The Photography of Eudora Welty

“A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away.” — Eudora Welty

This video from the Smithsonian Magazine showcases some of Eudora Welty’s photographs of Mississippi during the Depression, with commentary by friends and scholars including Reynolds Price and Robert MacNeil. They’re interesting, but I really just like to watch the photographs drift by.

Eudora Welty as Photographer — “Photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Eudora Welty display the empathy that would later infuse her fiction” (By T.A. Frail; Smithsonian Magazine; April, 2009)

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A Second Look at TinEye

TinEye is a reverse image search engine — show it an image, and it searches for copies of the images on other web pages. It uses complex algorithms that allow it to recognize pictures even if they have been cropped or altered. I first wrote about this over a year ago here: TinEye Image Search

I enjoyed playing around with the service, and I especially liked the examples using iconic images like American Gothic and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. It’s fascinating to see all the different ways these images have been changed and used for various purposes, and it’s impressive that TinEye’s algorithms are able to identify these altered images as copies of the original work.

However, as interesting as I thought Tineye was, I didn’t actually find it much practical use in finding unauthorized copies of my images on other webpages. I searched for some of my photographs that were used on various pages that I knew about, just to test it out, and had very little success. Tineye acknowledged that its database was still relatively small but growing all the time, but I stopped bothering using it to look for copyright issues. I had better success looking in my Flickr referrer logs and just doing word searches on Google Images.

But recently I decided to give it another try, and was quite impressed with my results. I searched a few of my photographs and found several unauthorized copies on various websites. Nearly all of my photographs are posted on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-Commercial / Sharealike license, and it’s discouraging to find people downloading them and using them without the required attribution, and on commercial sites. I send a message to each site asking that they add the credit line or remove the image, and most people apologize and comply. A few don’t respond or don’t seem to understand the problem, and one person was quite rude. It seems that there are a lot of people who ought to know better, including bloggers, journalists, teachers and sometimes even my fellow librarians, who would never commit plagiarism and give sources for quotations but treat other people’s photographs as if they had no value other than as eye candy, unworthy of a simple credit line. It’s especially annoying to find my work used without credit on blogs whose content is marked All Rights Reserved.

(You’ll have to forgive the soapbox — I found a lot of my uncredited copies of my photographs floating around the web today, thanks to Tineye!)

Links:

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The Quiz Kids

Vintage Postcards from Cardcow.com

I ran across this postcard on CardCow last week. It’s one of the preprinted cards sent to people who submitted questions to the popular Quiz Kids radio program. As an old time radio buff, I knew that the program featured bright kids answering questions to win Savings Bonds, and that the regulars became junior celebrities who occasionally made appearances on other programs. I had recently heard them on an episode of the Jack Benny program. I also knew that the Quiz Kids program was the inspiration for It’s a Wise Child, the fictional radio program in J. D. Salinger’s stories about the Glass family.

The Quiz Kids (Cover Image)But I really didn’t know much about the show itself. I tried listening to the show online at the Internet Archive, but it’s too dated and hokey even for me.

I had better luck with the 1982 book Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids: Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted by Ruth Duskin Feldman, one of the most popular Quiz Kid girls. The first part of the book is the author’s story of her family, her experiences as a Quiz Kid, and her life after she graduated from the program at age 16. Her parents were loving and supportive, her memories of her Quiz Kids experiences are mostly positive, and her adult life seems to have been successful. The stories of the other Quiz Kids are actually more interesting, some did well for themselves, sometimes in unexpected ways, and others ran into difficulties and disappointments. Although their experiences were unique because of the attention and fame they won as Quiz Kids, but they are also case studies in growing up gifted.

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Wrapped Canines

My Lady of the Towel

I took this picture of my dog Nina three years ago and posted it on Flickr. I love the expression on her face, and the way the draped towel makes her look like the Virgin Mary. It wasn’t posed, I was drying her off in the bathtub, turned to get another towel to wrap her in and lift her out, and caught the expression on her face, and grabbed the camera.

I haven’t looked at this in a while, but it yesterday it received an invitation to put it in the Flickr group Wrapped Canines. This is what I love about Flickr, there’s a group for everything. There isn’t one dog group, there are dozens of dog groups, each with its own style or topic. There are general dog groups like Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!, with nearly 60,000 members and over 500,000 photos, and groups for specific types of pictures: Dog-Tired for sleeping dogs, Dogs in Lakes and Dogs in Pools, groups for specific breeds from Bernese Mountain Dogs to Shih Tzu Central, and much, much more.

Wrapped Canines is a group for a very specific type of photo: “Dogs in towels, dogs in hoods, dogs in blankets, dogs peeking out from behind curtains and drapes, dogs who are partially visible due to their involvement in fabric.” But apparently that’s not specific enough, because the group’s admin needed to add “Please, no dogs merely sitting on top of the bed – must be wrapped. Any costumes, please have a wrap, hood, or drape effect to it.” I understand this — I run 23 of my own groups on Flickr, and you wouldn’t believe how people try to push the boundaries.

I added my picture of wrapped Nina to the group, and spent way too much time looking at everyone else’s pictures of much-loved dogs draped in towels, blankets and scarves. Silly and cute stuff– definitely raised my mood!

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