What's the news. I can tell you what the Fem Fri news is, it's women photography innovators!
Here's Anna Atkins, the first person to illustrate a book with photographs. They were pictures of ferns, the name of them is cyanotypes for which you don't need a camera or a dark room:
Before the invention of photography, scientists relied on detailed descriptions and artistic illustrations or engravings to record the form and colour of botanical specimens. Anna's self-published her detailed and meticulous botanical images using the cyanotype photographic process in her 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
If you fancy making a cyanotype this weekend, you can do that too:
The cyanotype process can develop digital photographs into more extended outcomes. A digital image can be desaturated and ‘inverted’ to create a negative, which can then be printed onto acetate. Placing this negative onto a coated surface and exposing to UV light will result in an alternative image. The chemicals themselves can pool and leave additional marks, quite often creating haunting images of interiors.
Thank you to the friend and subscriber who alerted me to the architectural photography of Hélène Binet. Here's an interview:
“I photograph space. Or, better, I frame space. I try to figure out what space means for a blind person, namely many strong experiences: smell, touch, temperature, as well as all the more obvious things. Then I try to put all the ingredients together. “But when I think about a building, it’s about one thing, a fragment, that can then unfold in the brain as a whole experience.” Meaning what exactly? She continues: “[The American architect] John Hejduk used to say we are “digested” by architecture. We enter a building and we are changed. I am looking for the digestive enzyme! Is it the light, the colour, the size, the sense of peace? Making a building takes years of work. I want to know, what were the visions, the dreams of the architect when they first thought of making that place?”
We end with Lillian Virginia Mountweazel. She was entirely made up, and she gives her name - mountweazel - to copyright traps. Those made up things in reference books so you know when your stuff has been copied:
An even more elaborate fake appeared in 1975, when the New Columbia Encyclopedia included a long entry on the distinguished American fountain designer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who had achieved some fame with Flags Up!, a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes. Ms. Mountweazel, alas, met a premature end, dying in an explosion while she was researching an article for Combustibles magazine. Although Mountweazel was nothing more than an inside joke among the encyclopedia’s authors, she is said to have appeared in other encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries—proof that other editors have pilfered from the New Columbia. The term mountweazel is now used to refer to these mischievous entries inserted in reference books.
What would you say to a Fem Fri of women animators. I hope the answer is "YES PLEASE" because that is what I have for you today.
Excited to start with Lotte Reiniger, who was truly part of the vanguard of animation. She used cut-outs and they are utterly charming, you can watch one of her films here:
The crispness and intricacy of her black, scissored figures, combine with fluid, bouncing animation. As soon as you think that you have spotted a join, or seen the technique behind the movement, the scene changes, another transformation occurs and the picture has been reformed again. The cut-outs are often backed with jewel-like colours, so the impression is of visual richness, rather than stark monochrome. By conjuring fantastic worlds out of paper and light, Reiniger’s films reach us on a deeply emotional level too: we seem to see imagination at work, as when a story is improvised or embellished from memory at a bedside.
Delighted by this quotation from Jennifer Yuh Nelson about how important it is to show impact in animations. I love a film that does not shy away from showing you… a body moving through space in a realistic way, and it's good to read someone else thinking about this:
we try to avoid magic because it seems too easy. In an animated movie where everything you see is fake, we actually have to overcompensate. Even in a live action film where actors are running around in a completely fabricated set, you can still see real human beings. In a movie where everything is completely fabricated, you have to “double up” on the cues that give you the idea it’s real. Part of that is making things difficult for the characters themselves. For example, if someone is taking a punch, they feel it. You don’t see it just bounce off, or if it does, it’s for a gag. If someone’s throwing a punch, they can’t be play-acting it. If they throw a weapon, they really have to throw it.
Faith Hubley is a true inspiration who made an independent film every year with her husband for over 20 years and then, following his death, made an independent film every year on her own for over 20 years. I really enjoyed her perspective on the importance of art as well:
You have to know that I believe everyone is an artist. Without any doubt. We know that all children draw until five or six, and they make marvelous art, and then the school system starts, and people go on with their lives. It's not right. It's frustrating. A society that doesn't provide artistic expression for each individual is asking for trouble. We're meant to do it.
