Camera In Hand Research Articles

Navigating Arm Robot Motion with Vision via Image Processing

The integration of vision-based technology in daily life has been perceived in recent years. The wide range of robot implementations, including agriculture, necessitates the installation of the eye to fully function and substitute the human eye. Camera and image processing work hand in hand in realizing the idea of automatic labor in daily life. This paper presents an arm robot navigated by image processing inputs from objects' coordinate positions. The robot is assigned to pick and place red tomatoes within different lighting and positions. The robot can sort the red tomatoes and ignore the green tomatoes. Inverse kinematics analysis is included to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. This robot is ideal for agricultural settings to sort the harvested fruit.

Hand Dominance Is Not of Significance in Performing Fundamental Arthroscopic Skills Simulation Training Tasks

To compare the performance of the dominant and nondominant hand during fundamental arthroscopic simulator training. Surgical trainees who participated in a 2-day simulator training course between 2021 and 2023 were classified, according to their arthroscopic experience in beginners and competents. Only right-handed individuals with complete data sets were included in the study. Ambidexterity was trained using a box trainer (Fundamentals of Arthroscopic Surgery Training, Virtamed AG, Schlieren, Switzerland).Two tasks, periscoping for learning camera guidance and triangulation for additional instrument handling, were performed 4 times with the camera in the dominant hand and then in the nondominant hand. For each task, exercise time, camera path length, and instrument path length were recorded and analyzed. Out of 94 participants 74 right-handed individuals (22 females, 52 males) were classified to novices (n= 43, less than 10 independently performed arthroscopies) and competents (n= 31, more than 10 independently performed arthroscopies). Competents performed significantly better than novices. No significant difference was found after changing the guiding hand for the camera from the dominant to the nondominant hand regarding the camera path length and the instrument path length. Notably, tasks were performed even faster when using the camera in the nondominant hand. Our data demonstrate that the learned manual skills during basic arthroscopic training are quickly transferred to the contralateral side. In consequence, additional fundamental skills training for camera guidance and instrument handling of the nondominant hand are not necessary. For skillful arthroscopy, camera guidance and instrument handing must be equally mastered with both hands. It is important to understand how hand dominance may affect learning during arthroscopic simulator training.

Rendezvous

The pandemic returned me to photography. It heightened my awareness of movement. In common with many others, during lockdown, I took to walking, increasingly, in my case, with camera in hand. When lockdown lifted, it was Paris that I was drawn to. In a city such as Paris, one of the consequences of the pandemic was a re-enchantment of public spaces. If the lockdown prevented indoor encounters, the public park became a scene of meeting. A sharing of light and shadow. no longer not yet is a response to my encounter with the chairs as I walked in the parks: empty, clustered together in pairs and groups, abandoned at random or carefully arranged, they came to seem like the ghostly traces of a series of meetings that I was either too late or too early to witness. These chairs marked the dehiscence of the present moment; the no longer and the not yet. Who sat here? Who will sit here? Why? What desires filled the empty spaces? The chair is both open and indifferent to such questions, even as they in turn become the prompt to a desire for narratives that might give form to these hauntological meetings. Between documentation and imagination. The photographs and text here are mine, although there are traces of the voices of others, just as there are traces of meeting. The photograph shadows forth that which is no longer there. It produces ghosts, even if they cannot be seen or heard within the frame. The clusterings of words and images gathering here are part of a sequence continuing.

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's <i>Gardiennes d'images</i>

Camera in Hand: A Variety of Uses in the Trade Union Struggle

Ce travail entend apporter des pistes de réflexion afin de nourrir les travaux sur la construction iconographique des mobilisations collectives. Il s’agira plus particulièrement de retracer la pluralité d’usages des images lors de la grève des éboueurs·euses lyonnais·ses en avril 2019 soutenue par l’Union syndicale Solidaires (USS). Cet outil de représentation du conflit est investi par les grévistes et par les soutiens faisant ainsi des réseaux sociaux un espace de mobilisation en soi. L’image produite devient également un contrepoint médiatique essentiel pour rendre visibles les revendications des grévistes. De même, l’image va se déplacer dans les tribunaux lors de la judiciarisation du conflit par l’employeur pour appuyer les arguments de part et d’autre des parties. Pour finir, les militants s’approprient des images tournées pendant la mobilisation pour faire un documentaire et des supports de formation dans l’objectif de développer le syndicalisme porté par les militants de l’USS.

