Photographic Enlargements Research Articles

Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai’s Archival Art and Organic Ephemera

Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai’s Archival Art and Organic Ephemera H. J. Tam (bio) Titled Ba Ơi (Dear Father), Vietnamese American artist Trinh Mai’s 2017 mixed media portrait reproduces an enlarged photograph of the artist’s father-in-law, a former high-ranking official in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) named Phơưl Vân Thạch,1 holding a sign of his name at a reeducation camp after the Communist takeover of the country in 1975 (Figure 1). We see Phơưl with a deep frown, his mouth half open as if in mid-speech, defiant despite the abjection imposed by the state. In Trinh Mai’s depiction, this photograph from a haunting past becomes a memorial: carved onto the artwork’s surface are seventeen punctures representing the bullet wounds Phơưl sustained through the war, and the hand-painted Sanskrit words “dear father” cascade around the subject. The incisions reveal the thick texture of materials underneath: swatches from mourning bands worn in Vietnamese funerals and copies of Phơưl’s camp release papers. Less visible materials used in the artwork include rainwater from Vietnam, the tears Trinh Mai shed for her father-in-law, and the natural oils left on the canvas from her fingertips. In Dear Father, as in her other works introduced in this Portfolio feature, Trinh Mai combines the tangible and the imperceptible, discarded objects and living things, official documents and bodily secretions, to give form to the interstitial: between public and private, alive and demised. This critical interstitiality holds the diasporic Vietnamese consciousness that exists outside of dominant national histories in the United States and contemporary Vietnam; as such, the artworks grapple with “the sad and violent history that exists between Vietnam and the United States, and the politics of translocated race, gender, and class that springs from this past” (Espiritu 2010, 200). [End Page 43] Two prominent types of materials appear throughout Trinh Mai’s oeuvre: those that could be considered archival in nature (identification cards, letters, photographs) and organic elements (tears, eggshells, feathers). Combined in each work, their properties complement and transform each other: the organic materials lend their living aura to the historic documents, enabling these objects to conjure the specters of those who carried them through exile; at the same time, the archival materials fuse historicity into the ephemera, which symbolize refugees’ precarious, embodied experiences often unacknowledged in history books. In her use of photographic and written materials, Trinh Mai evinces what art critic Hal Foster (2004, 3) calls “an archival impulse.” Diverse in their subjects and media, Foster writes, archival artists share “a will to relate— to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs . . . to ascertain what might remain for the present” (21). For Trinh Mai, the “misplaced past” is the ill-understood story of Vietnamese refugees like her family after the fall of Saigon. Moreover, Trinh Mai’s mixing of organic substances recalls the influence of bioart, which, as Robert Mitchell (2010, 26) explains, couples artistic goals with biological technologies to make statements about the problematic of biotechnology. While Trinh Mai shares with bioartists the desire to solicit a moral response to the living beings and biological processes manipulated into art, her focus and intent in integrating organic materials in her work are different: instead of commenting theoretically on the state of biotechnology and its industries, Trinh Mai situates her work historically and politically in the legacy of the Vietnam War and mourns through her art those deemed disposable by regimes of power, in Vietnam and the United States. Without Trinh Mai’s artistic treatment, Phơưl, the reeducation camp inmate in Mai’s Dear Father, would otherwise have no public recognition: he is disavowed in Vietnam, where the government continues to suppress critiques of its postwar treatment of South Vietnamese, and in the United States, where the American soldier/veteran retains discursive primacy. Neither is Phơưl a “boat person” figure, with its representational burden of helplessness and proof of the West’s humanitarian gift of freedom, as Mimi Nguyen (2012) has suggested. The artist’s father-in-law appears here only through reproduced state documents, that is...

