Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

“My molecular structure is the same.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“It’s like going through a war.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“That’s what it looks like. We have to prove it now; that’s going to be the tough part.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“We took a walk for a few minutes together. The street became his photographs.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“This increase in performance reflects the benefit of two years of restructuring and repositioning, and the trust is an attractive investment for investors seeking low risk and a medium return.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“[The photograph was described by a police witness as] a joke of a kind someone outside police culture would not understand … In my view the culture is as sick as the joke.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“Jail must be imposed to reflect the ongoing breach of trust, the considerable effect on the victims and the considerable amount of money,” 
— Bruce Davidson

“There had been no agreement with Australia, we were not in a position to announce anything and when the other deal came out of the blue it was evident ING NZ were not aware of the discussions.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“This excellent result further reinforces the advice given to unit holders that they should take no action on the takeover offer made by ING Property Trust until they are in receipt of all relevant information.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“Most of my pictures are compassionate, gentle and personal. They tend to let the viewer see for himself. They tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“[W. Eugene Smith's photo essays] taught me that a photograph could not only communicate emotions, but could also serve the human condition.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“They all [other photographers] gave us clues to their inner world. Kertesz let us see our mortality in a piece of crusted rock and a man’s flesh; Avedon made us confront his anger in the black man’s pores and crystal-clear eyes; Arbus broke through the desperate pain of her aloneness into the cruel world of the midget’s taboo.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“Taking photographs, taking candid photographs, means that the photographer is an invisible man. Whereas there is still a feeling that in having a photograph taken there is loss of face: something of the soul is gone.” 
— Bruce Davidson

“I am not interested in showing my work to photographers any more, but to people outside the photo-clique. My pictures are not escapes from reality, but a contemplation of reality, so that I can experience life in a deeper way.” 
— Bruce Davidson

Bruce Davidson (born: 1933)

Bruce Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of Magnum since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, have been widely exhibited and published in a number of books.

Youth

Bruce Davidson was born in Oak Park to a single mother who worked in a factory to support her two sons. His mother raised her children to be autonomous, while being sensitive and aware of the troubles of the less fortunate. At ten, Bruce Davidson began taking pictures, as he was given the freedom to wander the streets of Oak Park alone.

Soon after, he approached a local photographer who taught him technical nuances of photography, in addition to lighting and printing skills. In his mid-teens, Davidson began to ride Chicago’s elevated train system into the city, exploring neighborhoods and the Chicago Loop, observing wide varieties of people, and most importantly developing skills and interests that would be seen in his later photographic works.

At sixteen, Davidson won his first major photography award, the Kodak National High School snapshot contest, with a picture of an owl at a nature preserve. Following high school, Davidson attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, where one of his teachers was artist Josef Albers. Davidson showed Albers a box of prints of alcoholics on Skid Row; Albers told him to throw out his "sentimental" work and join his class in drawing and colour. For his college thesis, he created a photo essay that was published in Life in 1955, documenting the emotions of football players behind the scenes of the game.

Following college, Davidson was drafted into the army, served in the Signal Corps at Ft Huachuca, Arizona, attached to the post’s photo pool. Initially he was given routine photo assignments. Undaunted, Davidson created out of seemingly mundane material unique photo studies. An editor of the post’s newspaper, recognizing his unique talents, asked that he be permanently assigned to the post newspaper. There, given a certain degree of autonomy, he was allowed to further hone his talents. Later, stationed in Paris, he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, a later colleague with Magnum Photos, sharing his portfolio and receiving advice from an accomplished photographer. While in France, Davidson produced a photo essay on the Widow of Montmartre, an old Parisian woman.