We Are All Digital Now: Digital Photography and the Reshaping of Historical Practice

Visiting a reading room in the last five years is a very different experience than what it looked like even fifteen years ago: while a few researchers carefully read archival documents in situ, most are crouched over their archival documents with a smartphone or digital camera in hand, taking thousands of photos that will be analyzed upon return to their home institutions. With the advent of digital photography and less-restrictive archival policies on digital reproduction for personal use, historical research is now characterized by quick trips to gather thousands of photos. What does this mean for the research and writing of history, however? How do researchers create their corpuses and on what information? What work takes place before the archival visit, after the archival visit, and how can we better support this sort of work? Drawing on a 2019 survey of 253 historians employed at Canadian universities, this article argues that through specific reference to the use of digital archival photography, we can see the varied ways in which historical work is being adapted to these new and emerging technological circumstances.

Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome by Shawn Levy (review)

Reviewed by: Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome by Shawn Levy Shannon Scott Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome Shawn Levy New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016, 424 pages, $27.95 (softcover) Levy's Dolce Vita reads like a well-researched and well-written tabloid. Fittingly, it begins with a photographer, Tazio Secchiaroli, or Il Mitragliatrice Umana ("The Human Machine Gun"), as he trolls the streets of trendy Via Veneto in Rome camera in hand, searching for movie stars in compromising positions. He finds the regulars: exiled Egyptian King Farouk gorging himself in a cafe, Ava Gardner clubbing with her new co-star and lover, Tony Franciosa, and Swedish actress Anita Ekberg and husband, Anthony Steel, who becomes so provoked by shutterbug Secchiaroli that he drunkenly charges at him. A typical night for paparazzi in 1950s Rome. Levy follows this prologue with more sobering historical background on postwar Italy, including the implementation of the Marshall Plan, which was meant to alleviate the rampant poverty and shortages throughout a country whose infrastructure had suffered significant damage and whose populace spent 95% of its income on subsistence food (3). In time, Hollywood, too, would become an important factor in Italy's economic recovery. Levy then transitions to the history of Cinecittà ("Movie City") on the outskirts of Rome, an industry which had been previously supported by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was a fan of film for both entertainment and propaganda purposes. Cinecittà was founded in 1937, and the number of films produced there increased each year until the Nazis took it over, using it "for a logistical headquarters, a storage facility, and, when they were forced to flee, a rummage sale at which everything was free" (64). But Italian cinema, and Cinecittà itself, would rise again. Levy tracks this resurrection first through filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, who illustrated the effects of the war on Italy in films like Roma: Città Aperta (Rome: Open City) (1945). Levy examines several of Rossellini's neo-realist films (a designation Rossellini did not accept) before shifting from his work to his private life, which coincided with the rise of the Roman paparazzi. These tawdry intervals of movie star gossip and celebrity culture become guilty pleasures in a text that often veers like a Vespa away from history and film to anecdotes about scandals like the one that eventually led to the marriage of Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini. In addition to Rossellini, Levy follows the careers of several Italian filmmakers: for example, Vittorio De Sica, specifically Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (1948), which received Oscar recognition, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni from Le Amiche in 1953 and Il Grido in 1955 to his Divorzio all'Italiana (Divorce Italian Style in 1961), which became one of Antonioni's crossover successes in America. The most substantial section in Levy's text is devoted to Federico Fellini. Again, he offers highly entertaining biographical information and stories, but also some substantial analysis of Fellini's films, not simply their conception, funding, and filming—or even the scandals surrounding the stars Fellini chose to work with—but the films themselves. He examines Fellini's visual and thematic aesthetic in La Strada (The Road) (1954) in detail, and then places it into the context of other groundbreaking filmmakers of the time, such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. Levy's description of the performance of Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, as Gelsomina is poignant and sensitive, standing in stark contrast to the crude accounts of the insatiable paparazzi. Yet the paparazzi, and their forays into the seedy nightlife of Rome, become essential to one of Fellini's most famous films—one that Levy has selected for his own title.. In 1958, Pierluigi Praturlon captured Anita Ekberg on camera soaking her sore feet in the Trevi Fountain in Rome after a long night of dancing. This would be one of the [End Page 78] more harmless run-ins the paparazzi would have with Ekberg, one occasion caught amazingly in a photo featured in this text, when Ekberg herself came out...