Gloria Naylor and “The Other Place” of Black Feminism

Gloria Naylor and “The Other Place” of Black Feminism Kiana T. Murphy (bio) Gloria Naylor: Other Places, curated by Suzanne Edwards, Mary Foltz, and Mark Wonsidler, September 13, 2021–May 27, 2022, Dubois Gallery, Maginnes Hall, Lehigh University. In Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day (1988), the matriarchal figure Miranda (Mama Day) goes up to the attic to fix a leak in an old, tattered house—a home resting on a former plantation that has now been in the Day family for many decades and subsequently named “the other place.” In search of a remedy to cure her great-niece Ophelia (nicknamed Cocoa by the Day family), Mama Day returns to “the other place” in search of ancestral guidance. While in the attic, Mama Day starts to remember stories of her family living in the house, and in her process of remembering she eyes an object in the darkness: She’s pushing and nailing the matting up into a small corner when she spies the ledger. Black leather binding, long and narrow, bent almost in two from being jammed into the point of the roof. That had to be hidden there on purpose. Miranda tries to wedge it out and the cover practically falls apart in her hands. The pages are swollen and discolored from dampness. She couldn’t read it in this light anyway, even if the ink wasn’t all run together. . . . In the bright light of the bedroom, there’s nothing to be read in it. Too old. Too long gone. She finds a slip of paper in the back that tells her just how old. Tuesday, 3rd Day August, then a 1 and a half of what must be an 8, with the rest of the date faded away. Sold to Mister Bascombe Wade of Willow Springs, one negress answering to the name of Sa . . . Water damage done removed the remainder of that line with the yellowish and blackened stains spreading down and taking out most of the others as well: Law . . . knowledge . . . witness . . . inflicted . . . nurse. It’s all she can pick out until she gets to the bottom for the final words: Conditions . . . tender . . . kind.1 Although readers are given the full text of the ledger before the novel begins, it is significant that the ledger is indecipherable in the hands of Mama Day. Crumbling before her, the ledger represents the violent and fractured history of slavery. For Mama Day, however, this object also becomes an opening door, as she endlessly tries to figure out the name of her ancestor, knowing that calling [End Page 453] out to her will be the ancestral connection needed to help her great-niece recover from her illness. Throughout her novels, Naylor consistently imagines this contradiction of the archives as a site of memory—characters find ledgers, childhood toys, diaries, cookbooks, and other ephemeral objects that activate and fragment both individual and communal remembrance. Sometimes the objects are passed down or found in basements or community spaces, which become geographic and cultural locations that also serve as archival maps for generations to come. The exhibit “Gloria Naylor: Other Places,” on display from September 13, 2021, to May 7, 2022, not only centers the range of spatial locations that populate Naylor’s novels but also highlights the significance of the archive for her narrative retellings. A poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter, Naylor was born in New York City by way of Mississippi, where her parents, Alberta McAlpin and Roosevelt Naylor, were both from sharecropping families. She gained prominence as a writer with the publication of her debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), which won a National Book Award and was later adapted by Oprah Winfrey into a miniseries. Naylor would go on to publish several novels throughout her career: Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Café (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2004). At the beginning of the exhibit, the viewer is pulled immediately into the universe of a prolific writer: in the background of the introductory panel is an enlarged photograph of a jubilant Naylor, head tilted back midlaugh, in front of fully stocked bookshelves. Although the exhibit’s structure mirrors...

Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking: Fingerprints from Hooghly

Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking:Fingerprints from Hooghly Mira Rai Waits (bio) The "hooghly Fingerprint Copies" are photographic enlargements of the fingerprints of Indian subjects developed on bromide paper, a popular commercial photography paper invented in the 1880s.1 Made by Francis Galton (the so-called father of eugenics2) from fingerprint specimens sent to him by William Herschel (a British colonial administrator stationed in India), they are a noteworthy feature of the digital collections of University College London. In his anthropometric laboratory at the South Kensington Museum in London, Galton enlarged fingerprints of the same people, prints taken first in 1878 and then again in 1892. During development, he placed the two prints side by side to show how fingerprints did not change over time. To access digital copies of these prints today, one need only click on [End Page 36] the PDF icon on the UCL "Hooghly Fingerprint Copies" reference web page and a document with pages of black and white photographic enlargements is generated. While the sheer volume of prints in the PDF can be visually overwhelming, the digitization of these prints also masks the colonial history of the prints' production by transforming bodies into easily accessible files. These enlarged prints appear more beautiful to me the longer I stare at them. Galton also admired the beauty captured by bodily prints, although his reasons for admiration had little to do with their aesthetic value and more to do with what they could potentially prove about human heredity. In his 1888 lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, he noted that "Perhaps the most beautiful and characteristic of all superficial marks are the small furrows with the intervening ridges and their pores that are disposed in a singularly complex yet even order on the under surfaces of the hands and the feet" ("Personal Identification" 187). Galton's interest in the "complex yet even order" of fingerprints was spurred by his hypothesis that there were observable hereditary commonalities within the human population. He took a special interest in research subjects that would enable him to prove the existence of criminal and racial "types," speculating that the discovery of commonalities would ultimately contribute to the human population's improvement. To facilitate the visualization of the "type," Galton experimented with a variety of mediums. Prior to fingerprinting, he developed composite photography, a practice wherein exposures of different people were combined on a single photographic plate. He also drew contour lines based on facial profiles and explored Bertillonage, a classification system developed by French police officer Alphonse Bertillon in 1882 (Gillham ch. 17).3 While Galton ultimately failed to put fingerprinting to use as a tool for "improving" the human population, he was able to demonstrate that fingerprints were unique markers of identity that did not substantially change over time. He also developed a classificatory system that continues to form the basis for biometric classification within criminal justice systems around the world (Cole 99–100). To develop his fingerprinting system, Galton returned to photography, praising the medium for its accuracy and the ease of enlarging prints, which he argued facilitated the deciphering of fingerprint patterns (Galton, Finger Prints 111). When I look at the prints, I too am moved to praise by the patterns one can observe in the abstract loops and whorls, which, through photographic enlargement, look less like parts of the human body and more like the aerial photographs of Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970). Such visual ambiguity is demonstrative of photography's power to distort the scale of its subjects, but it also underlies a disturbing feature of biometrics that has conditioned our engagement with its imagery since the science was first cultivated. In translating the body into an abstraction, the enlarged photograph prompts us to lose sight of the people whose bodily traces are recorded on the photograph's surface. [End Page 37] I have spent several years pondering if it is possible to acknowledge the people fingerprinted in India who were the subjects of Galton's research and whether we can adequately address the historical circumstances that engendered the fingerprints' making. The notes on the reverse side of Galton's photographic enlargements are...

The Big Picture: The Materiality of Size in Ansel Adams’s Large-Scale Works

The prominence of the large-format photograph in contemporary art since the 1970s is often attributed to the desire to explore new pictorial and spatial avenues by moving beyond the documentary approaches that had dominated since the 1930s. While not an inaccurate characterisation, the focus upon the artistic impulses associated with large-scale photography comes at the expense of the material issues that enabled it. This article addresses the gap by examining two largely overlooked forms produced by Ansel Adams between 1930 and 1960 – the photomural and the folding photo-screen – in order to demonstrate the high level of direct engagement that existed between photographer and materiality, which resulted in large-scale works that addressed many of the same issues dealt with in contemporary large-format photography, but that also stood in stark contrast to the ephemeral, mass-produced, large-scale work prevalent at the time. By considering historical examples, from an era when materials and processes were very different, the article demonstrates the active, physical effects of photographic enlargement, revealing print size to be not simply a changeable option but an inherently material condition, honing our understanding of why a photograph is big by demonstrating how it got that way.

Linking Disaster to Natural History, A Visit to Sasaoka Keiko’s Exhibition: Tanesashi, Ninoshima (Hachinohe City Museum of Art)

