the passenger engine

United Artists Theater

Fort Shelby Hotel

Ballroom, Fort Wayne Hotel

Ballroom, Lee Plaza Hotel

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography

Stephen Wiltshire of London is drawing a panorama of New York City from memory. Wiltshire, who has autism, took a 20-minute ride over the city in a helicopter last Friday. Wiltshire has drawn panoramas of eight cities: Tokyo, Rome, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai, Jerusalem, and London. The New York panorama will be his ninth and last.

The public will be able to visit Wiltshire while he works on his New York panorama from 10am to 5pm, Monday, October 26 to Friday, October 30 at the Pratt Institute’s Juliana Curran Terian Design Center.

Like a Skyline Is Etched in His Head, New York Times

stephenwiltshire.co.uk

Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina, 1955

Charleston, South Carolina, 1955

Trolley—New Orleans, 1955

“It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.” —Robert Frank

Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
September 22, 2009—January 3, 2010

Limestone fountain spout.

Gold necklace set with turquoise, garnet, and pyrite.

Folding gold crown. Could be laid flat and packed in a saddlebag when the tribe moved from place to place.

Omara Khan Massoudi knows how to keep a secret. Massoudi is director of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Like the French citizens during World War II who hid works of art in the countryside to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands, Massoudi and a few trusted tahilwidars—key holders—secretly packed away Afghanistan’s ancient treasures when they saw their country descend into an earthly hell.

First came the Soviet invasion in 1979, followed about ten years later by a furious civil war that reduced much of Kabul to ruins. As Afghan warlords battled for control of the city, fighters pillaged the national museum, selling the choicest artifacts on the black market and using museum records to kindle campfires. In 1994 the building was shelled, destroying its roof and top floor. The final assault came in 2001, when teams of hammer-wielding Taliban zealots came to smash works of art they deemed idolatrous.

Afghanistan’s Hidden Treasures, National Geographic

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
June 23—September 20, 2009

French photographer André Zucca was hired by the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal to capture scenes of Paris flourishing under German occupation. Joseph Goebbels decreed that the French capital should be “animated and gay” to show off the “new Europe.” Zucca was provided with rare Agfacolor film. His are the only known color photographs of occupied Paris.

After the liberation, Zucca was arrested but never prosecuted. He worked under an assumed name as a wedding photographer until his death in 1976.

Andre Zucca’s photographs of gay Paris at war paint an uneasy portrait of city collaboration, The Times (London)

LiveJournal: bekar

East German By Design: The ABCs of Communist Consumer Culture, Spiegel Online

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009, Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind.

What is most shocking is not the fraud itself, but that it was brazen and entirely without pretext. The final figures put Mousavi’s vote below thirty-five per cent, and not because of a split among reformists; they have Karroubi pulling less than one per cent of the vote. To announce a result this improbable, and to do it while locking down the Interior Ministry, sending squads of Revolutionary Guards into the streets, blacking out Internet and cell-phone communication, and shuttering the headquarters of the rival candidates, sends a chilling message to the people of Iran—not only that the Islamic Republic does not care about their votes, but that it does not fear their wrath. Iranians, including many of the original founders and staunch supporters of the revolution, are angry, and they will demonstrate. But they will be met with organized and merciless violence. Already, YouTube clips are streaming out of Iran, many of them showing riot police savagely beating protestors.

In the days before the vote, my Iranian contacts breathlessly compared the atmosphere in Iran to that of 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution. In the last twenty-four hours, the unavoidable analogy has become 1989. The big question is where we are: Wenceslas Square or Tiananmen.

Iran’s Stolen Election by Laura Secor, The New Yorker

Scelere velandum est scelus.
One crime must be concealed by another. —Seneca

On June 4, 1989, seven weeks of peaceful protest were ended with tanks and guns. The world watched as soldiers fired on students, workers, and ordinary citizens demonstrating for democracy and human rights. Many were shot in the back as they fled. The Chinese red cross reported 2,600 deaths, while the official government record is 241.

The protests and massacre have become known among dissidents as the “June 4th Movement” or simply “6/4” but many younger Chinese are unaware of the date’s significance.

The Chinese search engine Baidu now blocks at least 19 derivations of “six four,” including homophones, the abbreviation “SF,” and “63+1.” Some internet users have begun to evade censors by referring to the date as May 35th.

Days ahead of the 20th anniversary, the Chinese government has forbidden foreign television crews and photographers from filming Tiananmen square, detained dissidents, blacked out BBC news broadcasts, blocked web sites including Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, and halted delivery of international newspapers.

Today in China some wore white, the color of mourning, as a form of silent protest and 100,000 people took part in a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong.

Magnum Photos: Remembering Tiananmen

Frontline: The Tank Man