VEN-3DVE: vision based egocentric navigation for 3D virtual environments

Navigation is moving inside a virtual environment to reach to a desired object or location. This paper presents a new egocentric navigation technique for exploring a virtual scene by tracking the 3DOF moves of index finger along x, y and z axis. With image processing at backend, the finger’s position in 2D image frame is traced dynamically to travel inside the designed frontend 3D scene. Mimicking a camera in hand, the system can also support Panning. Dynamic mapping is performed to interactively follow the trajectory of index finger. For either of the interactions, movement of index finger controls orientation and position of virtual camera. Linking the libraries of OpenCV and OpenGL, the technique is implemented in a visual studio project navigation by index tracing (NBIT). With NBIT, parallel processing is performed for backend index tracking and front-end rendering of virtual scene. The system was evaluated by fourteen participants for a total of 336 trails whereas applicability of the approach in virtual reality based computer aided design was assessed by five professional designers. Un-biased statistical evaluation of the system reveals that the approach suits well for interactive virtual and augmented reality applications.

The Sparrow by Asher Svidensky

In December, 2015, I visited a town called Nalaikh in Mongolia. Nalaikh was built as a coal mining town during the communist regime in Mongolia and served as the main supplier of coal to the capital Ulaanbaatar. As time passed, many Mongolians moved into Nalaikh, finding work in the massive coal mining factory, but Nalaikh's prosperity came to an abrupt end in the early 1990s when the communist regime ended, the factory ceased all of its activities, and the town fell into darkness. In the years that followed, as a last resort to provide for their families, some residents of Nalaikh decided to dig their own holes in the ground and illegally mine the precious coal themselves. In Nalaikh, I met a young miner who we decided to codename The Sparrow to protect his identity. After I told him about my photo project he agreed to take me underground and introduce me to the world of the illegal mines. Later, I found myself squeezing into a rusty metal bathtub connected with a cable to an old engine that lowered the tub down in complete darkness through a roughly carved tunnel. The Sparrow and his colleagues had to dig deep in order to reach the thick layer of quality coal. With a camera in hand I crawled after him through a system of tunnels, barely big enough for a grown person to sit, lit only by a series of mostly blinking lightbulbs and the headlights that were connected to the miners' helmets. Work went on around the clock; teams excavated the coal in rotations; some miners used hammers to break the coal out of the walls and others loaded it into the metal bathtub that we had used to get down into the mine. Once the metal bathtub was full, the miners would drag it to the entrance, pull it up to the surface and add the coal to a pile outside, waiting for someone to buy it. None of the miners I met had any safety equipment. The air that they breathed was dusty and dirty and the atmosphere in the mine was oppressive. These terrible conditions put the men at increased risk of a range of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The image on the cover is The Sparrow as he worked a shift on the surface, painstakingly sorting good coal from bad coal before it was sold. Asher Svidensky is a freelance photographer who specialises in art and documentary images. His career began when he was conscripted to the Israeli military in 2009, where he served as a photographer. After completing his military service, he picked up a bag and a camera, and followed his dream to become a documentary photographer. Asher Svidensky is a freelance photographer who specialises in art and documentary images. His career began when he was conscripted to the Israeli military in 2009, where he served as a photographer. After completing his military service, he picked up a bag and a camera, and followed his dream to become a documentary photographer.

