Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

Eagle, Philadelphia, PA, 2010.

Unseasonably cold pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4347068091/

#photography

Social media responses to jokes:

(0) I understood your joke

(1) I understood your joke, but I assume you do not, so be please allow me to explain it to you.

(2) I understood your joke, but did not find it to be sufficiently humorous to warrant my having read it.

(3) I did not understand your joke, but I believe that if had, it would have undoubtedly caused me great personal offense for reasons that you could not have anticipated. I therefore must challenge you to a duel.

@20002ist Neat. Will have to check it out. I love "Department of Terrestrial Magnetism". So specific.

@20002ist I have not! Where? What?

@ai6yr Pretty much. Whatever was left of their original business model collapsed with the Internet.

(Western Union today is mostly a retail money remitter and check cashing outlet for the unbanked, but back in the day was a significant part of US telecom infrastructure, providing data communications including telegraph, teletype, and telegram services).

Bonus microwave tower photo: Western Union Tenleytown Tower, Washington, DC, 2020.

The first commercial terrestrial microwave network wasn't actually AT&T, but rather Western Union (the telegraph/telegram company).

A few remnants of the network survive. This hexagonal concrete tower, built in 1947 down an alley in Tenleytown, Washington, DC, was part of the first experimental link in the network. The cupola of the tower is actually a plexiglass radome concealing microwave antennas.

With a few exceptions (mostly towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. Perhaps we'll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as visual blight, the same way decades after they're (inevitably) gone.

Infrastructure is heroic.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. This particular concrete brutalist design appears not to have been exactly replicated elsewhere; it was site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T "Long Lines" long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 "horn" antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.

Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, of a unique design.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).

The tower's shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.

The wide angle and panoramic orientation give a bit of context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).

AT&T Long Lines "Oak Hill" Tower, San Jose, CA. 2021.

All the pixels, with no static or fading, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51261791084

#photography

How’s my day going? Well, I haven’t been arrested for leaking insider financial data to a notorious child rapist, nor have I been sentenced to life imprisonment for declaring martial law in service of a coup against my democratic government.

So pretty good, I suppose.

Arguably, given the health and environmental effects of things like power plants, perhaps they *should* be ugly. But ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

In any case, if you like this kind of stuff, let me strongly recommend the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher. https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/bernd-and-hilla-becher

Power plants are often regarded as utilitarian eyesores, and are rarely (generally only under public pressure) built to look beautiful or interesting, (London's Battersea Power Station was a notable exception). Generally, like here, any beauty to be found is accidental, a direct consequence of interesting form happening to follow from function.

I shot several versions of this, with exposures that kept the moving train sharp or blurred it to varying degrees. I think this was the most successful attempt, with the train blurred enough to suggest motion, but not so much that it's unrecognizable.

Motion can be a central part of a still photograph.

This was captured with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 HR Digaron-W lens and the Phase One IQ3-100 back. A bit of vertical shift was used to keep everything straight. A 1/2 sec exposure provided just the right amount of motion blur for the passing train.

The power plant generates electricity (now oil fired, converted from coal) as well as steam for Philly's Center City steam loop. The rail bridge extends the former Pennsylvania Railroad's "High Line" into south Philly's Greenwich rail yard.

Schuylkill Co-Generation Plant and Arsenal Bridge, Philadelphia, PA, 2018.

Too many pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/42660696454

#photography

@adamshostack now you will be lectured about how it’s completely fine, and any mishaps are the users’ fault.

Aside: Although the new embassy, which had been in the works for years, opened during the first Trump administration, he disliked the building so much that he refused to attend its official opening. Presumably not enough gold leaf.