humanity

“Where We Find Ourselves” – The Lost and Found Photography of Hugh Mangum

Image | | Paul Greer

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“The sitters who moved in and out of Hugh Mangum’s view between 1897 and 1922 smiled, laughed, and daydreamed; they threw their arms around or leaned upon one another; they wore their best dresses and fanciest hats, or they wore coarse cloth and stood barefoot. In an era of racial terror, as Jim Crow tightened its grip on the South, Mangum set up makeshift studios across North Carolina and Virginia (sometimes just a tent outside of town) that were open to white and black sitters alike. A gangly white man with an appealingly unkempt mustache, Mangum often used a Penny Picture camera, designed to capture up to thirty exposures on a single glass plate. Sitters would line up and take their places in front of the camera; Mangum would charm and cajole them, shifting the plate a little bit for each new exposure. The result, inadvertent but still provocative, is a record of how much daily life and experience was shared by the people whom racist American custom and law treated as separate.”

— Sarah Blackwood

 

Earliest known drawing found on rock in South African cave

Link | | Paul Greer
Researchers believe the pattern on the fragment of rock is 73,000 years old, but are perplexed as to what it might represent

“Archaeologists found the marked stone fragment as they sifted through spear points and other material excavated at Blombos cave in South Africa. It has taken seven years of tests to conclude that a human made the lines with an ochre crayon 73,000 years ago.

“The simple red marks adorn a flake the size of two thumbnails which appears to have broken off a grindstone cobble used to turn lumps of ochre into paint powder. The lines end so abruptly at the fragment’s edges that researchers believe the cross-hatches were originally part of a larger design drawn on the cobble.

“This is first known drawing in human history,” said Francesco d’Errico, a researcher on the team at the University of Bordeaux. “What does it mean? I don’t know. What I do know is that what can look very abstract to us could mean something to the people in the traditional society who produced it.”

— guardian

‘one of the few English books written for grown-up people’

Quote | | Paul Greer

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

– Middlemarch