Peggy Weil: Core Memory

There is a huge screen that must be more than 25 feet high on the wall in one of the entrance areas at MoMA.  It is a screen that shows a very slow movie scrolling upward, made up of 88 digital images of ice cores drilled through the Greenland ice sheet between 1989 and 1993.  The drilling of the cores descends two miles and 110,000 years in time. Each year there is an annual "layer" of ice that is formed and these layers preserve time vertically, by trapping bubbles of atmospheric gases, giving a record of what was in the air at the time.  I chose to do a close up cropped version of the photograph first because it is mysterious photograph - you are not sure of what you are looking at.

This is the full frame image of the core movie, slowly scrolling upwards.  To watch the entire movie of 88 cores takes something more than 4 hours!  But it was fascinating to look for changes in the appearance of the ice as the movie slowly scrolled up.

 

Can You Slice Up An Onion, Please?

 Kathy and I both saw a photo in Newsday today with a recipe from Marge Perry for "Sausage and Peppers Pasta."  Kathy wanted to make it but it required a lot of chopping so I agreed to do all of that and then she would make the dish.  So I said where should I start?  So she said "Can you slice up half an onion, please, really thin?" and I said "sure."  So I cut an onion in half, and was stunned by what I saw!  Isn't this interesting, and beautiful as well!  So forget the slicing for the moment - I brought the half onion over to the window and got my camera with a close up lens, and took this photograph.  So here you go!

The Red Tree and the Blue Bed...

In addition to the major exhibit that Liz and I saw at MoMA, we also saw two much smaller exhibits.  This one is called "Frida and Diego: The Last Dream."  Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera were two of Mexico's most famous and beloved artists who worked from the 1920's to her death in 1954.  The story is complicated but the short version is this construction of a red tree growing on a blue bed may have been a model for part of the stage set for an opera about the two artists.  There was no text block on display and the guide I talked to said they had not been told exactly what this was.  But as you can see, it is an absolutely stunning work of art, created for the stage.

I was immediately taken by the roots of the tree and the bed and then the ground underneath and so I photographed that.  Then I thought I should do a wide-angle view of the entire piece.  Just amazing!

 

In Profile

I sat down on a bench to take a rest after seeing the Marcel Duchamp exhibit.  My camera was at my side as it always is.  There was some kind of group listening to a docent explaining something about the exhibit.  I saw this mother and her son at the back of the group and I was taken with their profiles.  I can't explain it exactly but this was clearly a photograph.  I shot about 8 frames as they moved around and chose this one as the best.  I really like this photograph for some reason that I can't explain.

 

The Escalator

During our visit to MoMA, Liz and I were trying to figure out what floor we wanted to go to next.  We were standing looking down onto the escalators criss crossing each other and I took a wide angle photo but it was not that interesting.  So I zoomed in a bit and saw this woman all alone on the down escalator looking at her phone.  So I started shooting and realized what was going to make this photograph, was to have other people visible at the exact same time. So then I was looking at both the up escalator on the right and at the opening showing the floor below, on the left.  I was rapidly shooting but saw both the small pedestrian on the lower left and the passenger on the up escalator on the upper right!  Click!  Got it!

 

An Interesting Juxtaposition

Do you see any interesting juxtapositions in this photograph?  This is one of the galleries of the Marcel Duchamp exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.  I stopped and was looking around this corner of the gallery and I saw something that I couldn't believe, and it was about the shadow of one of the objects in the gallery, on the wall over near the guard!  I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it.  It was funny I thought, that the shadow was there and the guard would have no reason to be aware of the shadow's presence!  You can see the object hanging up at the top of the photograph that is creating the shadow on the wall next to the guard.  Just happenstance that the shadow would be where the guard chose to stand.

 

Marcel Duchamp at MoMA

About 20 years ago Liz read a biography of Marcel Duchamp.  When she came to visit us a few days ago, she happened to look for what exhibits were at MoMA.  She was stunned to see that the Marcel Duchamp exhibit was on, and so we both took the train to the city for the day and we spent a wonderful time together at MoMA.  She asked me to take this photograph of her to have as a mememto.  It was an amazing exhibit. There has not been a large exhibit like this since 1973.

I have been doing a lot of selfies recently, haven't I?  But I did want to do one of us at MoMA.  We took this photo in front of the large display that shows what exhibits are on display at this time. What a great father/daughter day we had, just hanging out!