Hiking - Part 27

 Railroad Tracks

Old railroad tracks or railroad beds (where the tracks have disappeared) can be great places to hike.  Trains can't go up steep grades, only very gentle ones, so your hike is guaranteed to have no steep hills.

It's easy to determine whether the railroad is still used by trains.  If the tracks are rusty on top, like the ones above, then no trains are using the tracks.

If the tracks are shiny, like these ones, then they are still in use.

You can still hike along tracks that are in use, as long as there's room to get out of the way if a train comes through.

Bridges and trestles are more problematic.  The tracks above are shiny, which means that the guy above will be in trouble if he's in the middle of the trestle and a train comes along.

This guy is taking no chances.

The same thing applies to tunnels.  You don't want to be in the situation where the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.  This tunnel has enough room on the sides to get out of the way, and the tracks don't look shiny, so it's probably safe.

Just take commonsense safety precautions, so this doesn't happen.  (Obviously the photo was staged, and he's not really getting run over.)

Then follow the rails, and who knows where they'll take you?

Artists - Part 32

 Gustav Vigeland

Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), above, was a Norwegian sculptor.  

You can get some idea of how highly he is regarded in Norway by looking at the tail of this Norwegian Air plane.

In 1921, the city of Oslo wanted to demolish Vigeland's house to build a library.  In compensation, the city gave Vigeland a new building as a house and studio, and Vigeland promised to donate to the city all his subsequent works of art.

Vigeland now lived next to Frogner Park, and his sculptures began to be installed in the park, starting with this fountain in 1924.

More sculptures were installed in the park.  They depicted men, women, and children, and all were nude.

To me, this sculpture looks like: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

The area of the park devoted to Vigeland's sculptures expanded to include a feature called The Bridge, lined with sculptures.  Vigeland's sculptures are full of life, like this one of an older man about to strike a younger one.

And this sculpture of a man playfully lifting and swinging a child around.

This one is pure fantasy.  It's called Man Attacked by Babies.

Someone liked Man Attacked by Babies so much that he got it tattooed on his chest.

Vigeland's works extended still further in the park, culminating with a large structure of steps leading up to The Monolith, a huge pillar of naked men, women and children carved out of a single block of Norwegian granite.

On the steps surrounding The Monolith are more sculptures of men, women and children.

And the steps have cast-iron gates designed by Vigeland depicting more naked figures.

More cast-iron work surrounding The Monolith.

There are many more Vigeland works in the park – over 200 in all – so that this section of the park has become known as Vigeland Park.

But we will end today with another legacy of Vigeland.  Vigeland won a competition in 1901 to design the gold medal for the Nobel Peace Prize.  The front has an image of Alfred Nobel.  The back, above, features three naked men linking arms, with the Latin words Pro pace et fraternitate gentium (For peace and brotherhood of nations).

Protests - Part 29

 Global Warming Protest on Aletsch Glacier

On August 18, 2007, Greenpeace combined forces with photographer Spencer Tunick to stage a nude protest of global warming on the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland.

About 600 people from all over Europe participated.  For Tunick, it was another opportunity to do another of his "installations" that involve posing large numbers of naked people.

For Greenpeace, it was a way to dramatize the issue of global warming.  The Aletsch Glacier is the largest glacier in Europe, but like glaciers all over the world, it has been shrinking.

The air temperature was about 50 degrees F, which was not too bad, but note that the participants are standing on some kind of little pads so they don't have to stand on the ice with their bare feet.

Here's a rear view for those who enjoy that perspective.

And then they lay down on the ice.  That had to be cold!  The men could be excused if there was some shrinkage.

But speaking of shrinkage, glaciers are shrinking increasingly fast.  More than 80 percent of the famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted away since 1912.  Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting so fast, researches believe that most will virtually disappear by 2035.  That's only 13 years from now.  The cause – global warming – is obvious to those who haven't stuck their head where the sun don't shine.

Vintage Athletes - Part 32

 Muybridge Runners

We continue our look at the stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge published in his 1887 book Animal Locomotion.  Muybridge did his work at the University of Pennsylvania, and his subjects were mostly students or graduates who excelled in the activity being portrayed.  Today we look at Muybridge's runners.

I made the gif above from plate 62 in the book, labeled "Running at full speed."  Muybridge's models were only identified by number, not by name.  This one was model 37, noted as "the champion runner."  So he was probably the star of Penn's track team, but I don't know his name.

This gif is from plate 63, showing model 46.  A few of Muybridge's models have been subsequently identified, and model 46 was Dr. Jacob K. Shell.

Here's a portrait of Dr. Shell in later life.  We saw him last time as one of Muybridge's wrestlers.  He was a talented athlete who eventually became head football coach at Swarthmore, then athletics director at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and finally athletics director at Penn.

Here's a gif from another plate in the book showing Jacob K. Shell running, plate 68.  He was not the only subject filmed wearing this curious hat.  Several other of Muybridge's models wore the same hat, including the guy in our first gif today.  Apparently the purpose of the hat was that the pompom in the center of it provided a point that could be easily measured if someone was making a scientific study of the motion shown in the photographs.

