“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
worldhistory.substack.com
“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#2A fascinating tour of 19th C France through the the photographs of one man.
Captivated me much more than reading about the AI-enhanced-startup du jour.
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#3I cannot really explain why, but I feel like each of these photos captures so much more about the respective person than a modern colored photo ever could.
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#4Those who can see but cannot look are condemned to a life of Art (whereas those who can look but cannot see to a life of Science)?
Finally, those who can do both: life of Jobs
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#5> and to slow the predatory opening of Japan that had begun with American warships’ arrival in 1854.
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5LY4Mz15o&t=282s
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#6Those who can see but cannot look are condemned to a life of Art (whereas those who can look but cannot see to a life of Science)? Finally, those who can do both: life of Jobs
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Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#7>The painter naturally visited Nadar’s studio fo a portrait; it captures an artist of fierce intelligence:
As true as it might be in many cases, I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance. A brief meeting is bad enough, but a single photo? It's poetic to think that they tell us more about a person than they do.
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#8I cannot really explain why, but I feel like each of these photos captures so much more about the respective person than a modern colored photo ever could.
Portraits are like long exposure photos where the artist watches a person and captures the right elements at the right moments.
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#9>The painter naturally visited Nadar’s studio fo a portrait; it captures an artist of fierce intelligence: As true as it might be in many cases, I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance. A brief meeting is bad enough, but a single photo? It's poetic to think that they tell us more about a person than they do.
A non-groady interpretation might be that we know Manet was intelligent, and the portrait captured that well; you might not be able to judge food by its photograph, but a photo that makes it look delicious when it actually is delicious has managed to capture the deliciousness.
Personally, I don't find it groady anyway; pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein. I can imagine a species that evolved to conceal the appearance of intelligence, but in humans I think it's more something natural selection would try to broadcast.
Re: “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
#10A related video series showing many places around the world in the 1900s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-UhDuKZ2OQ
There's a lot of really interesting things to see there besides the sites themselves. The obvious one worldwide is that this is before the mass commercialization of clothing + planned obsolescence of such, which seems to have a very negative outcome.
But one thing not so visible that's really interesting to see is how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles or hidden gazes. People were willing to just stare at something or somebody odd. But that sterness is regularly belied by things like a couple of guys in their 40s happily putting on a fake fight in front of the camera, falling on their asses, and just basically playing around like school boys having a great old time - a far rarer site now a days.