The invasion of world-imperiling Iraq has begun with high-tech bangs, and we in the USA worry about our dwindling popularity in the rest of the world. Official opinion holds that this is due to envy of our freedoms. In that case, not to worry. Our government is diligently diminishing those freedoms by peaceful means. However, the job is incomplete. As a commentator has commentated, “It’s not our freedoms that those nudnik foreigners resent, but our policies and what we do.”

Bill Broecker wrote this just to tell me about a book, so it is uncontaminated by thoughts of publication. He writes so well that no editing was needed. By permission, here’s what he said: Lee Dejasu just sent me a book I enjoyed greatly: “Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston”, by Charis Wilson. (1998, North Point Press, div. of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; ISBN 0-86547-539-3 (paperback, 378 pp.). It is a narrative full of interesting bits of information, perceptive comments, and a gently shrewd understanding of people, herself included. Good descriptions/observations of the Weston boys, Ansel, Beaumont and Nancy, David McAlpin, Merle
Armitage, Sheeler, and many others. She undercuts and quietly skewers the errors and apparently willful misinterpretations of Ben Maddow simply by relating what a situation really was, what Weston actually said or did or felt. There is a wonderful extended quote from William Edmondson, the black sculptor Weston photographed in Tennessee while on the 1940 trip to take pictures for “Leaves of Grass”. He talks about how God made him a sculptor before he was born, and wouldn’t let become anything else after he was born. She is honest, and she notices the good stuff. A dairy motto: “You can whip our cream, but you can’t beat our milk!” She is a very good and frequently witty writer. Describing a dinner at board tables in a folk school in the south: “Everyone ate fast while spontaneous-combustion coffee came around in a huge pot.” I haven’t read as satisfying an autobiography in quite a while.

Shoot what you see, not what you think.
—Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Once in every few thousand photo books, a good one comes along that must not be confused with the usual coffee-table stuff I have two areas of doubt. One concerns the English translation, which I can’t always understand. In spite of Sheila Glaser’s Anglo name, she seems unfamiliar with English. Other language puzzles include the title of Borhan’s introduction. What does “The Double of a Life” mean? I have no clue. And there are more. Itâ?Ts not a very serious fault, but this translation needs translation. The other is about assigning Jane Livingston to write photo history. Jane is a nice young woman and a useful mover and shaker in the field of getting photography out to an ignorant public, but in her book, “The New York School”, she demonstrated more talent for making it up out of thin air than for going to sources to find out what really happened. As one of her New York school photographers, I can assure you that no such school existed. The people in her book did not cohere in that way. They couldn’t have. She did a brilliant job of inventing her “history”. Therefore I can only read what she writes about Andre Kertesz in America as nice if it’s true---but is it true? I have reason to doubt, but no way to know. It is a distinct pleasure to report that in spite of having a book designer - typically a sign of disaster - this new book on Kertesz is designed well. No complaints. Its highly competent - and so, extremely rare - graphic designer is credited as “Dominique Merigard/Intensite.” I don’t know whether she works with an agency called Intensite or is herself Intensite. Either way, she’s very good. I hope she gets a lot of work.

There are many good photos here that I haven’t seen before, and I am grateful for that. The biographical parts also tell a great deal that I didn’t know. The photos are reproduced unusually well, and as I have said, the layout, for once, serves the photos instead of (to borrow from Charles Reynolds his description of what designers usually do) cutting them up to make pretty pages. I thank the people who worked on it and the publisher for making it available in spite of the grim odds against publishing worthwhile photo books well. They are almost sure to be remaindered soon after publication, and they seldom bring in much money. I think Bullfinch is worth watching. Few of their photobooks approach the quality of this one, but it is good they exist at all. Thanks, Little, Brown. I must also thank Daedalus for making such books available when remaindered. This one cost me $14.98 plus shipping. Daedalus is at 9645 Gerwig Lane, Columbia MD 21046, and mails out frequent catalogs. Their book code number for Andre Kertesz is 30280, and their order phones are 1 800 395-2665 and 1410 309-2705. On the web, www.salesbooks.com and www.salemusic.com.

more new tech

“Science News” for March 22,2003 has an item cover-blurbed “new lenses for computers.” Its less-accurate heading on p. 200 in the magazine is “Pictures Only a Computer Could Love,” but a better subhead adds, “New lenses create distorted images for digital enhancement.” The article, well worth looking up, is by Peter Weiss, SN’s physics/technology. Thinking outside traditional optics, two inventive researchers, Edward Dowski and Thomas Cathey, came up with a defocusing lens that produces an unsharp image containing all the information needed to make a sharp image with much greater depth of field than that of a conventional lens. A computer program converts the resulting blurred image to the desired sharp one. Carl Zeiss and Olympus are using this new concept for various industrial and medical applications. The article says that there is a price to pay for the increase in depth of field in the form of random errors or noise, not described, which, I conjecture, may limit or delay its use in cameras for ordinary picture-taking, an application not discussed in the article. That is the somewhat vague bad news. The potentially good news includes some unheard-of new possibilities. Among these are lightweight space telescopes with large tolerances for imperfect construction. (Remember the Hubble fiasco? Among the contractors for various high-precision parts, some used “US customary” measurements (inches, feet, ells, vests, acres, cloth yards, grains, pints, ounces, troy ounces, fluid ounces, flounces, hands, furlongs, chintzes, cubits, rods, chains, quimps, poods, gallons, bushels, pecks, carats, leagues, broccolis, et al) with the numbers they were given, and others with more sense used metric ones, with the result that vital parts didn’t fit or anyway didn’t work. This was pure staggering stupidity. It has long been high time we all used metric for everything all the time, whether it frightens the can-do American public or not. At least Coca-Cola has begun to bottle in liters. So now, everybody, finish the job. Get it over with so we can start to know what we're doing. Rant ends.) Other possibilities include many-lensed high-definition cameras no thicker than a credit card-and on and on. No doubt all this will trickle down into useful, inexpensive consumer products before too many centuries crawl past. The possibilities seem great, and the sooner, the better. Still, I think, don’t hold your breath while waiting. A most interesting three-part illustration is on the article's first page. It shows three color photos of the same array of what look like Crayola tips. The top one is a conventional photo focused sharply on the fourth row of crayons, with crayons at greater and lesser distances from the lens going progressively out of focus and into unsharpness. The middle part is a defocused picture from the new technology in which all the crayons are equally unsharp regardless of distance from the lens. The bottom one is a computer-interpreted image derived from the all-unsharp middle one. In this bottom picture all the crayons are sharp, regardless of distance. It’s an impressive demonstration unless it is a complete fake, which seems most unlikely. “Science News” is consistently well informed and intelligent.

Here is the question: What, if anything, is it worth? If you had committed this folly, how much would you charge for a copy? I’ll do no promotion, so that will cost nothing, but don’t forget the time and cash that go into packing and mailing. I don’t know how much to charge for this book. That’s why I ask Thanks in advance for your answer.

(Please let David know: David Vestal, PO Box 309, Bethlehem CT 06751-0309)