Linking Disaster to Natural History, A Visit to Sasaoka Keiko’s Exhibition: Tanesashi, Ninoshima (Hachinohe City Museum of Art) Kuraishi Shino (bio) Translated by Daryl Maude (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Sasaoka Keiko, ninoshima, 2015. © Sasaoka Keiko. Courtesy of the artist. [End Page 186] At a talk during the opening of her exhibition, the photographer Sasaoka Keiko remarked, “For me, Ninoshima is an untouchable.” Ninoshima is an island to which large numbers of the dead and badly wounded were transported after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In Sasaoka’s words we can glean—to the extent that such a thing can be expressed—the weight of what she has learned from studying the history of her hometown Hiroshima, as she wandered around ground zero of the bombing and took photographs. Sasaoka digs into the challenges of relating an event that rode roughshod over the individuality of each person’s death and does not stop in her attempt to communicate it. And she does so without seeking any sort of streamlining under the pretext of forging new methods of preservation or communication. That decision brings a certain darkness into her photographs. In this exhibition, Sasaoka captures Ninoshima using two techniques. The first is an image of a negative seen between the heads of passengers on the ferry to the island. The second is a series of five photographs that feature a distant view of the island hazed in rain, with countless raindrops piercing the pleats of ocean waves in the foreground. Sasaoka represents the memory of Ninoshima, which lies hidden behind the “untouchable” water’s edge as a tangible “scape.”1 In the “Hiroshima” section on the second floor of the museum, Sasaoka has thoughtfully mixed both older and more recent works, including these latest ones. Her sincerity in resolutely recalling the horrors that human beings have inflicted on others is moving. The first-floor exhibition room displays enlarged photographs of the Tanesashi coastline in the background, with photographs of the areas damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake displayed on a small monitor, creating a gentle correspondence between the images. The Hiroshima series investigates what remains after the devastation of [End Page 187] modern civilization, which has trampled on individual human life from the date of August 6, 1945 and continues through to the present day. According to Sasaoka, photographing the landscapes of the regions of both Tanesashi and the areas damaged by the disaster, employs the shock of March 11, 2011 to link modern history to that which transcends it: natural history. To do so, she looks unblinkingly at the areas of life that were destroyed by the disaster. Therein we find, with limitless empathy, the present and past histories of the many generations of people who were born and lived by the shore. Artworks on display at Hachinohe City Museum of Art (including five works from the Ninoshima series) © ICANOF The exhibition was held as Citizen’s Art Support ICANOF 13th Exhibition, Sasaoka Keiko—Ninoshima, Tanesashi, Hachinohe City Museum. Kuraishi Shino Kuraishi Shino is a Professor at the School of Science and Technology, Meiji University. He specializes in the theory of art practice and the study of cultural assets in modern art and photography, among other areas. He graduated from the Department of Art Studies, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tama Art University, and is a member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Japan, and the Japan Society of Image Art and Sciences. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Hawai’i. (kuraishi@meiji.ac.jp) Daryl Maude Daryl Maude is a Ph.D. candidate in Japanese literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is on intimacy and futurity in Japanese and Okinawan literature, using queer and feminist perspectives to examine imaginations of the future after the American Occupation. His review of Akiko Shimizu’s work on transphobia and feminism in Japan, “Queer Nations, Trans-lations,” was published in Postmodern Culture (30:2), and his translation of Shinjō Ikuo’s article “Male Sexuality in the Colony: On Toyokawa Zen’ichi’s ‘Searchlight’” was published in...

Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths

Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths

The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies edited by Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 245 pages, 72 b/w ill., bibliography, index. $112, cloth.

<b>The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies</b> edited by Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 245 pages, 72 b/w ill., bibliography, index. $112, cloth.

An Exhibit/an Aesthetic: Richard Hamilton and Postwar Exhibition Design

The story, as Richard Hamilton told it years later, begins with something of an insult. Upon viewing Hamilton's 1955 exhibition Man, Machine, and Motion, Victor Pasmore, the Constructivist sculptor and Hamilton's then-colleague at King's College in Newcast le, delivered a snide quasi-compliment, dismissing the iconographical content (and main attraction) of the project only to praise the mere apparatus of exhibiting—the bracket and framing system that Hamilton had invented to exhibit his imposing photographic enlargements of men and their technical prostheses. “It would have been very good,” Pasmore is purport-ed to have said, “if it hadn't been for all those photographs.”2But clearly the exhibition intrigued Pasmore, who would approach Hamilton later in the hope of collaborating with the younger artist. Hamilton recalls:Remembering his comment on Man, Machine and Motion I proposed that we might make a show which would be its own justification: no theme, no subject, not a display of things or ideas—pure abstract exhibition.3

Photomasks Fabrication Based on Optical Reduction for Microfluidic Applications

A procedure for fabrication of photomasks on photographic films with minimum feature achievable of about 20 μm, which are particularly suitable for the fast prototyping of microfluidic devices, has been improved. We used a commercial photographic enlarger in reverse mode obtaining 10:1 reduction factor with error less than 1%. Masks have been characterized by optical transmission measurement and contact profilometry: the exposed region completely absorbs light in the wavelength region explored, while the non-exposed region is transparent from 350 nm on; the average film thickness is of 410 nm and its roughness is about 120 nm. A PDMS microfluidic device has been realized and tested in order to prove the effectiveness of designed photomasks used with the common UV light box.

Parallel of Life and Art: Indications of a New Visual Order

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 7. The exhibition Parallel of Life and Art opened on September 11, 1953, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Consisting of 122 photographic enlargements edited by Nigel Henderson, Ronald Jenkins, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson, it explored how reproductive technologies affect the terms of cultural production. The architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham would later refer to the exhibition as a “locus classicus” of the New Brutalist movement.—A.K.

