Random picture thread for Friday

@JWP said:

I would spend every Saturday morning racing my car at a track like this when I was a kid. Loved it too

Me 2 in the 70's, at Hobby City, Anaheim, CA. Now gone.

For this week's Friday photo posting I am sharing a just found photo essay I had written decades ago as a college student.

I had prepared a report on Lewis W. Hine, the early 1900s photographer who established the then new field of Documentary Photography. Apart from the narrative I added photos he had taken which I then juxtapositioned alongside analogous photos I had taken a half century later.

For those who may be interested here is my “long lost report” with its accompanying photos taken by Hine along with related photos taken by myself.

                LEWIS W. HINE - PHOTOGRAPHER, SOCIOLOGIST, AND PROPHET

If Stieglitz was a Picasso, then Lewis W. Hine was a Rembrandt. Both photographers spoke of their work as art; but while Stieglitz talked of elucidating composition from clouds, Hine referred to modeled Madonnas within his pictures.

Born in Wisconsin, (1874), and educated at The University of Chicago and Columbia University, Hine was a Ph.D with a degree in Sociology before he snapped his first picture in New York’s Central Park. Within a period of thirty-years he completed prestigious photographic assignments for the National Child Labor Committee (Pictures from which public sentiment arose to create new Child Labor Laws), served as the official photographer for the construction of The Empire State Building, photographed for the TVA in the South, and traveled to war-torn Europe to document for the American Red Cross. Yet, by the end of those three decades he was broke, bitter, and unacclaimed.

Broke, because he could never fully compromise his talents and capitalize himself as a commercial photographer. (His photos subsequently used for Labor Union Propaganda were taken for a completely different purpose.)

Bitter, because just as he had brought into harmony his sociological conviction of the dignity and equality of the working man by photographing men at work, a cruel depression struck the country and challenged everything he had proposed.

Finally, unacclaimed, because he had left teaching early in his career and thus abandoned the society of Sociologists, had never sought out the companionship of artists, and had always been alone among the newly growing world of photographers.

What was Lewis W. Hine’s most singular contribution to the field of photography? Some say he never joined in the issues of debate among the photographers of his time because the subjects of his own work was unrelated. While his contemporaries were arguing the merits of various film emulsions, Hine was establishing the new field of Documentary Photography.

Perhaps poverty, bitterness, and unacclaim are the lot of those who dare to be different, but then Prophets never were recognized in their own time.

                                                               ___________

One measure of the significance of Lewis Hine’s work is its universality. To make that point, attached below are a series of four color photos which I had taken and placed side-by-side with four corresponding black and white photos which Hine took.

@SoCalBigMark said:
I cannot believe they wanted to mothball the warthog, such a great aircraft. On a trip to Edwards organised by desertrat we got to see the cannon up close.

These are 2 TITANIUM replica 20mm Auto Cannon shells that the A10 used.