Remembering Weegee

The New York Times reported yesterday that on Thursday the Chicago Sun-Times fired all of its photographic staff. Twenty-eight employees. Their crime: not only did they commit photo journalism, they insisted on being paid.

Apparently the scheme is to get their writers to take snapshots for the paper with cheap digital cameras and also get photos from the public.

With the demise of Life and Look magazines and the use of national inserts in newspapers rather than locally produced rotogravure, the public's awareness of photo journalism has itself been in decline.

Photo journalism is a craft. It shows the world to the public and the public to the world. It is not an unskilled profession.

One of the most skilled practitioners, Henri Cartier-Bresson, described the task as that of capturing "the decisive moment." This obviously applies to sports photography, but less obviously to other events as well.

As I pondered the event, I was reminded of Weegee. That was his pen name (or stage name, I don't know), but he was a well known free lance photographer in New York City. His photos, published on this web site, give a feel for what a working photographer could do. He showed us to each other in all our human guises.

He worked, by the way, mostly at night, with a 4x5 press camera and disposable flash bulbs for lighting. Developed and printed the photos himself in a darkroom as the sun rose. Primitive equipment. But it did the job.

There were many other skilled photographers in the genre. Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstadt, the list goes on. Browse the works of Weegee and enjoy.

Rude Awakening

How would you like to be awakened by an airplane landing in your living room?

It happened in Herndon, Virginia. Fortunately, it was a small airplane and no one was killed.

Still and all, pretty unsettling.

Economists And Politics

Today's New York Times tells the story of the political travails of Russian economist Sergei Guriev. Guriev, a prominent Russian economist who frequently advised former President Medvedev, apparently incited suspicions of Russian authorities when he co-authored a report by experts critical of the prosecution of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky.

Khodorkovsky, who acquired great oil wealth after the breakup of the Soviet Union, has been imprisoned since 2005 and is being investigated for further charges. Khodorkovsky apparently made the mistake of directly challenging Putin. He has now joined a long line of Russians and Soviet citizens who ran afoul of authorities, back to the time of Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) and even earlier in Russian history.

In Soviet years, the capture and prosecution of Khodorkovsky would certainly have counted as one of the most significant "show" trials.

Economist Guriev, very well connected in Russian political circles, especially the entourage of Medvedev, may have made an error in judgement by criticizing any aspect of the trial.

The phenomenon of economists getting entangled too closely with politics is not only a problem in Russia. My economics professor in graduate school, George N. Halm, made the error of giving the Nazi regime advice they didn't want to hear right after Hitler came to power. Professor Halm deemed it advisable to flee to the United States, where he became a noted professor of economics.

Guriev has found refuge at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, a university in Paris. As the French say, "plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose."

To paraphrase a thought from Tolstoy, "Authoritarian regimes are all alike; each free country is free in its own way."

War With The Newt

Yesterday Paul Krugman (and friends) debated with Newt Gingrich (and friends) in Toronto. In some respects it sounds like a case of "rounding up the usual suspects." Still, I wish I had seen it live.

Here is Krugman's own report of the event, augmented by comments from some who did watch and even some who attended.

Do We Glorify War?

President George W. Bush often claimed that America "does not glorify war."

Television stations and cable networks across the land spent last weekend proving the opposite.

Memorial Day had its start as "Decoration Day." A day to decorate the graves of those who fell in the American Civil War. The only decorating that goes on these days is when elected officials ceremonially place wreaths on symbolic graves. Our population, for the most part, has no knowledge and understanding of the everyday sacrifices of military families. Even less are they connected with the anguish of the families of deceased soldiers, sailors and airmen.

Decoration Day was a day in which survivors could share their anguish, even as they decorated the graves. This was not a march of triumph.

Armistice Day (as I choose to continue calling November 11th) was a celebration. Not a celebration of victory, but of the end of a conflict that ended the world as Europeans and Americans had known it in 1914.

Each time, we promise never to forget. We have finally learned our lesson.

But our learning process never keeps pace with our forgetting tendencies.

Especially when the sacrifices have been made by someone else.

Germany Beginning To Accept Need For Economic Stimulus

News from Germany is that the German government has decided they have to do something to have an economic stimulus in the periphery of the Euro zone. Spiegel On Line has some details.

Nothing in the report suggests that the program will be big enough to do much good.

It still looks to me like the Euro has been a bad idea, poorly executed. There is not an adequate mechanism to move funds from prosperous to less prosperous areas. The distress in the periphery was not caused by government spending, but by banks. In many cases, German banks.

This is not going to work, but it may drag out for a long time as the European Central Bank tries a series of what will prove to be inadequate measures.

I could be wrong - but I don't think so.

Memorial Day 2013

We attended the Memorial Day ceremony at Bayboro this morning.

It is always a rewarding experience to talk to older veterans. But I have noticed some developments in recent years worth pondering.

The first thing that stands out is the age of attendees. They tend to be older and older each year. As if the whole enterprise of recognizing and remembering veterans has less and less connection to our youth.

In a way, that's not surprising. There was a time when we were all in this together. Seventy years ago, war and rumors of war affected the entire population.

Now fewer and fewer people are involved in the sacrifices and inconveniences of war.

On the one hand, that's a good thing. Fewer casualties.

On the other hand, military service has long since ceased to be a shared experience - a common effort for the good of the nation. There would be benefits in recapturing the idea of common effort for the common good.

Global Water Shortage?

The past couple of weeks, one of the topics at Oriental Town Hall has been budgeting and planning the management of the Town's water system. Last Friday, at one point, Town commissioners gathered around the table redesigning the water treatment plant.

It might be better to turn that task over to experts.

In the meantime, we need to deal with the reality facing mankind: we are running out of potable water and water for irrigation. Here's the bad news.

A little over two centuries ago, economist Robert Malthus examined the problem of constant population growth and limited resources. He is best remembered from pointing out that population grows geometrically, while food production grows arithmetically. In the intervening two centuries, food production has increased at a more rapid rate than Malthus predicted, especially in the 20th Century.

Nevertheless, other factors of production essential to population growth may assume a limiting function.

It looks like water may soon play that role.