Curio Cabinet / Photo Curio

This quiet photo packs an incredible punch. Titled Edita (the one with the feather duster) by Panamanian photographer Sandra Eleta, the image captures the contradictions inherent in domestic servitude. Edita is a maid: she wears a uniform and carries an elaborate feather duster. But she doesn't appear diminished by her job: her bearing is regal as she rests in an ornate chair, her duster held like a scepter. Her hair is neatly coiffed, and her face made up. Still, along with dignity, there is weariness and resignation in her expression. The chair she sits in is not her own, nor is the house in which she works hard every day. The photo is part of Eleta's series, Servitude, which depicts the experiences of the people who work for wealthy Americans in Panama's Canal Zone. Eleta is one of 123 photographers whose work appears in the exhibit, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 -1985, at the Brooklyn Museum through July 22nd. The powerful collection illuminates a period of occupation, upheaval, and violence in that region through the perspective of activist women artists—and through the eyes of women like Edita, who lived it.  

Below: La platería, Panamá (The silversmith, Panama), 1982.
 

Image credit & copyright: Sandra Eleta, courtesy of Galleria Arteconsult S.A., Panama.
 

One, two, three dozen's a crowd on the diving boards! Fine art photographer Pelle Cass' new series Crowded Fields pushes the boundaries of summertime sports. To create the flurry of activity in the above photo, Cass took up to 1,000 photos over the course of a swimming meet, before editing them together in Photoshop. One of the limitations Cass sets on himself is that no subject can be moved from its place in the original photo, which turns the editing process into quite the undertaking. For that reason, Cass amasses a multitude of photos covering athletes at all areas of swimming pools, hockey rinks, and other sporting events. Though he's no sports fanatic, Cass' aim with Crowded Fields is to give the viewer a bit more than they would usually see from other sports photography: "I think that conventional single-exposure photographs distort by their inhuman briefness.… your memory of a game is a bit more like a general impression of many-figured bustle and activity." That makes a 9.1, a 8.7, and 9.5 for you there in the red one-piece bathing suit. No, not that one! The other ones.
 

Below: more of Cass' photos shot with a Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR and 16-35mm f/4 lens set to 16mm.
 

Image credit & copyright: Pelle Cass
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Hey—did someone turn the gravity off? Last fall, landscape photographer Kilian Schönberger published Otherworld, his series on South Tyrol's stalagmite-like "earth pyramids." The collection captures the precarious physics of these pillars in the haze of dawn, only adding to the earth pyramids' bizarre, film set appearance. But despite being called earth pyramids, these formations are built from top to bottom, not bottom to top. The soil forming the pillars is moraine clay deposited from glaciers of the last Ice Age. When this soil becomes wet, especially during torrential downpours, the soil rapidly erodes. But when dry, this soil remains hard like stone. Areas of the soil that find shelter from the rain beneath boulders stay intact, and as the rest is swept downhill by showers, the dry soil endures, producing these incredible pillars. If someone were to remove a boulder from the top of one of the pillars, however, the next rain would rapidly erode it down to nothing—but who would do that? Our guess is the farmer in the valley below, eager for nutrient-rich topsoil to flow onto his land!
 

Below: more shots of the earth pyramids. When a pillar becomes too flimsy, the boulder atop will tumble—sometimes toppling a fellow earth pyramid!
 

Image credit & copyright: Kilian Schönberger
 

Nothing can keep Serena Williams down! The tennis champion, captured here mid-leap after a Wimbledon victory in 2012, is widely considered the best tennis player in history. She has won 23 Grand Slam titles—including two of her signature "Serena Slams" (four Grand Slam victories in a row). As African American players attempting to succeed in a largely white, country-club sport, Serena and her sister, Venus, have always had to prove themselves. Both have faced racial slurs, while Serena has been disparaged for her body size. But that hasn't cowed her into docile "good" manners. When she wins, she shows her joy with jumps and whooping fist pumps; she has also fought for equal pay and treatment for women tennis players. Williams stands up for herself off-court, too. She is prone to blood clots and after she gave birth to her daughter in September, 2017, she recognized clotting symptoms. Hospital staff initially dismissed her concerns, but tests revealed clots in her lungs, and she was finally given the life-saving treatment she required. Just a few months later, Williams was back on the courts, defending her title in the Australian Open. Go, Serena!
 

