If you read the London Review of Books you may be interested in their blog; it’s been going since March of this year, apparently, but I only just saw it. I say ‘may’ because it’s not quite the LRB: it’s not a book review, but it’s sort of in the leftish book-reading spirit of the LRB if you like that. It’s edited — is a blog ‘edited’? — by Thomas Jones, who often writes delightful articles in the magazine itself. You don’t need to be an LRB subscriber to read the blog, nor to comment.
The piece that convinced me to link to the blog was this short one by Jim Holt on people who’ve been told to pose for photographs with a hand under their chin. I’m always amazed the victims cooperate. Their agents ought to have told them it’s a signal: they’re saying ‘I’ve been made to believe my face is uninteresting, it needs all the help the photographer can get’. I don’t think the T.C. Boyle one he shows fits my category, but the others do, particularly Cynthia Ozick and Don DeLillo. What John Updike was trying for is anybody’s guess. None of them is the really worst case: that’s when a finger or two is simply brushing the cheek, with the arm in a next to impossible position, as in the one below. Try it: she’s got her little finger close to her face, not her thumb; it’s quite painful.
Update, 19 November. Studiolum linked in the comments below to this picture of József Antall, the first post-Communist Hungarian Premier:
It reminds me of this.
A Bad Guide 
You think that’s bad? You can’t be interviewed as a chemist with having to pose in a labcoat, staring at some container with a liquid in it. (I forget the reference, but it turns out that the image goes back to mediaeval doctors staring at urine samples.)
Yes; I’m staring at a urine sample, in the picture above.
You look apprehensive – is the vessel above you, and are you afraid it might spill on your head?
I was trying to look thoughtful, but you never know what’s going to fall on you. I nearly always wear some sort of crash helmet when I go outside (which isn’t often).
I find “At the Basingstoke Odeon the other night, in an almost empty cinema, I counted six advertisements ….one recruiting for the Royal Marines. ….
The army recruitment spot came …”
He thinks that the marines are part of the army! So that’s “leftish” in the traditional sense of pig ignorant.
I wondered what he was doing in an empty cinema in Basingstoke. I suppose he lives there.
(Basingstoke, not the Odeon. I’m sure they pay badly at the LRB, but I assume he’s not homeless.)
More about Basingstoke, from two Wikipedia articles:
The dust jacket cover for Michael Chabon’s* recent nonfiction book about being a man (what’s it called?) shows him looking up from an awkward sitting position in a little private room. Not a bathroom or equivalent euphemism — it’s book-lined — but it might as well be.
*I finally learned how to pronounce his name.
Feel free to share the pronunciation, just don’t use IPA glyphs.
Never mind, it’s SHAY-bon.
The picture can be seen here at Amazon (click on Back Cover & zoom in). The white toilet seat thing in the background and the surprised look don’t help.
No, not that picture. Not on the back cover of that novel, but on the inner back flap of this book of personal essays. But I can’ t find the picture online.
This might take your fancy (courtesy of T Wortsall).
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2009/11/men-who-glare-at-stoats.html
Sorry, empt, you did say nonfiction.
Thanks, dearie.
I realised later that in fact the most annoying part of the LRB for me is their relentless leftyism, despite my own liberal opinions. Sometimes one simply wants to read a book review. Anyway, they’re just preaching to the converted.
about these poses…there seems to be a whole website giving advice about…how to look uncomfortable and unconvincing in professional photographs?
http://books.google.es/books?id=J_kCbNLDDuMC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=pose+for+photographs+with+a+hand+under+their+chins&source=bl&ots=oyruyD2DfR&sig=B7ZT_-PGcsmDuo7o0nX9iRwtKek&hl=en&ei=eNX-StvoDomz4Qbl_OnzCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
??
You do know those medieval doctors had to taste the urine as well.
It says so there, doesn’t it? But here’s what I don’t get about the whole uroscopy wheel thing: Urine (mine, anyway) looks very different according to what I’ve been eating or drinking. Beets/beetroot, to take an extreme example. So how useful was the color as a diagnostic tool?
Yes. Glad Wikipedia knows this. I fear it’s all part of the medieval medical mystique. On the other hand, when my younger daughter was in nappies, there was certainly a colour-coded chart for babyshit. I was amazed.
Now that was pre-internet for sure. So I must think back: in what publication? Hm.
Thank you so much for Jeff Smith’s Posing Techniques, Catanea.
So far, my favourite line is “If you want to use train tracks as your background, you should not work on operational tracks.” (You have to see the pictures).
Empty, you must mean this one. I agree it’s very peculiar, the figure is too big for the background.
It looks like he is in a doorway, and the bookcase behind (perhaps in a corridor) is about the size of the door, giving the impression that he is in a room only as wide as the doorway. Also, there must be some other trick of perspective (zoom?), as his feet look much too big for the rest of him. His face seems overly long, and the colours of his face also look unnatural.
There are at least two horizon levels. The vanishing point of the brass plate […] under the base of the bookcase, as you can see on the left.
Oh, never mind all the analysis. I find it’s a picture by a very funny San Francisco photographer/artist called Merkley, who uses flat backgrounds and foreshortening and other clever devices and whose work can be seen at http://www.threequestionmarks.com/
I am not familiar with the tricks possible with photography, but the picture of the man sitting on a desk chair in the doorway (itself manipulated somehow to show overlong legs and feet) must be superimposed on that of the room behind, which is foreshortened as shown by the lines of the floor. A lot of fun for the photographer!
In the case of Merkley it’s just that he has a very imaginative work method. He’s got full-length portraits where (for complicated reasons) I think the subject is holding a picture of their legs, taken earlier, in front of their ‘real’ legs. And he’s furnished a room with a bed placed on a wall so that the long hair of the model lying on it appears to be defying gravity. Stuff like that isn’t so much ‘photography’ as art that’s using the medium of photography, I’d say, though the categories have fuzzy borders.
manipulated somehow to show overlong legs and feet
I think he just took the picture of the figure much lower down than he took the picture of the background. He was closer to the feet (which therefore are big) than you would expect from the rest of the picture, so they look bizarrely huge.
I knew that the picture was odd, but I had not realized how impossibly odd it was until you all went to work on it. I’m glad I mentioned it.
Hoy! what happened to the thoughtfull Mr Crown? He’s been replaced by somebody looking like a younger Margaret Thatcher.
The goats must have eaten the picture.
This picture (of a New York radio personality) better fitted my requirements, I thought. I was getting tired of seeing that picture of myself.
May I propose for the next change the photo of the first post-Communist Hungarian Premier József Antall: http://mek.niif.hu/01900/01906/html/index355.html Not exactly submandibular position, but the intention is definitely akin.
“It reminds me of this.“
Now I understand why every time he did like this the Hungarian hymn was heard.