Major works and joining Magnum Photos

After his military service, in 1957, Bruce Davidson worked briefly as a freelance photographer before joining Magnum Photos the following year. During the following few years, he photographed extensively, most notably producing Brooklyn Gang and The Dwarf. From 1961 to 1965, Davidson produced one of his most famous bodies of work as he chronicled the events and effects of the Civil Rights Movement around the country, in both the North and the South. In support of his project, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and his finished project was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Upon the completion of his documentation of the Civil Rights Movement, Davidson received the first ever photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Exploration of New York City

Bruce Davidson’s next project, East 100th Street, is perhaps his most famous. Considered a modern classic, East 100th Street was a two-year documentation of an infamous block in East Harlem. This project was also displayed at the Museum of Modern Art. Davidson followed this with Subway, a classic portrayal of the New York subway system in the late 1970s. Using color to convey mood, Davidson documented a gritty and lively urban underworld. Over a decade later, in the early 1990s, Davidson completed a four-year exploration of Central Park as a beautiful and grand homage to New York City.

Recent activities

In 1998, Davidson returned to East 100th Street to document the revitalization, renewal, and changes that occurred in the thirty years since he last documented it. For this visit he presented a community slide show and received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship Award. In addition to his best known publications, many of Davidson’s lesser known works have appeared around the world and in many museums. Recently, a book has appeared of Davidson’s portraits of people such as John Cage, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein, Kiki Smith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Andy Warhol, and Jack Kerouac. To this day, Davidson continues to work as an editorial photographer. His photographs appear around the world and in many museums. Also, Davidson has directed two award-winning short films, a documentary titled Living off the Land and a more surreal tale titled Isaac Singer’s Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard. He lives in New York City with his wife, Emily.

Common themes in Davidson’s photography

Bruce Davidson photographs people on an eye-to-eye level, portraying and inducing powerful emotion, while focusing his lens on people in the midst of transition and a search for meaning.

In all of Davidson’s works, instead of objectifying his subjects — as objects of pity, subjects of curiosity, or specimens for analysis — he humanizes them, portraying them with a sense of vigor and vitality, as we are given insight to their lives, struggles, and desires. In particular, Davidson often documents the human search for meaning among people who face potentially ruinous social obstacles and economic strife. This type of documentation is especially evident in East 100th Street, Brooklyn Gang, and Davidson’s Civil Rights Era photography.

He induces and portrays powerful emotion in all of his major works emotions such as loneliness, despair, love, determination, and uncertainty, while his realism induces social concern and sympathy for complete strangers.

Bruce Davidson is extremely adept at documenting people or subjects in transition, whether rebellious teenagers coming of age, persecuted people fighting for equality, the urban poor amid soon-to-be demolished tenements, a gritty underworld soon to be sterilized, a traveling circus soon to be disbanded, or the passage of the seasons amid the magnificence, grandeur, and human heartache evident within Central Park.

Davidson creates an expression of the human condition by capturing his diverse subjects and settings in a personal and lyrical visual language, as he is able to transcend race, culture, and background, thereby uniting all his subjects in a shared poetic human experience. He allows us to see both beauty and pieces of ourselves in wide ranges of people. Through Davidson’s works we see how everyone shares similar experiences, how we are all united, and therefore how everyone can truly relate to one another.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Bruce Davidson that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goldblatt

Also, an article on Bruce Davidson found in… 
Peter Stepan. (2008) 50 Photographers You Should Know. New York: Prestel.

by Gerald Boerner

“50 years may not sound like a whole lot of time. But in the computer industry it really is a great accomplishment. The UNIVAC is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary.”
— Slashdot

“UNIVAC 1100 machines used one’s complement representation of negative numbers, as opposed to the two’s complement form almost universal today.”
— UNIVAC Memories

“The finest computational system ever devised by man, Remington Rand presents the UNIVAC. Capable of processing a few thousand digits per second, its giant dynamic mercury memory tanks are surely the greatest technical achievement in the history of electronic difference engines.”
— Geekend, TechRepublic.com

“There were earlier 1100 systems going back to the 1101 in 1951, but the 1108 marked the introduction of the first 1100 Series computer designed for a modern operating system.”
— Wikipedia

“The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.”
— Wikipedia

The UNISYS Corporation (1950s)

Unisys Corporation, headquartered in Blue Bell, Whitpain Township, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a global provider of information technology services and programs.

