« March 2009 | Main | May 2009 »
"Photographer Keith Loutit has mastered the art of tilt-shift photography– that is, a technique requiring a special camera lens to impart the illusion that what you’re looking at are miniatures, not life-sized human beings. When he locks the camera down and shoots hundreds of successive pics, it becomes a movie.
Mardi Gras from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
A must-watch interview with David Simon, creator of what I think might be the best TV show of the last decade, The Wire. A number of good bits, including the failures of journalism:
I've wondered about that, because I did a lot of journalism. I did a lot of journalism I thought was pretty good. I was very careful as a reporter. And for me, I was trying to explain, for example, as a reporter, I was trying to explain how the drug war... Read More doesn't work. And I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces. And they would go into the ether and be gone. And whatever editorial writer was coming behind me would then write, "Let's get tough on drugs." As if I hadn't said anything. Even my own newspaper. And I would think, "Man, it's just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts." When you somehow tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats....And the manipulation of statistics:
You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.
(via)
Ba dum dum.
1989, National Geographic
Additional photos.