Images of Images: Notes on Anne Collier’s and Kotama Bouabane’s photo practices

Photography, since its very beginning, has been self-reflexive, with photos and cameras themselves becoming subject matter for further forays into imagemaking. Recent works by Anne Collier (b. Los Angeles, lives in New York) and Kotama Bouabane (b. Pakse, Laos; lives in Toronto) recall this history while making visible the ways in which culture and gender are appropriated and commodified within photography. particular, Collier and Bouabane make visual inquiries into the dissemination ubiquitous photographic instruments marketing, production, and ultimately consumerism. Through the construction, circulation, and recontextualization photographic advertisements and manuals, both artists challenge the ways in which we see and consume various media. Although they have very different approaches to image production, both photographers address subjects germane to the world photography while simultaneously questioning cliches and tropes within that sphere. (1) Collier's series Woman With A Camera (2006-present) depicts, as the title suggests, photographic ephemera in which various women are positioned with an assortment lens-based apparatuses. Woman With Cameras #1 and #2 (both 2012) introduces a headless, sprawling female nude whose anatomy is peppered by Contax, Olympus, Pentax, and Bronica cameras. Her body stretches over a full magazine spread and is truncated by the fold the spine with the foregrounded cameras intimately hovering over her reclining figure. This kind tropic depiction reappears in Zoom, 1978 (printed 2009), which likewise features a headless, lounging female clothed in nothing more than thigh-high stockings and gold high heels. Here, however, the female subject is bionic, as a large camera is propped on top her neck. With one hand she adjusts her Cyclops-like oculus and with the other she seems at the ready to release the shutter, as if to say she is recording us as much as we are visually consuming her. The same exchange between subject and viewer is rendered by Woman With A Camera (Postcard. Verso Recto) (2013). A mostly nude female adorned by an assortment shell and beaded jewelry leans slightly to the right as she points her camera at something or someone out the viewer's sightline. Coillier has paired the National Geographic-like postcard image with an image its blank recto. Written across the barrier that demarcates the typical postcard spaces used for addresses and messages is the caption A. Real Photograph. The postcard also tells us that this image, tided Say Cheese before I click. (Turkana Girl), is from the Edition East Africa, 1312. Rather than doctoring, cropping, or altering these images, Collier simply re-documents readily available materials. Shot against stark, white backgrounds, the magazines, postcards, advertisements, and other objects that appear in the Woman With A Camera series are shown as is. This directness should not be confused with neutrality. In these and others their type, Collier has mined a rich vein irony in which women's bodies and phallic cameras become intertwined in a misogynist system that is as consistent as it is extensive. (2) While several works in the series might challenge the cliche passive female subjects as consumable objects, these images still seem to depict deeper photographic tensions. Woman with a Camera (diptych) (2006), for instance. pictures publicity stills from the 1978 thriller Eyes Laura Mars (directed by Irvin Kershner), in which a fashion photographer, played by Fave Dunaway, develops the ability to see through the eyes a killer, through the lens her camera. Despite this bizarre affliction, Dunaway, pictured with her Nikon camera in hand, could be seen, as curator Michael Darling has noted, as an image of female empowerment and agency or perhaps some kind reversal the male gaze. (3) Celebrities reappear elsewhere in Collier's series. Woman with A Camera (The Last Sitting, Bert Stern) (2009) documents a photograph Marilyn Monroe, also posed with her Nikon camera in hand, in what would be her last photo shoot. …

Articulations of Motion

&lt;p class="body_text"&gt;Andri Tambunan is a photojournalist based in Indonesia whose photographic essays work as catalysts for social change. In Tambunan’s words, “Beyond the act of recording, my aim as a photographer is to tell a story that voices the truth, evokes empathy, and ultimately moves people into action. Having a camera in my hand gives me both a rare privilege and a profound responsibility. Though the act of taking an image is instant, a photograph is capable of making a lasting impact.”&lt;/p&gt;