Below: Serena Williams and her daughter Alexis Olympia, born in September, 2017.
 

Image credit & copyright: AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth; Today
 

Don't go barefoot on this beach! To celebrate International Rock Day, we're taking a look at flysch formations on the Basque Coast in Spain. These jagged outcrops of rock are formed undersea by abrading tectonic plates. As the continental plate—in this case, the Eurasian Plate—is shoved and heated by friction, sediment is deposited by ensuing landslides. These, in turn, form the flysch slabs. And since larger grains of sediment sink faster into the Earth than smaller varieties, some slabs stand taller than others. A great way to visualize flysch formation is to imagine the earth bunching like an accordion; photographer Fran Llano, who snapped the above shot, has his own metaphor: "the rocks offer a unique vision of the geological features of this area, [like] reading a rocky book full of information." In this way, each row of flysch could be looked at as a page in Mother Nature's ongoing autobiography. Could we get her autograph on this tectonic tome? We're huge fans of her work!
 

Below: more beachside shots of flysch.
 

Image credit & copyright: Fran Llano, National Geographic Your Shot / Robert Harding
 

Now here's a tree that looks like it could've been plucked out of Lord of the Rings. Photographer Paolo Woods' image of a dragon's blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari) in Socotra was recently a featured photo by National Geographic. Socotra's archipelago region, some 200 miles from Yemen in the Arabian Sea, is full of plants and creatures uniquely evolved to survive the harsh, arid climate. Dragon's blood trees got their name by their dark red sap, which was used as a dye and medicine by ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The tree is also featured on Yemen's 20-rial coin. Yet the plant—which is related to drought-resistant succulents that grow in the western part of the U.S.—hasn't garnered attention recently because of its fascinating history. Though large forests of dragon's blood cover mountainsides in Socotra, scientists have noticed that few saplings grow among them. Global climate change has negatively affected the amount of clouds and mists in the area, which are the trees' primary sources of water. Add to that the rapidly increasing ecotourism in the area, and both scientists and the some 600 villages in the region have their work cut out for them in preserving the dragon's blood's delicate ecosystem for generations to come.

 

Below: a view of a dragon's blood forest; Yemen's 20-rial coin, featuring the ancient tree.

Image credit & copyright: Paolo Woods, Mark W. Moffett, Dreamstime
 

David Goldblatt's photos express what a a thousand words cannot. The photographer, who died last month at the age of 87, grew up in South Africa, and spent his life documenting that country's brutal system of apartheid and its aftermath. He captured tenderer moments, too, as in A farmer's son with his nursemaid, Heimweeberg, Nietverdiend, Western Transvaal, 1964, above. The young boy and his nurse lean into each other, and she clasps his foot protectively as they gaze shyly at the camera. Goldblatt chose to show, not tell: photo titles provide some information, but he let his subjects' postures and facial expressions do the rest. In the photo, Going Home, below, for example, the sleeping man's painful position and his companion's furrowed brow reflect the grueling nature of their long commute. And we don't know why the teen in the next photo clashed with police, but his bandaged arms and frightened eyes are more evocative than an explanation would be. Goldblatt would experiment with color in later work, but for much of his career he used black and white, because, he explained, "color seemed too sweet a medium to express the anger, disgust, and fear that apartheid inspired."  

Below: more images by David Goldblatt, including Team leader (left) and mine captain (right) on a pedal car, Rustenburg Platinum Mine, Rustenburg, 1971; Going home: Marabastad-Waterval route, 1984;
Fifteen-year old Lawrence Matjee after his assault and detention by the Security Police, Khotso House, de Villiers Street, Soweto, Johannesburg, 1985; and, Errol Seboledisho where he was arrested for shoplifting in 2002.
 