The ultrastructure of low temperature stimulated rubber-producing cortical parenchyma in guayule

The low temperatures of the Chihuahuan Desert stimulate rubber biosynthesis in guayule plants, primarily by promoting rubber-producing cortical parenchyma cells and inducing the activity of enzymes in the pathway of rubber biosynthesis. Further progress in increasing rubber production in guayule requires a better understanding of the ultrastructure of the organelles in the rubber producing cortical parenchyma. The objective of this study was to investigate the ultrastructure of the organelles in the rubber producing cortical parenchyma. The electron photomicrographs show that the rubber-producing cortical parenchyma, in contrast to mature cortical parenchyma in stems not exposed to the low temperatures, contain a high population of rubber particles, an abundant number of mitochondria, chloroplasts, a well-structured nucleus, rough endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparati. The double membrane nucleus is important in the low temperature induction of rubber-forming enzymes: rubber transferase and 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase. Photographic enlargements of the population of mitochondria show well-developed inner membrane folding that functions in ATP production to support the energy requirements of rubber biosynthesis. Electron photomicrographs show dividing chloroplasts that increase the number of plastids in the rubber-producing parenchyma. The well-structured grana and stroma lamellae may produce energy for the stroma production of carbon precursors of rubber. Photographic enlargements show a cortical parenchyma with an active Golgi apparatus, producing an abundant number of vesicles. Features of this electron photomicrograph is the fusion of a Golgi vesicle with a rubber particle, suggesting the transport of Golgi-processed glycolipids and glycoproteins to the rubber particles, and the rubber particles extending into the central cytosol still attached to the RER indicating an earlier origin of the rubber particle from the RER. The electron photomicrographs of the ultrastructure of rubber-producing cortical parenchyma in guayule stems support the conclusion that these cells contain an abundant number of organelles relating to the low temperature stimulated rubber synthesis.

From Sorrow to Activism: A Father’s Memorial to His Son Alexander Arredondo, Killed in the U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Abstract After his son Alexander was killed in the Iraq War, Carlos Arredondo created a memorial to honor him. Using enlarged photographs, a coffin, and Alex’s military uniform and boots, Arredondo created a portable tribute to his son. The memorial provides him with a way to work through his grief while simultaneously asking viewers to contemplate the consequences of the war. Distinctively shaped by dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, gender, and national identity, the memorial challenges governmental efforts to obfuscate the deaths caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

From Sorrow to Activism: A Father's Memorial to His Son Alexander Arredondo, Killed in the U.S. Occupation of Iraq

After his son Alexander was killed in the Iraq War, Carlos Arredondo created a memorial to honor him. Using enlarged photographs, a coffin, and Alex's military uniform and boots, Arredondo created a portable tribute to his son. The memorial provides him with a way to work through his grief while simultaneously asking viewers to contemplate the consequences of the war. Distinctively shaped by dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, gender, and national identity, the memorial challenges governmental efforts to obfuscate the deaths caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Assessment and Instruction of Self-Recognition

school special education teacher approached the author to discuss a concern she had about a segment of her morning circle routine. During that segment, the teacher presented each child with two enlarged photographs; one was a self-photograph (of the child) and the other was a photograph of a peer. The teacher expected that each child would select the self-photograph when requested. An individualized greeting song that was highly reinforcing followed selection of the selfphotograph. Some of the children were just as likely to select the peer’s photograph as their own. The teacher was concerned that her students were not making progress in learning to recognize their own images even though the lesson was provided daily. This conversation sparked the author’s interest in the topic of self-recognition. Many teachers of children with disabilities incorporate photographs of people during the school day as part of daily schedules, choice-making, attendance, and turn-taking opportunities. They often hold the expectation that the child with disabilities will be able to discriminate the photographs of others from a self-photograph. It is important to understand the developmental sequence of self-recognition so that instruction is provided at an individually appropriate level. This article explains the development of self-recognition and provides both assessment and instructional suggestions for teachers working with students with disabilities of all ages.

