Eyes

Recent research indicates that people behave differently when they know they are being watched.  That is true of Ravens as well.  If they know or even think they are being watched when caching food, they either only pretend to cache it or cache it and come back and move it when they are certain they are not being watched.  That’s important since Ravens will steal from one another, sort of like humans.

But not only do we behave differently when we know — or think — we are being watched, we also behave differently if there is a picture of eyes watching.  Some workplaces have coffee machines along with requests that users make a small contribution to help pay for the coffee.  More people contribute if there is a photo of eyes on the wall.  In experiments allowing participants to share benefits with one another or keep them for themselves, more sharing takes place if a photo of eyes is posted in the room where the experiment takes place.  Olivia Judson recently wrote about these experiments and others.

You’re being watched:

Male Models

You seldom see males modeling nude.  Perhaps this is because historically much nude photography has been by heterosexual males who prefer the female form. (With notable exceptions) Or perhaps it is because the lines of the male body aren’t as aesthetically appealing.  Or maybe most males look much like the real model for Michelangelo’s David which you see here.

It’s a cactus. Really.

The artist in this cartoon just violated one of the fundamental rules of artists working with nude models.  I doubt he’ll forget it.  Thanks to William Steig and the New Yorker.

Photographic Film Users

Hiatus Ending

This happens every winter.  The days get short and dark and its too cold to shoot outdoor nudes and so I take a long hiatus from model photography and go back to nothing but landscapes.  And then I promise to spend many of those long winter evenings developing and printing the results of the summer and fall photography.

And I do, sometimes.  What I don’t do is write about photography  until the sap is running in the trees again and the birds come back. Which they have done, so I’ll get back to writing about photography and art and have another go at producing some of it myself.

Happy Solstice!

Later today the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Capricorn 23.5 degrees south of the equator. (Think Australia, Chile, Brazil and South Africa.) Lovely. Tomorrow the days for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere begin to lengthen. Imperceptibly at first. We won’t notice it for several days. “Solstice,” after all, is Latin for “Solstitium” or “sun standing still” which is what the sun appears to do. (We’ve known better ever since the Catholic Church sent Copernicus out to prove that the earth is at the center of the universe. Copernicus flunked the assignment.)

Nonetheless, the days begin to lengthen at 0608 UTC today. Which is actually tomorrow. UTC is the modern term for Greenwich Time (GMT) and it won’t be December 21st anymore in Europe. In fact, it won’t even be December 21st on the east coast of the United States. It will be 1:08AM, December 22. But from the Mountain Time zone west it will still be December 21st. 11:08 MST, 10:08PST and so on. Giving western residents of the United States two full days to celebrate. Plus the full moon is on the 23rd so one could stretch it to three days.

No matter. Where ever you are, Happy Solstice!

The Halloween Dress

Happy Halloween.

The Trumpet in the Orchestra of Evolution

We live beneath a bird highway.  Every year thousands of Sandhill Cranes use the highway to fly back and forth to summer breeding grounds and winter feeding grounds.  They mark the changes of summer to autumn and winter to spring for us.  We use them to keep track of our lives. 

We heard the first cranes of this year’s autumn today and thought of these fine words about cranes from Aldo Leopold:

When we hear his call we hear no mere bird.  We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.  He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.  The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.

Sexual Harassment, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill

[I know this is a blog about photography but I'm going slightly afield today because I am in a state of high dudgeon about Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court and his latest book. We'll get back to photography tomorrow. You can read some of the press coverage here and here.

I see that Clarence Thomas is having another go at Anita Hill. Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a man spurned. According to Thomas – in his new book – she was “a mediocre employee” who had a job in the federal government only because he gave her one. She was “touchy” and overreacted to slights, real and imagined. She wasn’t that “demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” She was “asked to leave” her job as an associate attorney at the Washington law firm where she worked before going to work for the federal government.

In earlier years I made some unsuccessful sexual overtures at women myself – never anything improper mind you – but I’ve always forgave the women for rejecting me. Actually, I never blamed them in the first place. Sexual partners should be a matter of free choice and I was skinny and had a funny looking haircut so their refusals always seemed rational to me. Of course, none of them ever tried to keep me off the Supreme Court. I might be ticked off if they did that. But it hasn’t been a big issue yet; an unbroken chain of presidents from Richard Nixon forward have kept me off the Court without any help at all from innocent bystanders.

Which is what Anita Hill was: An innocent bystander. Clarence Thomas lied his way on to the Supreme Court.

How do I know that? Several reasons actually but they all boil down to one: For the better part of two decades I have represented women in sexual harassment lawsuits and I have heard Clarence Thomas’ excuses, denials and defenses from hundreds of men. There is no originality in any of them. That is one of the guaranteed qualities of a sexual harasser: A complete lack of originality. The ones I’ve met thought of themselves as decent men but most weren’t. They would have been rapists but they lacked the physical courage for that. They were not people you would want to have to dinner. I suppose the worst thing I ever said about one of them in a trial – after catching him in innummerable lies – was when I turned to a jury and said, “Look at him jurors. Do you really think that if you invited him to your house for dinner, he would help with the dishes?” Sexual harassment, like rape, is about power; not sex, and men who think themselves powerful don’t do dishes. Or windows.

Harassers always claim that their victims are “mediocre” employees, hypersensitive to imagined slights, and sexual sluts in disguise out to entrap innocent male supervisors and co-workers. Sometimes those vixens wear low cut blouses to inflame the innocent males or they “mislead” men into thinking that they want their necks rubbed when what they really want is to have their breasts manhandled. The women are never demure or innocent in the eyes of their harassers.

The men we sued were always lying. But don’t take my word for it, take the juries’ words. We’ve never lost a jury verdict and, in all that time, I only refused to represent one woman because I thought she was exaggerating. The juries always believed the evidence and the women. Mostly the women underplayed what happened to them out of a sense of decency.

But the point is: The men all talked and acted just like Clarence Thomas and their stories were improbable on their face and melted in the heat of the evidence. If Anita Hill was such a lousy employee why did Thomas hire her twice? For the hoped-for sex or because she really was a good employee? He loses no matter how he answers that question. If that Washington law firm fired her, why did the partner in charge of her employment make it clear that she was a fine employee and was not asked to leave? If she wasn’t a demure conservative religious woman why did Oral Roberts University hire her as a law professor and why did Liberty University ask her to stay when it bought Oral Roberts University?

The harasser always attacks the woman first. She was, “always coming on to me.” If they see that isn’t working, they degrade her work performance and, when they see that approach failing too, charge her with misunderstanding and overreacting and being “too sensitive.”

I bet if you had Clarence Thomas over for dinner, he wouldn’t help with the dishes either.