Image credit & copyright: David Goldblatt, Goodman Gallery
 

It wasn't a bomb but deprivation and unemployment that blasted this British neighborhood, leaving its young people idle amid the rubble. In Karen on Overturned Chair, above, and other photos in her series, Youth Unemployment, photographer Tish Murtha depicted the stark poverty in 1980s England under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was a period of factory and mine closures; millions of jobs had been lost and there were few prospects for young people leaving school. Downtrodden urban neighborhoods, like this one in Newcastle, were particularly hard hit. Murtha herself grew up in poverty, and left school at 16 to support herself by selling hotdogs and working in a gas station. She took a photography course in night school, then was accepted at the respected School of Documentary Photography at the University of Wales. Murtha's favored theme was always people, and she photographed them with tenderness and respect. "Growing up we couldn’t go anywhere without her befriending randoms," her daughter, Ella Murtha, told a reporter. Only they weren't random—not after Murtha took their photos and beckoned us, her viewers, to see them, too.  

An exhibit of the artists work, Tish Murtha: Works 1976-1991, is on view at The Photographer's Gallery in London through October 14th.

Below: more photos from the Youth Unemployment series.
 

Image credit & copyright: Tish Murtha, copyright Ella Murtha
 

Leroy "Satchel" Paige is considered one of the greatest pitchers of all time, even though his career was handicapped by segregation in the sport. Paige, born 112 years ago today, quickly won fame in the Negro leagues for his lightening-fast pitching arm, but was barred from the segregated major leagues during his prime playing years. When Paige finally joined the majors as a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians after Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier in 1947, he was already 42 years old. By 1953, Paige was back in the minor leagues, where he remained well into his fifties. In 1965, he was invited to pitch during a game between the Kansas City Athletics and the Boston Red Sox. A reporter accused the team owner of treating the 59-year-old Paige like a circus freak: "He's throwing the old man to the lions, exposing him to the possibility of humiliation and ridicule." But Paige pitched three innings and struck out all but one batter. Some wags dubbed Paige the "Methuselah of Baseball," but whether by inclination or necessity he always downplayed his years. "Age is a question of mind over matter," he quipped. "If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter."
 

Below: Paige winds up for a pitch.
 

Image credit & copyright: Alabama News Center; Getty Images
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Winter gets weirder every year! This whimsical image is part of Julie Blackmon's recent exhibit at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York. The work is called Fake Weather. It pokes fun at the fake news phenomenon, when misinformation masquerades as truth in news stories. It also comments on global warming; the inspiration came to Blackmon during an unusually warm winter in her hometown of Springfield, Missouri. The children in the middle of the scene are friends from Blackmon's community. Behind the counterfeit winter backdrop are more friends armed with artificial snow. (90 gallons of pretend snow were used in total.) The wheelbarrow on the image's right side playfully reminds the viewer that Blackmon staged her work. Fake Weather shows what goes into creating her shots, which portray domestic scenes with a hint of dark humor. Blackmon may be from America's heartland, but she's influenced by 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painter Jan Steen. Steen's work often showed families in humorous disarray; these spoke to Blackmon, the oldest of nine children and a busy mother of three. Blackmon's images marry Steen's domestic mischief with a mature look at a rapidly changing world. Instead of spending time sifting through real and fake news on our Facebook feeds, we might soak up some of her pictures instead!
 

Below: Two kids play on a sidewalk near a shop that sells guns; children walk through a field on a wintery day; a woman and a boy pass the time in a waiting room at a veterinarian's office.
 

Image credit & copyright: Julie Blackmon / Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery
 

German photographer Andreas Gursky is all about big—so it's no wonder e-commerce giant Amazon caught his attention. In 2016, Gursky visited an Amazon fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona, to photograph thousands of items waiting to be shipped to customers. Founded this week in 1994, the company uses digital algorithms to decide how many units to stock at any given moment; when it's time to package and ship to customers, robots assist human workers looking for the right product. The sheer scale of Gursky's images has drawn comparisons to 19th-century landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. But Gursky explores thoroughly modern problems, like the rapid pace of globalization and the challenges of living in a digitized era. He's photographed a Japanese stock exchange, a Formula 1 racetrack in Bahrain, and cargo containers at an Italian port city. "I'm not interested in a particular place, but in what it says about the world today," he says. Many of his photos are digitally altered to heighten their sense of uniformity. Since this image was taken, Amazon has added several new fulfillment centers and narrowed its search for a second American headquarters. Thankfully, we have Gursky to document our quickly changing planet!

Below: a view of Tokyo taken in 2017; a field of solar panels shot in France in 2016.
 

