Notes, 2024-12-16.

Alright: I’ve been working on a Long Thing that I'm currently waiting for approval on, and another thing that hasn't totally taken shape yet. But I’ve got a browser, and it’s full of open tabs, and I’ve really got to close some of them out. Cui bono? You bono.

SCOPE CREEP

• Here’s a corporate blog post about how speakers are tested with sine sweeps. This is significantly more technical than I ever got while sourcing speakers for The Public Radio, and now that I’ve let this company’s YouTube page run for a few minutes, I wish that I had watched something like it before I visited The Public Radio’s speaker manufacturer, in Dongguan, in 2017 and 2019. I certainly didn’t see our speaker transducers being laser scanned there, though the assembly process did look more or less like the one shown here.
• The United Kingdom is a country, and it has a flag. England is a part of the United Kingdom; it has its own flag, as do Wales and Scotland.  Ireland, which is a separate country, has a flag. But Northern Ireland, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, does not have a flag. 
• From the Historic American Engineering Record, a (PDF) poster showing various types of truss designs for historic (mostly wooden) bridges. I looked at this for a while and decided to try and make it into a poster; I’m still waiting for my sample prints, but you can order yourself one here — or join SOW as a Member today and I promise to send you a postcard version when I receive them 💌
• Here’s a well-produced video, from photographic film manufacturer Ilford, of a couple of master photograph printers — people whose job it is to print enlargements of silver gelatin photographs. I had the opportunity to visit one of the locations in this video, Griffin Editions, earlier this year and was told enthusiastically that it is “the place.”
• Typology means the study of types. In photography, you can create a typology by photographing the same type of thing repeatedly. Perhaps the most famous photo-typologies are the ones made by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their typologies were often architectural and frequently industrial; see these water towers, these cooling towers, and these “objects with multiple functions.” For a very different type of typology, I highly recommend Nicholas Nixon’s series of photos of the four Brown sisters.

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was formed in 1937. It was intended to take action: It helped relocate farmers whose land wasn’t productive enough, and it provided education and loans and health insurance to farmers as well. It did not achieve some of its more ambitious founding goals, but it did take concrete action to a totally tangible problem: The fact that there were too many farmers, and they were trying to farm the wrong land, using inadequate tools.

But the FSA also had a photography program. It was headed by Roy Stryker, who officially was chief of the Historical Section of the FSA’s Division of Information; his “job was to collect documents and materials that might have some bearing, later, on the history of the Farm Security Administration.” His boss, Rexford Tugwell, had initially wanted the FSA to resettle the better half of a million people, and Stryker himself would later claim that he saw photographs as “the little brother” to written information. But both Tugwell and Stryker felt like they needed some photographic evidence of the work they were doing, and the photographers they hired came to produce many of the defining images of a generation.

It's odd to me that the FSA's photography program was eventually folded into, of all places, the Office of War Information. These two things — farm security and war information feel not at all related, and according to this archived biography of Palmer the inter-office politics were not totally seamless:

Palmer and Roy Stryker shared creativity and conflict during those years in the dissident approaches to portraying America to herself. While Stryker’s unit showed a national self scrutiny of post depression America, Palmer sought to emphasize a moral building role through his photography. Palmer’s deep belief in promoting the spiritual strength of people permeates his entire career as photographer and filmmaker.

But perhaps the best thing we can say about this time period is that Americans seem to have been capable of building coalitions, and I suppose there is something of a lineage between the "we can do it" attitude reflected in Dorothea Lange's rather hopeless migrant farm workers and Alfred Palmer's much more patriotic (and vibrant) photography.

• The topic of famous botanists came up during the SOW Members' Reading Group call last week. Carl Linnaeus was one; he's the reason that we give species two names. Joseph Dalton Hooker is another; he was the head of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew during a key point in British colonial history, and oversaw the theft of the seeds of both cinchona (the source of quinine, a key treatment for malaria) and Hevea brasiliensis (the Brazilian rubber tree) from South America. George Washington Carver was another; his research was very much aligned with that of the Farm Security Administration, and he did much to disseminate information about crop rotation and the potential uses of crops other than cotton. He was also photographed by the Farm Security Administration, above.