Vision-based control of robotic manipulator for citrus harvesting

The main contribution of this paper is in the development of vision-based estimation and control system for robotic fruit harvesting and rigorous stability analysis to guarantee performance of the closed-loop system. The presented cooperative visual servo controller benefits from the large field-of-view of a fixed camera and the accuracy of a camera-in-hand (CiH). Computationally inexpensive perspective transformation-based range estimation method obtains 3D fruit position using a monocular camera to enable real-time manipulator control. A rotation controller is developed to orient the robot such that the target fruit selected by the fixed camera can be viewed by the CiH attached to the end-effector. Subsequently, the end-effector can be servoed to the target fruit location using the presented pursuit guidance based hybrid translation controller. Lyapunov-based stability analysis guarantees global exponential regulation of the end-effector. Numerical simulations verify the feasibility of the developed controller while the performance is evaluated on a seven degrees-of-freedom kinematically redundant manipulator using an artificial citrus tree. The position of the fruit was randomly selected, and the closed-loop visual servo control experiment was performed 21 times to analyze the repeatability and accuracy of the developed controller. With 95% confidence level the expected position of the robot end-effector is observed to lie within the confidence ellipsoid. The accuracy of the controller was observed to be about 15mm, thus making the system suitable for harvesting medium and large varieties of citrus fruit but may limit operation for small varieties such as page and blood oranges.

Artist's Statement: SACRED LOS ANGELES

SOME TIME AGO, I began working on a photographic project I call SACRED LOS ANGELES. I have been visiting the places of worship and attending the services of many different religions, all within the bounds of Los Angeles County, and especially within the city itself. I have been to Sikh and Hindu temples and festivals, Muslim mosques, Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox churches, and Jewish synagogues—as many places as I can find where rich and poor, humble and mighty, people of all colors and races, worship. I have photographed the buildings themselves, religious murals on walls, people at worship, the leaders of different congregations, and even some religious buildings that have been abandoned for various reasons. At first, I felt very intrusive and shy about going into cultures foreign to me. But I took courage from the camera in my hand, and the warmth and welcome has been so amazing that I gradually became more and more comfortable with it. All along, I have been astonished at the beauty and diversity of services, as well as at the kindness and generosity of almost all the people involved.

Rioting or Protesting? Losing It or Finding It?

I was standing on a street corner in Chapeltown, Leeds, near a Bonfire Party that was blocking a side-street off Spencer Place. Camera in hand, I was looking for some shots and maybe some interview...

Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity Rowena McClinton (bio) Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity. By Michael J. Zogry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 328. $49.95 cloth) For approximately eighteen years ethnohistorian Michael J. Zogry intensively studied anetso (the Cherokee term for ball play) and through his rigorous observations, film-making, personal interviews, and note-taking, he carefully and thoughtfully published his research and field experiences in Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity. Zogry presents a raw and innovative perspective that reveals his own soul-searching for the meaning and significance of a centuries-old Cherokee practice; most importantly, [End Page 145] he makes distinctions between game and ritual and even questions to what extent is ball play truly a substitute for war, an activity some scholars refer to as a "mini-warrior sport"; other scholars refer to ball play as a "playful game." Additionally, Zogry debunks references to ball play as a tourist spectacle. Rather, Zogry challenges readers to rethink the connection between ritual and performance and to view the relationship of ball play to both as actually reinforcing cultural identity. The meaning of anetso is culled from Sequoyah's syllabary and comprises three syllabary characters, "as they are playing it" or "that which they play." Surprisingly, the syllabary word for "ball" ("a-lhsagalhdi") is missing possibly because the term implies "ball" already. Anetso, the precursor to lacrosse, harks back to ancient times but is anchored with traditions significant to contemporary Cherokees. Yet not all Cherokees participate in ball play and nor do all understand or know how to play. And ball play even baffles bystanders because players with ball sticks in hand can push and scuffle, run and tackle opponents, and even wrestle them to the ground. The only standard rule is that players cannot touch the "ball." However, "ball" is not a "ball" in European terms; it is actually the size of a golf ball but its outside layer is animal skin, mainly deer; players and audience alike fail to see the "ball." Ball play begins with a toss in the center of a large open field and then players from two vying teams try to catch the "ball" in the web of their handcrafted rackets. But the "ball" can easily disappear among contending players and what the audience can actually view are the ball sticks in addition to intense body contact; players hold their sticks at varying angles to catch the "ball" in the web of the sticks. When caught and saved in the web, the player with the "ball" tosses it into the team's goal at the end of the ballfield; then that team has scored. Zogry describes how he misses the "ball" even with camera in hand and filming the action as he has done many times at the Qualla Boundary, the name given the federally recognized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians comprising 13,400 tribal members. After [End Page 146] experiencing ball play many times, Zogry realized that after all of his hermeneutical reverie halted, what remained from a spectator's point of view was that anetso was an autotelic activity. He challenges readers to look at this important element of Cherokee culture in relationship to a "putative Cherokee religious system or repertoire" (p. 236). Zogry explains that the contribution he is making is not one centered on what anetso really means or an explanation of what anetso means to all Cherokee people. Rather, it is to give an overview of the historical ways Cherokees have viewed ball play and various observers for three hundred years have recorded it. Zogry bravely tackles basic assumptions scholars have promulgated about nonwestern practices from a western point of view. Zogry has written a very important and significant book about a Cherokee activity that reinforces the fact that the meaning of anetso remains as elusive as the "ball" itself but still central to Cherokee cultural identity. Rowena McClinton Rowena McClinton, an associate professor in the department of historical studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in Edwardsville, Illinois, is a historian of...

The Integrative Power of the Creative Spirit

Making use of my observing ego, I, an octogenarian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and photographer, take note of the way the organizing function of my creative spirit serves as an integrating force, binding myself together in the face of the anxieties that accompany getting old. My thoughts drift back to the time when I was temporarily lost after graduating from the analytic institute: “What will my future be?” By taking time to immerse myself in nature—awakening the spirit of my happy childhood when I had accompanied my father to the woods—my creative Eye sprang into existence. I became a pioneer in the acceptance of color photography as fine art. My photography has played a crucial role in the treatment of several of my patients. In a number of vignettes, I illustrate how my creativity has also been at work in the way I have adapted each patient's therapy to meet his or her individual needs. I feel that the humane therapy I have received from my own analysts helped to solidify my own shaky foundations caused by a serious family crisis when I was 1 to 3. With camera or pen in hand, I have been able to experience and express my feelings, whether they be happiness or the inevitable loss of dear ones.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: An Interview with Virginia Photographer Pierre Courtois

Pierre Courtois is well known by all those who attend the Virginia Library Association’s annual conference in the fall and the Paraprofessional Forum’s annual conference in the spring. Most often seen with an impressive camera in hand, he is the man who has been capturing the history of VLA during the past decade. Courtois has become very much a part of the organization, and as result of his observations over the years, he could probably write something about the organization and its members. Those who see him at the conferences, and sometimes at the Library of Virginia (LVA), have come to view him as a dear friend and colleague in the world of libraries. This most unobtrusive and quiet photographer has a very limited amount of time to socialize with the individuals within the organization, so it seemed that an interview would provide an opportunity to get to know Pierre Courtois.