I am in Singapore! Fem Fri today is not about SG, but it's SG-adjacent - here is a newsletter of skyscrapers designed by women. Wikipedia kindly has a list of the tallest buildings in the world designed by women, so let's have a look together at some of the most interesting ones.
The tallest building designed by a woman is the St Regis Chicago, designed by Jeanne Gang, but my favourite is the second tallest. Also in Chicago and also designed by Jeanne Gang, here's Aqua:
Here she is talking about the St Regis though. If you, like me, are alarmed by the way tall buildings waggle around in the wind, this interview won't make you less alarmed but it will make you better informed:
With tall buildings, they're - essentially they're cantilevers coming out of the ground, so the wind affects them a lot. So we have to do a couple of things to make it comfortable when you're way up at the top. But to counteract that, you put a heavy weight of some sort up at the top that moves at a different rate than the building, and that kind of cancels out that movement. So we did that here. Actually, we use water on the top in a big tank, and it sloshes around. But then, to reduce the wind more and to be able to use less material for the building, we found we could do a void up there, high up in the building, so the wind passes right through. And it really - it does an incredible amount to reduce how much stiffness you have to have in the building.
Wild that I've never featured Zaha Hadid in Fem Fri before. Maybe because I've never seen a photo of Leeza SOHO in Beijing before? I love this:
I also love her comparison of her architectural practice to playing the piano:
it’s laden with so many ideas that one cannot extrude a single one, there is no formal repertoire. two years ago I focused on one apartment to see how many variations you can come up with in a given space with the same parameters. I would work on this repeatedly for days and you see that there is maybe seven hundred options for one space. this exercise gives you an idea of the degree at which you can interpret the organization of space, it is not infinite but it’s very large. imagine if you multiply that to the scale of a bigger space, and the to the scale of a city. it is like a pianist constantly practicing – it’s the same level of intensity. it increases the repertoires immensely – it is unpredictable.
Here's one readers in the UK can go and see, and it's also excellent - the Library of Birmingham by Francine Houben. Europe's largest public library!
Some lovely photos in this article too, an interview with Francie Houben:
what we did was to make a huge lower ground floor, then made a kind of composition of a square, with Shakespeare at the top of it. Birmingham is a very green city but not in the city centre, there are a lot of grey roofs so we wanted to make sure if we made terraces we wanted to make them very green, like elevated gardens. What is nice for a library is to have a garden to read in. So we made these two to add green space to the city.
As I've darkly hinted at least once in this newsletter and associated media, I had a roughish time at work last year and it consumed a lot of my thinking/reading energy. But at the end of last year, the week before Christmas, something kind of magical happened. My work situation had resolved itself but I was still feeling a bit werrrrr, sitting by the fire with a friend and her children. Her daughter was reading aloud, the Christmas story as written by Jeanette Winterson. There were continually these little flashes of T. S. Eliot's "The Journey of the Magi," and as she read I remembered - I am a modernist. It was a beautiful feeling to be, as it were, called back to an identity I'd almost totally neglected throughout the year. Thank you [name witheld] and thank you Jeanette Winterson. Here's the latter:
It might have been because my parents had been in the second world war. It might have been because we lived in End Time, waiting for Armageddon. Whatever the reason, there was a drill to Christmas, from making the mincemeat for the mince pies to singing carols to, or rather at, the unsaved of Accrington. Still, Mrs Winterson loved Christmas. It was the one time of the year when she went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a vale of tears.
I'm currently reading a biography of noted modernist T. S. Eliot and just cannot stop thinking of this quotation from Vivienne Eliot:
not nearly finished. Barely getting started. Big plans. Here is a lady who is not afraid to advocate for herself.
Look, it would absolutely harsh your Friday mellow to think too hard/at all about T. S. and Vivienne Eliot's marriage, so let's skip straight to the biographer who wrote the above, Lyndall Gordon, recommending her own best literary biographies:
If a poet writes a sonnet, it’s part of the intensity of that form that there are very strict rules. And there are strict rules of biography – you have to authenticate facts, you have to include that detailed back-matter to tell the reader where a fact comes from. On the other hand, documentation alone is inadequate for the kind of biography that interests me. You need some shell of the public life, but the deep matter of the biography is the “private life” that Henry James talks of – he meant the writer’s life, the inward life.
