the visual poetry of graphic necessity...

another photo from the same album as yesterday's post. this time a photo of a wall chart of staff at a radar station, also dated 1939. i'm assuming someone took the photo because their name is on the sign, but perhaps it was someone, like myself, who simply responded to the form follows function design of the image itself. certainly not an unfamiliar form in the context of my own visual vocabulary... and it is nice that the image looks a bit like a satellite, many years before there was such a thing...

the visual poetry of orion seen by an amateur astronomer...

yesterday, i found this beautiful 8x10 inch photograph in a scrapbook at the flea market. dated 1939, it's a photo of 'the great nebulae of orion', as seen through a telescope. the exposure time was 2 hours and 5 minutes, and while i know it's not true, i like to imagine the photographer staring up at the stars for that exact amount of time, deciding to close the shutter at just the right moment, knowing internally that the image would be just right.

beneath the photo is a quote from something i know not what:
"a single misty star
which is the second in a row of stars
that seem a sword beneath a belt of thee".