History

In 1955 Sperry acquired Remington Rand and renamed itself Sperry Rand. Acquiring then Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and Engineering Research Associates along with Remington Rand, the company developed the successful UNIVAC computer series and signed a valuable cross-licensing deal with IBM. The company remained a major military contractor. From 1967 to 1973 the corporation was involved in an acrimonious antitrust lawsuit with Honeywell, Inc. (see: Honeywell v. Sperry Rand).

In 1978 Sperry Rand decided to concentrate on its computing interests, and sold a number of divisions including Remington Rand Systems, Remington Rand Machines, Ford Instrument Company and Sperry Vickers. The company dropped "Rand" from its title and reverted to Sperry Corporation. At about the same time as the Rand acquisition, Sperry Gyroscope decided to open a facility that would almost exclusively produce its marine instruments. After considerable searching and evaluation, a plant was built in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in 1956, Sperry Piedmont Division began producing marine navigation products. It was later renamed Sperry Marine.

In the 1970s, Sperry Corporation was an old-school conglomerate headquartered in the Sperry Rand Building at 1290 Avenue of Americas in Manhattan, selling typewriters (Sperry Remington), office equipment, electronic digital computers for business and the military (Sperry Univac), farm equipment (Sperry New Holland), avionics (e.g. gyroscopes, radars, Air Route Traffic Control equipment) (Sperry Vickers/Sperry Aerospace), and consumer products (electric razors) (Sperry Remington.)

In addition, Sperry Systems Management (headquartered near New York City with an office at Long Island MacArthur Airport) did a fair amount of government defense contracting. Sperry bought out and continued the RCA line of electronic digital computers: architectural cousins to the IBM System/360. In 1983 Sperry sold Vickers to Libbey Owens Ford (later to be renamed TRINOVA Corporation and subsequently Aeroquip-Vickers).

Unisys was formed in September 1986 through the merger of the mainframe corporations Sperry and Burroughs, with Burroughs buying Sperry for $4.8 billion. The name was chosen after an internal competition. The merger was the largest in the computer industry at the time and made Unisys the second largest computer company, with annual revenue of $10.5 billion. At the time of the merger, Unisys had approximately 120,000 employees.

In addition to hardware, both Burroughs and Sperry had a history of working on U.S. government contracts. Unisys continues to provide hardware, software, and services to various government agencies.

In 1990, Unisys spread to the United Kingdom when a British businessman bought shares into the company and took over the running of its British dealings.

Soon after the merger, the market for proprietary mainframe-class systems—the mainstream product of Unisys and its competitors such as IBM—began a long-term decline that continues today. In response, Unisys made the strategic decision to shift into information technology (IT) services such as systems integration, outsourcing, and related technical services, while holding onto the profitable revenue stream from maintaining its installed base of proprietary mainframe hardware and applications.

Important events in the company’s history include the development of the 2200 series in 1986, including the UNISYS 2200/500 CMOS mainframe, and the Micro A in 1989, the first desktop mainframe, the UNISYS ES7000 servers in 2000, and the Unisys blueprinting method of visualizing business rules and workflow in 2004.

Products, services, and customers

Paralleling larger trends in the U.S. information technology industry, an increasing amount of Unisys revenue comes from services rather than equipment sales. In 2008, the ratio was 88% for services, up from 65% in 1997. ^[8]

Unisys clients are typically large corporations or government agencies, and have included Washington Mutual, the New York Clearinghouse, Dell, Lufthansa Systems, Lloyds TSB, EMC, SWIFT, various state governments (for services such as unemployment insurance, licensing, etc.), various branches of the U.S. military, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), numerous airports, the General Services Administration, U.S. Transportation Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Nextel, and Telefonica of Spain.

Unisys systems are used for many industrial and government purposes, including banking, check processing, income tax processing, airline passenger reservations, biometric identification, newspaper content management and shipping port management, as well as providing weather data services.Unisys developed the software for NEXRAD, the original doppler weather radar, and has since provided weather data consisting of radar, satellite, lightning, etc. Unisys operates the world’s largest RFID network for the U.S. military, tracking 9 million containers yearly to 1,500 nodes in 25 countries. It also created the universal identification card for citizens of South Africa.

The company engages in consulting, one-time contract jobs, and contracts for ongoing outsourced IT services. Services include building and integrating hardware and software systems, providing ongoing hosting and management of data, planning operational processes and changes, and providing security.

Controversies

Unisys attracted significant criticism in 1994 after enforcing its patent on the LZW data compression algorithm, which is used in the common GIF image file format. For a more complete discussion of this issue, see Graphics Interchange Format#Unisys and LZW patent enforcement.

Unisys was the target of "Operation Ill Wind", a major corruption investigation in the mid-to-late-1980s. A number of employees were imprisoned as a result. As part of the settlement, all Unisys employees were required to receive ethics training each year, a practice that continues today.

In October 2005, the Washington Post reported that the company had allegedly overbilled on the $1 to 3 billion Transportation Security Administration contract for almost 171,000 hours of labor and overtime. Unisys denied wrongdoing.

In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the FBI was investigating Unisys for alleged cybersecurity lapses under the company’s contract with the United States Department of Homeland Security. A number of security lapses supposedly occurred during the contract, including incidents in which data was transmitted to Chinese servers. Unisys denies all charges and said it has documentation disproving the allegations.

Background and biographical information is from the Wikipedia articles on:

UNISYS Corporation that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys

Sperry Corporation that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperry_Corporation

by Gerald Boerner

They [Russia, England and France] had no “business on this continent”
— Wikipedia

“General Rousseau, by authority from His Majesty, the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United States the territory of Alaska.”
— Captain Alexis Pestchouroff

“Soon the world would see in the northwest ‘a hostile cockney with a watchful Yankee on each side of him,’ and John Bull would be led to understand that his only course was a sale of his interests there to Brother Jonathan.”
— Wikipedia

“[Critics] said that paying $7.2 million, or about two cents per acre, was too much for ‘a large lump of ice’.”
— William Bennett

Seward’s Folly, or Was It his Savvy Deal?

The Alaska Purchase, historically also referred to as Seward’s Folly, was the purchase of Alaska by the United States from the Russian Empire in 1867. The purchase, done at the behest of United States Secretary of State William H. Seward, gained 586,412 square miles (1,518,800 km²) of new United States territory. Originally organized as the Department of Alaska, the area was successively the District of Alaska and the Alaska Territory before becoming the modern state of Alaska upon being admitted to the Union in 1959.

Background

Russia was in a difficult financial position and feared losing Russian Alaska without compensation in some future conflict, especially to the British, whom they had fought a decade earlier in the Crimean War. While Alaska attracted little interest at the time, the population of nearby British Columbia started to increase rapidly after hostilities ended. The Russians therefore started to believe that in any future conflict with Britain, their hard-to-defend region might become a prime target, and would easily be captured.

Therefore Tsar Alexander II decided to sell the territory. Perhaps in hopes of starting a bidding war both the British and the Americans were approached, however the British expressed little interest in buying Alaska. The Russians then turned their attention to the United States and in 1859 offered to sell the territory to the United States, hoping that the United States would off-set the plans of Russia’s greatest regional rival, Great Britain. However, no deal was brokered due to the secession of seven southern states and the eventual American Civil War.

The signing of the Alaska Treaty of
Cessation on March 30, 1867.

Following the Union victory in the American Civil War, the Tsar then instructed the Russian minister to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl, to re-enter into negotiations with Seward in the beginning of March 1867. The negotiations concluded after an all-night session with the signing of the treaty at 4 o’clock in the morning of March 30, 1867 with the purchase price set at $7,200,000, about 1.9¢ per acre ($4.74/km²).

The viewpoint from Washington

The purchase was at the time derided as "Seward’s folly," "Seward’s icebox," and Andrew Johnson’s "polar bear garden," because it was believed foolhardy to spend so much money on the remote region.

Seward, the main force behind the treaty, had long favored expansion. U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, agreed that the nation’s strategic interests favored the treaty. Russia had been a valuable ally of the Union position during the American Civil War, while Britain had been a nearly open enemy. It seemed wise to help Russia while discomfiting the British. Furthermore there was the matter of adjacent territories belonging to Britain (namely the Colony of British Columbia, which in 1871 became part of Canada). Were Alaska to be purchased, they would be nearly surrounded by the United States, they were asserted by the United States to be of little strategic value to Britain, and they might someday be purchased.

The purchase, editorialized the New York Herald, was a "hint" from the Tsar to England and France that they had "no business on this continent." "It was in short a flank movement" upon Canada, said the influential New York Tribune. "Soon the world would see in the northwest "a hostile cockney with a watchful Yankee on each side of him," and John Bull would be led to understand that his only course was a sale of his interests there to Brother Jonathan."

Ratification and enactment

Russian ratification of the
Alaska purchase,
June 20, 1867.

The United States Senate ratified the treaty on April 9, 1867, by a vote of 37-2. However, the appropriation of money needed to purchase Alaska was delayed by more than a year due to opposition in the House of Representatives. The House finally approved the appropriation in July 1868, by a vote of 113-48.

Sumner reported Russian estimates that Alaska contained about 2,500 Russians and those of mixed race, and 8,000 Indigenous people, in all about 10,000 people under the direct government of the Russian fur company, and possibly 50,000 Eskimos and Alaska Natives living outside its jurisdiction. The Russians were settled at 23 trading posts, placed conveniently on the islands and coasts. At smaller stations only four or five Russians were stationed to collect furs from the Indians for storage and shipment when the company’s boats arrived to take it away.

There were two larger towns. New Archangel, now named Sitka, had been established in 1804 to handle the valuable trade in the skins of the sea otter and in 1867 contained 116 small log cabins with 968 residents. St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands had 100 homes and 283 people and was the center of the fur seal industry. An Aleut name, "Alaska," was chosen by the Americans.

The transfer ceremony took place in Sitka on October 18, 1867. Russian and American soldiers paraded in front of the governor’s house; the Russian flag was lowered and the American flag raised amid peals of artillery. Captain Alexis Pestchouroff said, "General Rousseau, by authority from His Majesty, the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United States the territory of Alaska." General Lovell Rousseau accepted the territory. A number of forts, blockhouses and timber buildings were made over to the Americans. The troops occupied the barracks; General Jefferson C. Davis established his residence in the governor’s house, and most of the Russian citizens went home, leaving a few traders and priests who chose to remain.

American public opinion was generally positive, but some newspapers editorialized against the purchase. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune wrote:

Already, so it was said, we were burdened with territory we had no population to fill. The Indians within the present boundaries of the republic strained our power to govern aboriginal peoples. Could it be that we would now, with open eyes, seek to add to our difficulties by increasing the number of such peoples under our national care? The purchase price was small; the annual charges for administration, civil and military, would be yet greater, and continuing.

The territory included in the proposed cession was not contiguous to the national domain. It lay away at an inconvenient and a dangerous distance. The treaty had been secretly prepared, and signed and foisted upon the country at one o’clock in the morning. It was a dark deed done in the night…. The New York World said that it was a "sucked orange."

It contained nothing of value but furbearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct. Except for the Aleutian Islands and a narrow strip of land extending along the southern coast the country would be not worth taking as a gift…. Unless gold were found in the country much time would elapse before it would be blessed with Hoe printing presses, Methodist chapels and a metropolitan police. It was "a frozen wilderness.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1767…
  Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon complete their survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Mason-Dixon Line.

• In 1842…
  In New York Harbor, Samuel Morse lays the first underwater telegraph cable.

• In 1867…
  The United States takes possession of Alaska from Russia.

• In 1898…
  U.S. Troops fighting in the Spanish-American war raise the American flag in Puerto Rico, signaling U.S. authority over the former Spanish colony.

• In 1989…
  The shuttle Atlantis releases the space probe Galileo, which begins a six-year journey to Jupiter.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Alaska Purchase that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seward%27s_Folly