Let me tell you about one of the nicest gifts I have ever recieved. This was about five, six years ago now, I was leaving a job and I was sad to be leaving. One of my team bought me a gift, an orchid. It arrived in the post which firstly was great, I love getting post, and of course when it arrived it was just perfectly in flower like orchids always are when they arrive. I'd assumed that the flowers would last for ages but that afterwards that would just be it, it would never flower again. Every November since then, though, it's put out a stalk and flowered its little heart out in the dead of winter, and with that I remember always the kindness of the person who sent it to me as well as appreciating the foamy wonder of this plant on my windowsill.
That is why this Fem Fri is about orchids.
Debora Moore is an incredibly accomplished glass artist who has devoted her career to the orchid. She learned glassblowing as a single parent and has gone on to great acheivements like residencies in Murano:
“A rose is a rose, but an orchid is — I don’t know,” she said, laughing about the bounty of orchid species. “I would never live long enough to make all of them.” Orchids have been a longtime muse of Moore’s. Some pieces in the exhibit are from as far back as 1987, when she had just begun to blow glass. She called “Glass Orchidarium” a “collection, within a collection, within a collection.”
How about amateur scientist Edith Coleman, who by watching a wasp on an orchid with her kid made a major discovery on how these flower are pollinated:
Coleman's biggest achievement was her discovery of "pseudocopulation", a pollination strategy that has a plant – especially an orchid – mimicking a sexually receptive insect, thereby tricking male insects into mating with it. Coleman's pseudocopulation discovery trail was long and involved. It began in January 1927, when one of her daughters described how she had seen a wasp entering the flower of the small tongue orchid (Cryptostylis leptochila) backwards. Coleman and her daughter then observed this "perplexing" behaviour time and again.
More science and more breakthroughs - here is Melissa McCormick talking about what can make an orchid come out of hiding:
Scientists have long puzzled over what prompts the plants to switch from a state of dormancy and send up shoots. Now, a new study by a group of scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, explains how concentrations of certain fungus in the soil cause one North American species of orchid, the small-whorled pogonia, to awaken.
Were you subscribed when Kerry did her fantastic episode on Judith and Holofernes in art and culture? Aaahhhh it was so good, here's just a preview:
Judith was a rich, beautiful widow whose town was under siege by the Assyrians (bad guys those Assyrians!). She dressed up, packed a kosher picnic basket with some wine, went down with her maid/sidekick to the enemy camp, and convinced the Assyrians they wanted to switch sides. The general, Holofernes, had his soldiers bring Judith to COUGH drink with him in his COUGH COUGH tent; she waited for him to get bladdered, called in her maid to hold him down, and took his sword off the wall and cut his head off. Hooray, victory against expansionist imperialists and dodgy creeper men alike!
You may recognize her from many paintings of her cutting a man's head off and/or with a man's head she has just cut off.
Anyway, today I have FRESH JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES CONTENT because Cat Graffam has recreated it in the elderly graphics software Kid Pix. Here's where they landed, I am genuinely impressed:
They have kindly made a video about it for us as well. I've watched the whole thing, totally fascinated, and I really do tend to give up on videos early:
How are you? Well, I hope. I was at dinner last night and someone was talking about Sonic the Hedgehog, which reminded me of something I'm low level fascinated by - speedrunning computer games. It's combination of being amazed at the physical and mental skill/toughness that it would take to get to a point where you can complete "Breath of the Wild" in under an hour, but also being sad at all the loveliness you would miss in not really inhabiting this delightful world that lots of people have created for you.
Anyway, here are some of the women of speedrunning! There are interviews and profiles here, I was particularly interested in Lizstar's project, which includes playing every game ever made for the Sega Genesis (she is more than halfway through):
She likes exploring lesser played titles including those that are not as well made but can still be a source of joy while allowing for some fun discussion about just how bad a game can get. “I like trash and trash is not necessarily bad,” she says. “It’s just things that people don’t pay much attention to and kind of throw out as worthless but there’s a lot of worth in there.”