The Dark Room Collective and Post-Soul Poetics

Generation next does not labor under burden of being brand new or even Brand Nubian. ... [T]hey know how to bring pain and profanity but also prophecy, redemption, and light. They bear witness to what Amiri Baraka once identified as Changing Same of African continuum. (Tate 630) In November 1986 aspiring poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange met in University Film Archive. A few months later, housemate of Strange's moved out, and Ellis replaced her (Ellis, Interview 90). Their three-story Victorian in Cambridge's Central Square--31 Inman Street--soon became meeting place for diverse cast of young black artists and intellectuals. James Baldwin's funeral in December 1987 galvanized this group and gave it sense of common cause. (Baldwin died / and we became church, as Ellis puts it [T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. 11.68-69]). Its members rechristened themselves Dark Room Collective--so-named for small, dimly lit room in house that once held photographic enlarger but gradually began to accumulate (Valentine 59)--and remade themselves as something of pre or PMFA: [W]e'd read one book, then trade and different books. We didn't always read them in order they were written, but would place them in order and talk about why one book was written after another; we looked for things that held books together, argued with decisions authors made and made critical judgments, all time developing our own tastes and literary vocabularies. Lonely fun done together. And when you're doing something like that around who are taking it very seriously, it gives you support and strength. (Ellis, Interview 91) The collective also provided an object lesson in the necessity of ... working hard, to come up with something new--no one wanted to be weak link in chain! It was like joining big band or something and cutting your chops that way, before you became soloist or had your own gig (Young, Interview 50). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Dark Room provided young African American writers a way of overcoming isolation, an opportunity to share similar struggles with writing with other Black people at time when European Americans still dominated most positions of authority in US poetry establishment (Strange 296). In 1989 collective inaugurated its now-famous Dark Room Reading Series. Initially, readings took place in living room at 31 Inman, and publicity for events was both informal and local. Little typed messages began appearing on bulletin boards around Cambridge, Askold Melnyczuk recalls (513). Landlord problems, however, soon forced relocation first to Institute of Contemporary Art and then to Boston Playwrights' Theatre. These new venues brought wider exposure. White Cambridge and Harvard Square took notice, and Dark Room quickly found itself behaving less like an improvised gathering of like-minded friends and more like an official entity with business side (Ellis, Loud 39). During its five year run, series succeeded in bringing to town some of biggest names in contemporary African American literature, among them Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, Essex Hemphill, bell hooks, Randall Kenan, Terry McMillan, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Walter Moseley. (1) Tracy K. Smith recalls transformative experience of watching like Michael S. Harper and Thylias Moss give these amazing readings and stage with who were just little older than myself, and who were taking their art very seriously. And I realized that I wanted to be doing that, too (Something 868). The Dark Room Reading Series also brought national attention to collective. [W]e appeared in Emerge, Boston Globe, New Yorker, on NPR, and in numerous newsletters and anthologies (Ellis, Notes). …

Management of the oral manifestations of HIV/AIDS by traditional healers and care givers

In many communities of South Africa, traditional healers are often the only means of health care delivery available. The level of knowledge and ability to recognize oral lesions of 32 traditional healers and 17 care-givers were assessed after a two-day workshop. The data collection instrument was a structured questionnaire, complimented by enlarged clinical photographs of the common oral manifestations of HIV/AIDS. Prior to the workshop, 46 (93.9%) of the 49 respondents had never had any formal information on oral health and 43 (87.8%) were unfamiliar with the symptoms of oral diseases. Thirty-five (71.4%) recognized bleeding gums from A4-size photographs and 11 (22.4%) recognized oral thrush. The recognition of other oral manifestations of HIV/AIDS were; oral hairy leukoplakia (41.0%), angular cheilitis (43.6%), herpes virus infection (56.4%), oral ulcerations (56.8%), and in children, parotid enlargement (27.3%), and moluscum contagiosum (56.8%). Traditional healers and caregivers constitute an untapped resource with enormous potential. A positive bridge should be built to link traditional healing with modem medicine in the struggle against HIV/AIDS.

Ferulic Acid Stabilizes a Solution of Vitamins C and E and Doubles its Photoprotection of Skin

Ferulic acid is a potent ubiquitous plant antioxidant. Its incorporation into a topical solution of 15%l-ascorbic acid and 1%alpha-tocopherol improved chemical stability of the vitamins (C+E) and doubled photoprotection to solar-simulated irradiation of skin from 4-fold to approximately 8-fold as measured by both erythema and sunburn cell formation. Inhibition of apoptosis was associated with reduced induction of caspase-3 and caspase-7. This antioxidant formulation efficiently reduced thymine dimer formation. This combination of pure natural low molecular weight antioxidants provides meaningful synergistic protection against oxidative stress in skin and should be useful for protection against photoaging and skin cancer.