Image credit & copyright: Andreas Gursky / DACS
 

Turn up the radio and pass the sunscreen! In Coney Island, above, photographer Sid Grossman captures the sweaty intimacy of young people enjoying a day at the beach. Grossman took this joyful photo in 1947 when his career was flourishing, but a few years later his life took a darker turn. In the 1930s, Grossman had co-founded the Photo League, a collective that provided classes, darkroom space, and community. Throughout the '30s and '40s, the League was the dynamic center of photography in the U.S. Grossman and other League artists—like Weegee, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt—believed in street photography's ability to illuminate social inequities. Still, Grossman’s powerful, compassionate photographs were more humanistic than didactic. That didn't prevent the photographer from becoming a target of the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. The League was declared a subversive organization in 1948, and Grossman was denounced as a Communist. The photographer retreated to Cape Cod, where he died of a heart attack at 42. Thanks to retrospectives like the one currently showing at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, Grossman and the Photo League are winning some of the recognition they deserve.  

Sid Grossman: Photography, Politics, and the Ethical Image is showing at the Perez Art Museum in Miami through October 28, 2018.  

Below: more images by Sid Grossman including Untitled,
and Aquadulce Cantina, Panama.
 

Image credit & copyright: Sid Grossman, The Met; Howard Greenberg Gallery; Perez Art Museum Miami
 

Holy black holes, Batman! NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory recently uncovered this view of thousands of black holes located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. These stellar mass black holes often reside at the center of galaxies, and typically form when a large star explodes into a Supernova. They weigh anywhere from five to 30 times the mass of our sun, too! One of the reasons this image is also so spectacular is that black holes do not actually emit light or x-rays; Chandra was able to detect the clusters because of X-ray binaries, where a companion star close to a black hole will swirl around it, creating friction that leaves heated traces of x-rays, which show up as the bright spots above. Since a companion star could become a black hole from this process, it's entirely possible that the cluster keeps perpetually growing because of the transformations. That's one rabbit hole you don't want to go down!

 

Image credit & copyright: NASA
 

Hattye Yarbrough has spent a lifetime collecting and sharing others' stories. Her work as an informal collector of African-American history has been recognized by the Smithsonian, where her scrapbook of World War II memorabilia from black soldiers is on display at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington D.C. In a recent USA Today Network profile, Yarbrough revealed the significance of the portrait in her hands: as part of Chick History's "March to the 19th" campaign to collect suffrage stories of African-American women, Yarbrough dug up this old photo of her finely-dressed aunt Annie Sybil Thomas Jarrett. It was Aunt Sybil who ignited Yarbrough's interest in education and history. Once, when the two were reading and discussing works of Harlem Renaissance literature, Yarbrough asked her aunt why she'd never heard of those writers in school. Jarrett replied "'We have been left out of the records, that's why…." A University of Memphis professor associated with Chick History confirmed the image was taken by James P. Newton, the first black professional photographer in Memphis. Yarbrough's significant work proves history isn't just written by the victors, it's also written by our loved ones who refuse to forget us.

 

Image credit & copyright: Jim Weber / The Commercial Appeal
 

This is one fire we don't want to put out! The 48th annual New York City Pride March kicked off June 24, and it saw more than just rainbow flags, body paint, and dancing. In the midst of an estimated two million onlookers, New York City Fire Department EMT Trudy Bermudez (shown left) proposed to her girlfriend of one-and-a-half years, paramedic Tayreen Bonilla (shown right). If it isn't obvious already, Bonilla said yes! Bermudez told reporters she'd been planning out the proposal for six months, and worried popping the question during the parade would be cliché (which it's not, of course). Her aim was to drop to one knee on Fifth Avenue and 8th Street, the middle of the parade, but when she and Bonilla neared the historic Stonewall Inn—the site of the Stonewall riots—Bermudez just couldn't help herself. The couple's impassioned elopement had their NYFD friends and throngs of others cheering. Because who needs gold when there's love at the end of this rainbow!
 

Below: more pride month photos, including: a man getting down during the 2018 Boston Pride parade; a pig showing its support for equality; and dancers in the Auckland Pride Parade in New Zealand.
 