How is it going? I hope you are well and, if in the UK or somewhere else cold, not too cold.
Almost twenty years ago now I went on a holiday to Dublin. One of the things I saw that I have always remembered is some grafitti above a bench that said, "sit here and think about modern art or something." That's more or less today's FF. Read this and think about modern architecture or something. Hope you're up for it. Many thanks to the friend and subscriber who sent me the link.
Architecture Fem Fris are all too rare, so I was thrilled to read about the work of Renee Gailhoustet, and even more excited to see the lovely spiky buildings she designed:
Gailhoustet pioneered a more urban form of Brutalism, where staggered terraces and urban gardens were deployed and where there was an attempt to harmonize brutalist housing with their street-level context. Her buildings often stray from Brutalism’s stylistic norm to create bright, colorful, and lively spaces with big windows and hospitable spaces. Through sensitive gestures, they engage with the people and the city and have since become an inspiration and a model for what generous housing truly entails.
I am in Bangkok! That's why if you are in Seattle you are recieving this email on basically Thursday afternoon. If you're in NZ, though, you should for the first time have a Fem Fri that is appropriately and definitely on Friday.
I'm here for work which means that most of the time I have been doing PowerPoint in an air conditioned hotel, but on Thursday morning I got to biff around the city and YOU BETTER BELIEVE I went to the textiles museum! It was founded by fashion icon Queen Sirikit and there's currently a whole exo devoted to her clothes through the decades. You weren't allowed to take photos in that bit so let's have a look together at some of her looks I found online:
As you know I love pretty dresses, but I also love having and sharing (rarely solicited) marketing ideas. Queen Sirikit created a foundation devoted to preserving the traditional textiles of Thailand (awesome) and lots of the notes in the museum end with things like "and then she shared some marketing ideas with the tribe who make this fabric." Highly, highly relatable move. She obviously also practised what she preached because a lot of her couture dresses were made with these fabrics.
Here's one of my favourite fabrics, a lovely sort of brocade called khit:
Struck by the beauty of khit, Her Majesty selected one of the narrow patterns and asked weavers to repeat it to create a wider cloth suitable for fashion or decorating. Sales opportunities for the weavers were thus increased. The pattern chosen by Her Majesty for this innovation was based on a traditional one, but the weavers renamed it Lai Somdet (ลายสมเด็จ) or “The Queen’s Pattern”.
I'm sure you have heard of batik, but did you know about Carolina Josephina von Franquemont, early commercial and chemical innovator? She created a new way of making a green dye
Carolina Josephina von Franquemont in 1840, at age twenty-three, started a batik workshop. Indeed, she is the earliest female Indo-European batik entrepreneur known to us today. She moved her workshop in 1845 to the slopes of volcanic Mount Ungaran near the Ungaran River in Semarang, where she had relatives. There she had at her disposal not only clean water for the preparation of white cotton and the dye process but also trained batik makers and only a short distance away a well-to-do clientele.
For good measure, here's a batik from the museum too:
MORE BROCADE. I just love brocade, this one is called Phrae Wa and is made only by the Phu Tai women of the Kalasin province. There's a good video about it on this page:
I hope you're looking forward to an email of some misc stuff I was jamming on in 2023. You already know the books and the albums, of course, but not everything fits into those categories.
Well, I guess books fit into those categories, but here's another books thing from me - it's the yearly Vincennes Review of Books. This time around I went really deep on the work of a business academic and he really engaged with it, driving more traffic than I strictly expected to this silly joke:
Last year I also got EXTREMELY into the Maintenance Phase podcast, about diet/health/wellness discourse and featuring "fat woman about town" Aubrey Gordon. If you're looking for a way into this, their deep dives into wellness personalities are always good, but my personal recommendation is to start with Snake Oil:
Which form a delightful diptych, if you will, of podcast episodes.
Finally, as you know I love outfits and I love production design so obviously I am ALL OVER the Marie Antoinette thing on iPlayer. Apparently it's been criticised as historically inaccurate? lol, like I care, it's not my period, go nuts on the dramatic licence. Check out this headdress:
