nd birthday, that notoriety wasn't about to stop that group of reporters and  photographers waiting outside the Institute of Advanced Study, much to Einstein's annoyance. As I said before, they followed him and the Ayedollets all the way out to the car. One photographer, Arthur Sasse of the United Press wire service, was particularly persistent. And insistent. "Professor, smile for your birthday picture!" he shouted out after a by-now weary Einstein and the Ayedollets had climbed into the back seat but had not yet closed the door. Instead of smiling, the scientist stuck out his tongue, and Sasse instinctively snapped the picture. Then the door closed, and the limo drove off into the New Jersey night.

The photo almost didn't get published. As Sasse himself remembered, "The assignment editor liked it but the chief editor didn't. So they had a conference with the big chiefs upstairs. The picture got okayed and we used it." United Press, today United Press International, has fallen on hard times in recent years and is now owned by Moonies, but back in 1951 it was a pretty big deal, the second-largest American wire service behind the Associated Press. That meant Einstein and his tongue appeared in a lot of papers. The response was uniformly positive. This scientist wasn't mad, just madcap! Surprisingly, given the moment of pique that had produced the picture, Einstein himself approved. A German-born Jew who took flight once he got wind that the Nazis had him in their crosshairs, he seemed to accept, and at times even encouraged, his adopted country's latter-day view of him as a dotty but lovable academic, America's cuddly genius. And this was one of the times he encouraged, requesting and receiving from United Press nine copies of the photo, which he turned into greeting cards that he sent to friends, sometimes with a caption that said the picture summed up his political views. Just another way he was ahead of his time.

 

The media of the day chalked it up as just another one of his "eccentricities", along with riding a bike, wearing sweatshirts in his off-hours, and hanging around ice cream parlors with a cone in hand. Of course, those aren't eccentricities at all but commonplace character traits. Even sticking out a tongue is something we've all either done or felt like doing (perhaps Sasse should feel grateful that he didn't get the finger.) I suspect the press and public seized upon those traits because it was an easier way of relating to Einstein than what were, for the layman at least, his true eccentricities: theories that said the universe was one big putt-putt course; that you can lose a few pounds outrunning a beam from a flashlight; that if a passenger in a rickshaw looks at his watch and a passenger on the Earth-to-Alpha Centauri Express looks at her watch, both watches are going to tell a different time even if both passengers are looking at their watches at the same time which they can't do anyway because there's no such thing as the same time; that the speed of light is the only thing you can count on in this Universe because everything else including time, distance, and solid objects are open to interpretation; and that all of reality is made up of itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny tinderboxes that, once opened, can wipe out entire population centers.

Albert Einstein died in 1955. A Princeton Hospital pathologist named Thomas Harvey who had done the autopsy decided the great scientist's brain was too important to waste, so, without telling anybody,  took it home with him. Einstein's heirs eventually found out about the theft, but after hearing Harvey out and becoming convinced that his motives were scientific and not monetary (which seems to have been the case) cut some sort of deal with him. Harvey died in 2007. His heirs donated the sliced and diced remains of the brain, along with many photographs of it intact, to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington D.C.

As for Einstein's tongue, I'm afraid that was cremated along with the rest of his body, though, in a sense...

 

...it has achieved its own kind of immortality.

Photo Finish (Shivering for Your Art Edition)

 In order to obtain pictures by means of the hand camera it is well to choose your subject, regardless of figures, and carefully study the lines and lighting. After having determined upon these watch the passing figures and await the moment in which everything is in balance; that is, satisfies your eye. This often means hours of patient waiting. My picture, ‘Fifth Avenue, Winter,’ is the result of a three hours’ stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22d, 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired picture.

--Alfred Stieglitz

 

Clearly Clemens

 67-year old Mark Twain in front of his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, and just to show you how commonplace photography had finally become by 1902 when this picture was taken...

 ...here's a photo (probably a snapshot from an early Kodak) of the photographer getting ready to take the photo!

 Whichever way you look at it, Twain attracted a crowd that day. By then he was one of the most famous people on the planet.