Parting the Curtain on Lye Poisoning in “A Worn Path”

Parting the Curtain on Lye Poisoning in “A Worn Path” Melissa Deakins Stang Eudora Welty’s sensitivity to words and images in rural Mississippi during the late 1930s are often reflected in her writings and photographs (Barilleaux 21). “A Worn Path” is evident of this. Written, apparently, in 1940, and published in 1941, it is a short story about Phoenix Jackson, an elderly grandmother who undertakes a heroic journey into town to procure free “charity case” medicine for her grandson’s throat (177–78). The story is predicated on the unfortunate circumstance that the boy’s throat periodically becomes swollen because he accidentally swallowed lye. The doctor’s office that Phoenix returns to “like clockwork” confirms this: “Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?-January-two-three years ago-” (178). How accurately does “A Worn Path” reflect conditions of the poor of Welty’s time and place, and from where does she draw inspiration for this tale? The child’s condition is something Welty obviously understood, as her story and its allusions to medicine clearly show. Traveling throughout her native state as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, camera in hand, Welty observed the lives of rural people closely and took photographs depicting black life, including several that portray images of women like Phoenix Jackson. Unlike many writers and photographers of her time—for example, Margaret Bourke-White and Doris Ulmann—Welty was not on a Depression era crusade (Black 35), although she is clearly sympathetic to the people whose images she snaps. She explains, “And though I did not take these pictures to prove anything, I think they most assuredly do show something—which is to make a far better claim for them” (Eye 354). What Welty did do, however, was to imagine the heroic and difficult lives of those whom she observed. Stories like “The Key,” “The Whistle,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” “A Worn Path,” and many others testify to the imaginative interest she added to the static pictures of obscure lives she discovered as she traveled Mississippi for the first time. Her conversion from photographer to chronicler was abrupt. In an oft-quoted remark, Welty states that: Away off one day up in Tishomingo County, I knew this anyway: that my wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the [End Page 13] finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight. (Eye 355) What is Welty parting the curtain to show in “A Worn Path”? An elderly black woman negotiates the barriers, threats, and mazes that challenge but do not thwart her annual trip through the countryside to town. Phoenix faces down a ghostly scarecrow and a white hunter with his dog before she must face the condescending nurses in the city doctor’s office to which her memory draws her. This story means to reveal the complexity and difficulties in the life of a woman like Phoenix, as Welty signals when she writes, “The shadows hung from the oak trees to the road like curtains” (176). This is just the first of many curtains that Phoenix Jackson will part. What is often written about is the courage of Phoenix Jackson, her devotion to her grandson, and the obstacles she overcomes on her mythic journey, including the humiliating way she is treated at the clinic. Since Welty played down the realistic elements in the story (and refused to explain whether or not Phoenix Jackson’s quest was an old woman’s delusion regarding a grandson who is long dead), the issue of accidental lye poisoning has perhaps not received the critical attention it deserves, even though it comprises a compelling chapter in the medical history of America and one that was well-publicized when Welty wrote Phoenix’s story. When “A Worn Path” was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1941, the plight of Phoenix Jackson’s grandson was alarmingly real, especially in the rural South. Esophageal injuries from swallowing the caustic chemical known as lye occurred frequently among children, especially in rural areas...

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited1

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited¹

Rhythms of Vision in Stan Brakhage’s City Streaming

Le « rêve de La Ville » est un thème qui réapparaît souvent dans l’oeuvre de Brakhage. City Streaming, tourné à Toronto en 1989, se distingue de ses autres films urbains par son élan festif. Libéré du « poids de l’histoire » et de la trop grande familiarité des lieux, que l’on retrouve par exemple dans The Dead et Unconscious London Strata, Brakhage peut présenter une construction dynamique de la ville en tant qu’entité vivante, en tant que réseau d’énergie exubérante et enthousiaste semblable au flot d’électricité qui parcourt le système nerveux humain. Les tensions concep - tuelles et formelles de l’oeuvre (par exemple, entre les prises de vue intérieures et extérieures, entre les lieux privés et publics), ainsi que l’ironie et l’humour visuel, situent l’individu (le cinéaste) en dehors de la « ruche » qu’il observe. Il peut ainsi se « re-mémorer » son expérience du lieu pendant qu’il « chante la chanson » de La Ville.