Thursday, June 30, 2011

Searching images

Here's something really cool. I found this utterly haunting photo on a youtube videoe to some piano music of Janacek (who is with me still). The picture looks to me like archetypal childhood - and (also?) the childhood of my parents' generation. In part this must be because it's in black and white... I wonder if there have been many other generations whose image of the time before their birth was visually different (b&w instead of color) than their own... though the millennials will probably be like that, their parents' worlds in still photographs while theirs are all in motion. Perhaps 2D and 3D will be similar.

But here's something even cooler, in its way. You can now can do a Google search with an image! (This is something I've been waiting for; it might in fact have been around for a while, but I only just discovered it.) So I just dragged my screencap of the image into the search box, and learned that the picture is by American photographer Henry Callahan (1912-1999). It's called "Eleanor and Barbara" and was shot in Chicago in 1953. Seems a kindred spirit.

...
Actually it can get surreal pretty quick. (Not a criticism, necessarily!) I put in a picture of a cactus you know, and look what came up!