Almost all the plates in the book showed the same activity photographed from two different angles.  This gif is from the second sequence of photos in plate 68, showing a front view of Jacob K. Shell running.

This gif is from plate 64 showing model 33 running.  I have not seen model 33 identified.

This is model 55 running in plate 66.  Again, the model is unidentified, but he looks older than the other models.  In addition to Penn students, Muybridge's models did include some Penn professors, so it's possible that this is one of them.

This is model 47, again unidentified, running in plate 67.  This plate also included two views of the subject, one from the side and this view from the front.

Next time, we'll look at the action in depth in Muybridge's plate "Baseball Error."

Ivy League Posture Photos - Part 8

 Ivy League Posture Photos

I've updated my comments about the posture photo program, so even if you've seen my previous posture photo posts, read on.

The Ivy League posture photo program originated at Harvard, which had taken nude posture photos of incoming freshmen since 1880.  In 1940, the Harvard posture photo program was taken over by professor E.A. Hooten and psychologist William H. Sheldon.  Sheldon was the inventor of the idea of "somotypes": ectomorph (skinny), mesomorph (muscular) and endomorph (fat) body types, which these researchers believed were correlated with mental properties such as personality and temperament.  The also believed in Nazi-like eugenic theories, now completely discredited.  They wanted to use the posture photos to "prove" their theories.  

Somehow, Hooten and Sheldon convinced other Ivy League schools such as Yale and Princeton and some of their Seven Sisters counterparts such as Vassar, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke to start taking nude posture photos, which they did from the 1940s through the 1960s.  (UPDATE: Yale, and possibly the other schools, were taking nude posture photos long before Hooten and Sheldon.  The Yale nude posture photo program started in 1919.)  There is no evidence that the people taking the photos at Yale and other schools believed in the eugenic theories or used the photos for anything more than detection of posture problems, although Sheldon may have gotten access to the photos.

Here are six more posture photos taken at Yale that I had the opportunity to acquire.  Posture photos taken at Yale before 1952 were a side view, like all of these.

This is Yale freshman Robert Allardyce Cairns in 1948.  The month is missing, but it was probably taken on the same day as the following photo, January 16, 1948.

Note the strange pins stuck to his back and chest.  The pins were stuck on at certain points for later posture analysis.  Supposedly, by examining the angles formed by connecting the points where the pins touched the body, certain posture problems could be detected.

This is Yale freshman Landon Crawford Burns, Jr. on January 16, 1948.  The background, which is dark in all the other profile photos, almost looks like a photographic negative, except the student's body isn't a negative.  I don't know why it came out that way, but that's what the original photo looks like.

This is Yale freshman Alister Michael Soutar on October 17, 1949.

This is Yale freshman Douglas Chapman Frackelton on October 20, 1949.

This is Yale freshman Aaron Joseph Siegal on October 21, 1949.

This is Yale freshman Herman Stanford Kohlmeyer, Jr. on October 18, 1949.

Were these photos an invasion of privacy for the students?  By today's standards, yes.  By the standards of the day, not so much.  In that era, guys were routinely naked around each other in locker rooms and in swimming pools when women weren't present.  Being asked to strip and even being photographed naked as part of a posture examination would not seem too outrageous, since the staff conducting this was all-male (and remember that Yale was an all-male school).

If any of these guys are still alive, my guess is that they would be happy for people to see what they looked like as fresh young 18-year-olds.

The Naked Farmer - Part 5

 The Naked Farmer - Western Australia

We continue our series of photos posted by the Naked Farmer, Ben Brooksby, a young Australian farmer who takes and posts photos of naked Australian farmers on social media sites.  The naked photos are to get people's attention, and his message is to encourage people with mental health issues like suicidal thoughts to talk about it with someone and not to hide it away.  Ben himself had suffered from panic attacks in school.

Farmers send naked photos to Ben from all over Australia.  Today's photos are from the state of Western Australia, abbreviated as WA.  Above, the westernmost point in Australia.

Western Australia is huge, occupying the western third of the continent.  It's fifty percent larger than Alaska.  Above is a stretch of route 1 along the south coast that runs straight as a ruler for 90 miles.  As to whether the guy in the photo is straight, I can't say.

This is Eighty Mile Beach on the northwestern coast, over 900 miles away from the previous photo but still in Western Australia.

Disclosure: I edited out a girl who was standing between the two guys.  Of course, she didn't fit my blog's theme, but she was also wearing a bathing suit, so she shouldn't have been in a "naked farmer" photo to begin with.

This photo was labeled "Albany, WA."  There is one big city in Western Australia, Perth, where 80 percent of the people in the state live.  The rest of the state is sparsely populated.

This one was labeled "Fifty shades of chocolate, Gascoyne, WA."

Eight farmers look over the cattle in the Pilbara region, WA.

And there are sheep, too.  This one was labeled "Josh Ball, ewe better keep an eye out for us, Dumbleyung, WA."

I love the Australian place names, like Dumbleyung.

And where there are sheep, there are bags of wool.  Baa baa black sheep ...

We end with this photo labeled "Sunset, living like a lord, Broome, WA."  Naked on the beach with a beer and a beautiful sunset.  What more could an Aussie want?

Lots more Naked Farmer photos to come.  Stay tuned.