Retinal Microaneurysmal Closure Following Focal Laser Photocoagulation in Diabetic Macular Edema

To determine the temporal relationship of microaneurysmal dosure following focal laser photocoagulation in diabetic macular edema. This prospective study included 25 eyes of 23 diabetic patients with clinically significant macular edema. Ten to 20 well-defined microaneurysms were preselected and marked on an enlarged photograph of the prelaser fundus fluorescein angiogram. These preselected microaneurysms were focally lasered and followed up angiographically at 48 hours, 1 week, 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks after photocoagulation. Thereafter, the average time span between photocoagulation and the closure of the microaneurysms was determined. The mean number of preselected microaneurysms at baseline was 18.24 +/- 3.51, which remained the same at 48 hours. However, the mean microaneurysmal count decreased to 11.76 +/- 2.65 (35% reduction) at 1 week, 9.12 +/- 2.53 (50% reduction), 7.12 +/- 2.26 (61% reduction), and 4.56 +/- 1.32 (75% reduction) at 3, 6, and 12 weeks, respectively. The majority of the microaneurysms (35%) closed between 48 hours and 1 week. The microaneurysmal closure following focal laser photocoagulation is a delayed process. None of the preselected microaneurysms showed closure within 48 hours, and 75% of the preselected microaneurysms closed at the end of 12 weeks.

Evidence from aerial photography of structural loss of coral reefs at Barbados, West Indies

In response to concerns about widespread degradation of coral reefs at Barbados, West Indies, over the past two decades, maps and planimetric areas of 20 fringing coral reefs were estimated from enlargements of aerial photographs of the island, using geographic information system analysis. There were statistically significant reductions in reef areas over a 40-year period from 1950 to 1991. Areal losses exceeding measurement and boundary interpretation errors of 10% were detected on eight of the 20 reefs. Ground validation carried out by divers on six of the reefs confirmed physical losses of reef structures and accumulation of rubble and sand substrata at sites where substantial planimetric area loss was detected on aerial photographs. Structural losses occurred along the "spur and groove" system of the reef-seaward edge, within deep channels or breaches in the reef front, and along the flanks or ends of reefs. The location and nature of the observed losses suggest that storm damage and seasonal alterations in beach morphology are the two most important factors contributing to geomorphological structural loss of the reefs.

Transpiration and forest structure in relation to soil waterlogging in a Hawaiian montane cloud forest.

Transpiration, leaf characteristics and forest structure in Metrosideros polymorpha Gaud. stands growing in East Maui, Hawaii were investigated to assess physiological limitations associated with flooding as a mechanism of reduced canopy leaf area in waterlogged sites. Whole-tree sap flow, stomatal conductance, microclimate, soil oxidation-reduction potential, stand basal area and leaf area index (LAI) were measured on moderately sloped, drained sites with closed canopies (90%) and on level, waterlogged sites with open canopies (50-60%). The LAI was measured with a new technique based on enlarged photographs of individual tree crowns and allometric relationships. Sap flow was scaled to the stand level by multiplying basal area-normalized sap flow by stand basal area. Level sites had lower soil redox potentials, lower mean stand basal area, lower LAI, and a higher degree of soil avoidance by roots than sloped sites. Foliar nutrients and leaf mass per area (LMA) in M. polymorpha were similar between level and sloped sites. Stomatal conductance was similar for M. polymorpha saplings on both sites, but decreased with increasing tree height (r(2) = 0.72; P < 0.001). Stand transpiration estimates ranged from 79 to 89% of potential evapotranspiration (PET) for sloped sites and from 28 to 51% of PET for level sites. Stand transpiration estimates were strongly correlated with LAI (r(2) = 0.96; P < 0.001). Whole-tree transpiration was lower at level sites with waterlogged soils, but was similar or higher for trees on level sites when normalized by leaf area. Trees on level sites had a smaller leaf area per stem diameter than trees on sloped sites, suggesting that soil oxygen deficiency may reduce leaf area. However, transpiration per unit leaf area did not vary substantially, so leaf-level physiological behavior was conserved, regardless of differences in tree leaf area.