Image credit & copyright: Kena Betancur / Getty / Scott Eisen / Daisy Korpics for Fast Company / Fiona Goodall
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this vacation-themed favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Bilbo Baggins, is that you? This image may look like the stuff of fantasy, but it was actually taken inside the world's largest known cave: Vietnam's Son Doong. Photographer Gregg Jaden recently added himself to a list of fewer than 800 people to have explored the three-mile-long cave, which boasts a ceiling 650 feet in height. In the photo above, one of his companions stands atop the Garden of Edam, a small jungle formed within the Subterrane. Over millennia, the three-million-year-old cave's ceiling collapsed, creating dolines, or skylights within caves. The lines allow beams of vibrant light into the belly of the cavern, which in turn allows the foliage to thrive. The Garden of Edam is only one of Son Doong's many incredible features, which include mirror-like pools, massive stalagmites, and other formations so intricate, they resemble sculptures. But be wary; if Son Doong sounds like a dream vacation, be prepared to cross over 47 rivers and fight through some of the densest jungles in the world to reach it—arguably a small price to pay to experience a landmark this awesome!

 
Below: more pictures of Son Doong Cave.
 

 
Image credit & copyright: Gregg Jaden

Maria Mitchell always had her eyes on the stars. A librarian at the time, she was searching the sky one night in 1847 with her father’s telescope when she discovered a comet. The celestial object, dubbed "Miss Mitchell’s Comet," won her overnight celebrity. She was hired to be Vassar College's first professor; she is shown above with some of her students. Mitchell, who died on this day in 1889, was America’s first professional woman astronomer, and the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—though she never attended college. Her training in astronomy came from her father, a school teacher and avid stargazer, and her own explorations. At Vassar, Mitchell passed her passion for the stars on to her students, many of whom became accomplished scientists in their own right. She urged women to "throw off reverence for authority" as she put it, and think for themselves. She followed this precept in her own life: in 1878, Mitchell—accompanied by her sister and several former students—traveled 2,000 miles across the country to view the Denver eclipse. Besides two scientists' wives, Mitchell and her entourage were the only women at the viewing site.
 

Below: 1851 portrait of Mitchell by H. Dassell.
 

 
Image credit & copyright: Vassar College, Wikipedia
 

When these little muscle men were posing for the camera 40 years ago, they probably never imagined they'd be featured in The New York Times. Yet that's exactly where they are, with selections from nearly 3,000 color slide subjects in an unearthed collection titled Scenes Unseen: The Summer of '78. Most of the photos were taken between August and November that year, when the Times was on strike. This left staff photographers with time to do freelance work for the city parks commissioner, Gordon J. Davis, who asked for photos of New York City parks, and people in them. The spirit they they captured seems like a bygone novelty these days: kids and adults without cell phones, gathering to picnic, frolic in the water, play double-dutch jump rope, and make new connections. The late '70s and '80s in New York is generally thought of as an era when a combination of high crime rates, new drug epidemics, white flight, and failing infrastructure contributed to the city's decline. These lost and finally found-photos show us how New Yorkers weren't complacent with that narrative, especially when there was fun to be had in exploring the five boroughs.
 

Below: more summer revelers from Scenes Unseen: The Summer of '78, which recently closed at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park.
 

Image credit & copyright: Paul Hosefros, Joyce Dopkeen, New York Times
 

Those bright colors might be attracting the wrong kind of attention! The Edwards' fig parrot, photographed above in Spain's Canary Islands, is one of many parrot species facing population issues related to deforestation, habitat loss, and demand for the intelligent birds as pets. A recent study in National Geographic included the above image as well as photos of other struggling species like blue-throated macaws, which rely for survival on a type of palm tree that only grows in Bolivia. 346 out of 350 documented species of parrots in the wild are eligible for protection by a global agreement called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Though parrots available in pet stores may be bred from captivity, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the majority of pet parrots are plucked from the wild. Researchers at a university in South Africa are now developing a method to determine if a specific bird was caught in nature. If their research pans out, airport inspectors and pet stores could take samples from a particular bird and quickly figure out whether it was created in a way that complies with international standards. We sure hope that strategy takes flight!
 

Below: the male red-winged parrot; the gang-gang cockatoo; the blue-throated macaw.

 

Image credit & copyright: Joel Sartore / National Geographic