Photos - 2025

 Sunrise in the East

Sunset On the West

Credits:
1. The top two photographs are by Daniel Pullen and there are more in this article:
"Battling The Sea On The Outer Banks,' Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, Nov.12, 2025.
2. The third photo is from: "2025: The Year in Pictures - Reflections of Turbulent Times," NYT, Dec.31, 2025. The caption:

Jan. 9 Los Angeles

"A house destroyed by the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and engulfed thousands of homes. Once known for its stunning views, the Pacific Palisades area was left unrecognizable by the blaze." Kyle Grillot for The New York Times

3.The photo of the ICE posters is from: "ICE Plans to Spend $100 Million on Influencer-Driven 'Wartime' Recruitment Campaign," The Washington Post, Drew Harwell & Joyce Sohyun Lee, Dec. 31, 2025.
  "An internal ICE document shared among immigration officials details plans to use influencers and geo-targeted ads to rapidly hire thousands of deportation officers."
4.The picture of the rubble of the East Wing is from" "New Images Offer Closer Look at Demolition For the White House Ballroom," Jonathan Edwards, The Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2025. Also lost were many old trees. 

   Pictures Are Worth Thousands of Words, But These Sum It Up For 2025

"Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful: A damage assessment of the President’s first year back in the White House", By Susan B. Glasser, The Atlantic, Dec.31, 2025

  "No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.

   Did we anticipate that Trump would come back to office wanting to rule as a king, consumed by revenge and retribution, and encouraged by sycophants and yes-men who would insure that he faced few of the constraints that hampered him in his first term? Yes, but now we know that bracing for the worst did not make the inevitable any less painful. In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them."

The London Free Press

 

The Good Old Days
   Seventy-five years ago that brief article was published in The Times (of London - the other one, June 14, 1949) when The London Free Press turned 100.  It is obviously a slow news day here and I just thought I would take the time to remind you that newspapers were once thicker and there were more of them.
    Although one can now find and read the older and much thicker newspapers that were published in the United States, and in B.C. and Alberta, that is not the case for most newspapers in Ontario unless you have access to some commercial database or travel to a library and attempt to read them on a microfilm machine. You can, however, view over a million photographs that were published in The London Free Press, by going up to the Western and consulting The London Free Press Collection of Photographic Negatives. 

   One can, of course, search the U.S. newspapers for articles about London and many are found.
   

For example, The Nome Nugget noticed in 1946 that reporters here had their own plane.
   

London is also found in many advertisements, the loss of which is the reason why we now don't have many papers. Here is one from the New York Tribune, July 18, 1909

The Bonus:
   I was able to find a partial copy of The London Free Press centennial edition in the County of Brant Public Library. Here is what the front page looks like and the readers back then still had 231 left to read. 

Periodical Ramblings (11)

 

A New Book About LOOK

  Although you would have to be over fifty to have read this magazine when it was still being published, you will probably have seen a copy and surely some of the photographs published within it. It was an important magazine in the United States and that is why Andrew Yarrow has written a book about it. Here is a description of the book:

"Andrew L. Yarrow tells the story of Look magazine, one of the greatest mass-circulation publications in American history, and the very different United States in which it existed. The all-but-forgotten magazine had an extraordinary influence on mid-twentieth-century America, not only by telling powerful, thoughtful stories and printing outstanding photographs but also by helping to create a national conversation around a common set of ideas and ideals. Yarrow describes how the magazine covered the United States and the world, telling stories of people and trends, injustices and triumphs, and included essays by prominent Americans such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Margaret Mead. It did not shy away from exposing the country’s problems, but it always believed that those problems could be solved. Look, which was published from 1937 to 1971 and had about 35 million readers at its peak, was an astute observer with a distinctive take on one of the greatest eras in U.S. history—from winning World War II and building immense, increasingly inclusive prosperity to celebrating grand achievements and advancing the rights of Black and female citizens. Because the magazine shaped Americans’ beliefs while guiding the country through a period of profound social and cultural change, this is also a story about how a long-gone form of journalism helped make America better and assured readers it could be better still."

The Photographs
   This new book, Look: How A Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-20th-Century America, contains some photographs and more can be found on the Internet, offered mostly by people trying to sell old issues of the magazine. The Library of Congress has over four million of them which were donated when the magazine folded. They remain, at this point, undigitized. The Museum of the City of New York has some relating to that city and a few of those can be viewed here and here. 

The Last of LOOK
   Look ceased publication in 1971 and, as Yarrow notes: 
"The end of Look (and Life a year later, on December 29, 1972) marked the end of the mass- circulation, general-interest magazine and the greatest days of photojournalism. News magazines like Time and Newsweek could still appeal to the nation's opinion leaders and much of middle America, but their content was more limited, and photos were mostly an afterthought."

Sources: 

   An e-version of the book is available in the Western Libraries for those fortunate enough to have access. Western also has this earlier book: The Forgotten Fifties: America's Decade From the Archives of Look Magazine, by James Conaway. 

  My last ramble was about the magazines held in The Steven Lamazow Collection of American Periodicals. 

The Bonus:
   The director Stanley Kubrick was a photojournalist at Look. Western also has a book about that: Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism.

The Ruins of Detroit

 

   Near the end of the year, I am cleaning out various email compartments and in one of them found a reference to this book: Detroit in Ruins. It is from a decade ago when I learned about the book from this review: “Detroit in Ruins: The Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre,” Sean O’Hagan, The Observer, Jan. 2, 2011. The subtitle: “In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America.” That is one of their photographs above.

There you see another one. The reason I noticed and kept the review is that the photographs in it were beautiful, even though they recorded devastation. As the reviewer notes: This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured in image after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where every tower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes where the baroque stonework, often made from marble imported from Europe, is slowly crumbling and collapsing....They have also captured for posterity the desolate interiors that once made up the city's civic infrastructure: courthouses, churches, schools, dentists, police stations, jails, public libraries and swimming pools, all of which have most of their original fixtures and fittings intact.

You can still read the review and fortunately view some of the photographs, as well. The place to begin is at the Marchand Meffre website. More can be found at the publisher - Steidl. The price of the book is listed at 88 euros, but it is out of print.

If you wish to purchase your own copy, it now will cost you a bit more. Unfortunately it wasn't purchased by a London public library, or by Western.

I wrote about Steidl, "the best printer in the world," in my post about Gasoline Stations. For a fine Canadian printer, see Lumiere Press and Michael Torosian.

North of Long Tail

Lake Erie

  

   'Long Tail' is how Indigenous people described Lake Erie and "North of Long Tail" is the title of a special photography project by Colin Boyd Shafer done with the support of Environmental Defence Canada. It is about the people and places on our, north side of the lake. 

Beautiful Photographs

   I will not force you to read on. You can go directly to the photographs at North of Long Tail. Among the people profiled you will find Ms Notebomer from Stratford (pictured above) who, at 14, swam Lake Erie from Sturgeon Point, NY to Crystal Beach near Fort Erie. Closer to London, you will find good photos of Port Stanley in the profile of Todd, a firefighter, who lives there. There is also a YouTube video about the project (almost an hour long.) North of Long Tail; Behind the Lens.  A radio broadcast is still available on the CBC website: "Afternoon Drive," Chris dela Torre, "Documentary of North Long Tail," Nov.19, 2020.

Sources:

   All the sources you need are provided above. I have posted about the Great Lakes and hope to do more in the new year. Here are some of the old ones:

The American Lakes - Book Series.

Wayne State University Press 

Parks Along the Great Lakes  

University of Minnesota Press

Great Lakes Pollution