 The house is still in existence, though 109 years after Twain's death, it can be a little difficult discerning...

 ...truth from fiction.

Motion pictures were anything but commonplace in the first decade of the 20th century, but a year before he died, when he was 74, Twain managed to appear in one anyway:

 As for what Twain sounded like, I'm afraid I can't help you there. He was a silent film star only.

Photo Finish

I'm debuting a new, recurring feature, folks. Hope you like it.

Hollywood, 1953


I was originally going to label this photograph "The Golden Age of Hollywood", but that would have been a bit misleading, for in 1953, that Golden Age was threatened with imminent extinction. Five years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled the major studios to be in violation of federal antitrust laws, and they were soon forced to sell their theater chains, thus depriving them of a reliable source of income. Trustbusting is usually a good thing, and probably would have been all right in this instance, except that it came at the worst possible time for the studios. The advent of television meant that a moving image was no longer something you had to pay to see in a theater, but one that could now be viewed scot free in the comfort of your own home. People increasingly did, depriving the studios of further income.

Despite all this turmoil, the man in the center of the photo, Humphrey Bogart, was doing all right. Still a major star, he had recently finished work on The Caine Mutiny , where he played the ball-busting, and ball-twiddling, Captain Queeg. His last great iconic performance, he would soon be nominated for an Oscar, though he would lose to the man who, a few years earlier, had lost to him, Marlon Brando. Could Bogart have stayed a major star all the way into the 1960s? We'll never know. See that cigarette in his hand? Kind of fits his tough guy image, huh? In three years he'd be dead of throat cancer.

Let's move on to Bogart's missus, the woman on the left, Lauren Bacall. Now nearing 90, she's often seen as one of the last living links to that Golden Age. After a strong start, however, her movie career basically sputtered. The strong start being the two movies she made with her future husband, To Have or Have Not and The Big Sleep. Though the inexperienced young thespian was more posing than acting in these films (she had started out as a model, after all) the camera nevertheless loved her, and she became a huge star before she really had a chance to hone her craft. A little later she also appeared with Bogie in Key Largo, another big hit. Then the sputtering began. She reportedly began turning down scripts she found of little interest, and the studios then started losing interest in her. Oh, there were a few critically acclaimed films like Young Man With a Horn, and she was on the verge of another big hit, How to Marry a Millionaire, when this photo was taken, at that movie's very premiere, in fact. However, the devil was in the credits. Though she arguably played the main character, she was billed third behind the other two stars, the first billed of whom is to the right of Bogart. Now, none of this is a reflection on Bacall's acting, which greatly improved as her film career declined, and would improve further still when, a few years after her husband's death, she moved back to New York and became a mainstay of the Broadway stage.

Finally, we come to the woman on the right, Marilyn Monroe. Of the three pictured, the 1950s belonged mostly to her. Like Bacall, she had been a model. But whereas Bacall had appeared on the cover of Vogue, Monroe's modeling had been limited to the kinds of pictures you might find posted in an army barracks. Turns out this was just what the movies needed. The studios battled the onslaught of television in many ways--Technicolor, CinemaScope, 3D--before finally settling on sex. True, they couldn't show all that much more than on TV, as the onerous production code was still in effect. Nevertheless, you sure the hell weren't going to see Lucy Ricardo standing over a subway grate while a passing train blows up her skirt. I happen to think Monroe was much more than her considerable sex appeal, but the Hollywood brass didn't necessarily feel that way. Fortunately, she did. Once she was a big enough star, bigger than Bacall had been, she began feeling her oats and started demanding more challenging roles. And got them, for with the rise of the talent agency, the iron-clad studio contract had quickly become a thing of the past.

And so, though this photo at first glance may be evocative of a more romantic, more glamorous era, what you're actually looking at is a Hollywood in transition. Not that transition is unique to Hollywood. Ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age, most places in most times have been in some state of transition or other. Arguably, a lot of great things have come out of that Industrial Age. The electric light. The telephone. The automobile. The personal computer. Near the top of the list I would put the development of photography. It allows us to occasionally take a break from transition and marvel at what has transpired.