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What Virginia Woolf's writing table has to do with Darwin's countryside cottage and Freud's final couch.
Annie Leibovitz is one of today's most prolific and celebrated photographers, her lens having captured generations of cultural icons with equal parts admiration and humanity. Unlike her other volumes, her latest book, out today, features no celebrities, no luminaries, no models. Instead, Pilgrimage is Leibovitz's thoughtful meditation on how she can sustain her creativity in the face of adversity and make the most of her remaining time on Earth. The quest took her to such fascinating locales and pockets of cultural history as Charles Darwin's cottage in the English countryside, Virginia Woolf's writing table, Ralph Waldo Emerson's home, Ansel Adams's darkroom, Emily Dickinson's only surviving dress, and Freud's final couch.
The kernel of the idea came before Leibovitz's partner, the great Susan Sontag, died – the two of them had planned to do a book of places that were important to them, which they meticulously compiled in lists. Years after Sontag's death, upon visiting Niagara Falls with her three young kids, Leibovitz decided to start her own list and do the book on her own.
From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal. It taught me to see again." ~ Annie Leibovitz
The darkroom in Ansel Adams's home in Carmel, California, now owned by Adams’s son, Michael, and his wife, Jeanne, friends of Leibovitz
The Niagara Falls in Ontario
Annie Oakley’s heart target from a private collection in Los Angeles, California
Emily Dickinson's only surviving dress at the Amherst Historical Society in Amherst, Massachusetts
A glass negative of a multiple-lens portrait of Lincoln made on Feb. 9, 1864, by Anthony Berger at the Brady Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Sigmund Freud's couch in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London
Virginia Woolf’s bedroom in her country home, which is a few miles from Charleston, England
A door in the adobe patio wall of Georgia O’Keefe’s home in Abiquiu, New Mexico
Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance warehouse in Yonkers, New York
Dominique Browning paid Leibovitz a visit to chat about the book and has a lovely piece about it in the Times.
I needed to save myself. I needed to remind myself of what I like to do, what I can do." ~ Annie Leibovitz
An intimate catalog of cultural meta-iconography, Pilgrimage is as much a photographic feat of Leibovitz's characteristically epic proportion as it is a timeless cultural treasure chest full of mementos from the hotbed of 20th-century thought.
Life is about the people you meet and the things you create with them."
My friends at Holstee have just released a beautiful short film that marries two of my great loves: bikes and creative restlessness. This cinematic take on their famous Holstee Manifesto, one of these 5 favorite manifestos for the creative life, is an exquisite piece of visual poetry, bound to give you goosebumps and leave you itching to get up and do – or make – something great. Enjoy:
And, lest we forget, the original Holstee Manifesto itself:
The manifesto is now available as a gorgeous 18x24" poster printed on 100% recycled post-consumer paper, locally made with hydro-electric power and benefiting Kiva, as well as a letterpress card printed on handmade acid-free paper derived from 50% elephant poo and 50% recycled paper. Yep, elephant poo.
What disdain and devotion have to do with the dawn of photography, evolution, and Lewis Carroll.
In 1872, some thirteen years after The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first scientific texts to use photographic illustrations. Though the work itself was hardly groundbreaking – it was based on the research of French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, who ten years prior used electrodes to explore the human face as a map of inner states and published Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (The Mechanisms of Human Physiognomy) – Darwin's book is regarded not only as his main contribution to psychology, but also as a pivotal turning point in the history of book illustration, right up there with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
(More than a century later, psychologist Paul Ekman used Darwin and Duchenne's research as the basis for his Facial Actions Coding System, or FACS – a codified approach to reading human emotion based on facial micro-expressions – on which I happened to do a decent portion of my undergraduate work and which went on to aid everyone from the CIA to animators. You may also recall the subject from our recent look at the science of smiles.)
Darwin's contribution to many fields of science, from evolution to geology to botany, are well-known – but it turns out he was also a seminal figure in the history of visual culture. In Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, photography curator Phillip Prodger tells the remarkable story of Darwin shaped not only the course of science but also forever changed how images are seen and made.
Prodger traces Darwin's tireless quest to capture human emotion at its most visually expressive – not an easy task in an age when photography was both slow and painfully awkward. After scouring countless galleries, bookstores, and photographic studios, Darwin finally found the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander, a titan of creative history in his own right, and recruited him to capture the emotional expressions Darwin intended to study.
A page of photographs by Oscar Rejlander from the Darwin Archive, 1871-1872. Albumen prints.
Infants: Suffering and Weeping. Heliotype print.
At first, photographs were judged in exactly the same way as prints and drawings. The same standards that applied to them – plausibility, authority, skill, and convincingness – applied equally to photographs. But photographic technology improved rapidly… It took approximately fifty years, but during the latter half of the 1800s photography moved into territory traditional drawing and printmaking could not. Once it became capable of taking pictures faster than what the naked eye could see, it began to affect measures of scientific integrity." ~ Phillip Prodger
Joy, High Spirits, Love, Tender Feelings, and Devotion. Heliotype print.
Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, and Despair. Heliotype print..
Indignation and Helplessness. Heliotype print.
But what's perhaps most interesting is Darwin's remarkable cross-disciplinary curiosity, a quality I believe is the key to combinatorial creativity. Though he never studied art formally, he had an active interest in art, read art history books, visited art museums, and mingled with the artists on his HMS Beagle voyage. Eventually, the sensibilities of art seeped into his work. Prodger takes a closer look at many of Darwin's curated friendships – Lewis Carroll, iconic photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, celebrated animal painters Joseph Wolf and Briton Riviere, sculptor Thomas Woolner, and many more.
Disdain, Contempt, and Disgust. Heliotype print.
Hatred and Anger. Heliotype print.
Surprise and Astonishment, Fear and Horror. Heliotype print.
Photographic illustration was an inexact process. Because there were no present rules for using photographs in books, Darwin attempted to create them. Working at a time when printmaking still dominated scientific illustration, he internalized prevailing notions about authority and authenticity in picture making. In this regard, he was a transitional figure, with one foot firmly in the past – lessons learned from the books he knew and admired – and one foot in the future, with the enormous potential he recognized in photography." ~ Phillip Prodger
Researchers at The Darwin Project, an ambitious initiative to digitize Darwin's legacy and a fine addition to these 7 important digital humanities projects, are currently crowdsourcing Darwin's experiment on emotions by asking you to name which core emotion each of Darwin's images conveyed. The experiment features 11 images and can be completed in under a minute – give it a try.
Rigorously researched and eloquently narrated, Darwin's Camera is an essential missing link in the evolution of visual culture at the intersection of history, psychology, and art.
