When self-described "Pinball Amasser" Richard Conger stumbled onto what he believed to be the world's first pinball machine, it was sitting in a farmhouse basement. The owner refused to sell him the game by itself, so Conger bought the entire farm.
That was 40 years ago. Today, at age 72, Conger has a truly impressive collection. He owns more than 500 different pinball games, 700 machines if you count duplicates (he sometimes has three of the same game). About 200 are in working order, and he intends to fix the rest.
"My time is measurable," says Conger, a retired high school teacher. "In another 30 years I won't be able to fix pinball."
Most of the machines are in various states of disrepair. They are piled floor-to-ceiling in storage rooms, and fill up what he calls a "barn," though the structure was erected not for livestock and hay bales but for broken pinball games. He still owns the farm he bought for just that one machine, but Conger lives on a separate eight-acre spread in Northern California that accommodates his collection — a sleepy property he dubbed the Silver Ball Ranch.
Pull the plunger and read on to tour the ranch and dust off this impressive collections of aging relics.
MAPUTO, Mozambique -- When U2's Bono broke into the classic refrain, "Gabba gabba hey!" from the Ramone's "Pinhead" on a Mozambique sweet potato farm last year, the farmers joined in to create perhaps the most unlikely punk rock cover of all time. Bono's riff was inspired by one variety of the vegetable called "Gaba Gaba."
In the last decade, the sweet potato has become an unsung hero in the fight against hunger and malnutrition in Africa. High in vitamin A and suited to a variety of climates, the sweet potato is championed by advocates of biofortification, a movement to improve global health by breeding nutrient-rich crops.
The sweet potato has garnered more than Bono's tuneful endorsement, with the Gates Foundation pledging more than $20 million toward orange-fleshed sweet potato projects in Africa. One biofortified variety of potato is even named "Melinda" after Gates' wife. These high-profile contributions are testament to the movement's growing momentum and the gains already made by scientists and development groups.
Wired.com paid a visit to the laboratory of the International Potato Center in Maputo, Mozambique, where biofortification researchers are saving lives with starch.
Above: A climate-controlled grow room filled with sweet potato seedlings is part of a lab in Maputo, Mozambique.
You don’t just commute to work, you commute for work.
Digital files, cloud computing and accelerating broadband have long put bike messengers on the endangered species list. No matter how fast a messenger is, even a triple rush can’t compete with instantaneous. For messengers, technology is more of a threat than wily cab drivers and potholes.
But, oddly, technology is also what keeps them around. The evolution of software and mobile phones has allowed some messenger companies to work in autonomous cells, rather than as an overhead-heavy hierarchy. A central headquarters is now obsolete, and profit-sharing employees take turns dispatching and making runs.
“Bike messengers will always exist,” says messenger entrepreneur Josh Weitzner, citing all the inventions that were supposed to spell the end for bike messengers but didn’t — the latest being 3-D printers with their ability to produce product prototypes from anywhere in the world.
Weitzner’s Samurai Messenger Service in Manhattan is a new breed of messenger company that employs mobile technology and software to keep expenses to a minimum, while cranking up efficiency. Conversely, the non-adaptive, old-school veterans still remain in the game, but they face a bend-or-break dance with changing times that are squeezing their market.
James Nash didn’t pack a guitar when he went off to college, which in hindsight was a boneheaded move.
Nash was 17 at the time and had been playing for about a dozen years. He was good. But he didn’t have any plans to “do music seriously” and didn’t think he’d play much while he was at school.
That didn’t last. Once you’ve discovered you enjoy playing the guitar, you can’t stop playing the guitar. It wasn’t long before Nash was borrowing guitars, playing whatever he could get his hands on whenever he could get his hands on it. Somewhere along the line he picked up a cheap Japanese guitar and was happy.
His father, however, was not.
Dad loved music and always had nice guitars lying around. It wouldn’t do to have his son playing something that sounded like a cat in heat. He showed up one day with a Santa Cruz Guitar six-string he’d picked up secondhand. An OM, Sitka spruce and Indian rosewood.
“Here,” he said. “Play this.”
It was perfect, with a bright, clear tone and great sound. Well, almost perfect. The neck was just a bit ... off. Not quite the right shape. No amount of adjustment would set it right. Finally, Nash walked into Santa Cruz Guitars to see what they could do.
“Let me have a look at that,” company founder Richard Hoover said. Santa Cruz was — and still is — a small place, the kind of place where Hoover himself will show you around if you ask for a tour. He did everything he could think of to set that neck right, but nothing worked. So he made a new neck and installed it for free, just because.
Nash, who’s 37 now, still has that guitar. He’s played it at hundreds of gigs with his band, The Waybacks. And all these years later, he hasn’t forgotten what Hoover did for a kid who wandered in one day looking for some help.
“You never forget something like that,” Nash said. “I was a 20-year-old kid. A no one. Not even in a band. But he treated me nicely when he had absolutely no reason to, or anything to gain from it.”
That’s how they are at Santa Cruz Guitar.
Above: Gerard Egan sets up a guitar before it heads out the door at Santa Cruz Guitar. It takes about four hours to install and adjust everything that touches the strings, from the bridge to the frets to the tuning keys. Once a guitar is properly set up, it’s played to make sure everything is just right.
“He'll make the guitars speak their first words,” Hoover said.
When the first Western photojournalists covering the conflict in Libya were killed Wednesday, the world found out about it through Facebook and Twitter. Now the Facebook page of one of the photographers has become a defacto memorial for the online community to grieve his death and honor his life.
Oscar-nominated photographer and filmmaker, Tim Hetherington, 40, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated Getty Images photojournalist Chris Hondros, 41, were killed by a mortar attack in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Two other photographers, Guy Martin and Michael Brown were seriously injured in the same shelling. Martin remains in a critical condition and Brown’s injuries are reported not to be life-threatening.
Over the course of the day, Tim Hetherington’s Facebook page became an impromptu memorial, with hundreds of condolences to his family and tributes to his work and memory. Friend and commenter Lorena Turner’s message sums up the thoughts of the photography community: “Let’s celebrate his contribution to our understanding of war and the complex interactions within it. Tim’s loss will be felt by everyone with an eye and mind that is engaged in the world.”
A wedding takes place in front of strung-up S.S. infantry. Topless women bathe in a river and are discovered by a Nazi soldier. What appear to be oddball scenes from World War II staged with action figures are actually one man’s attempt to rebuild his life.
These images come from the mind of Mark Hogancamp, who was beaten and repeatedly kicked in the head by five men outside a bar in Kingston, New York eleven years ago. The attack was so brutal that afterwards his mother Edda did not recognize him. When Hogancamp emerged from a 9-day coma, he had no language, he could not walk and he could not eat without assistance.
For twelve months, the ex-Navy man received state-sponsored physical and occupational therapy and regained many of his motor skills. Without medical insurance, however, Hogancamp was soon unable to afford the treatments. Lacking conventional rehabilitation, Hogancamp devised his own, unknowingly embarking on an art project that would be featured in high-profile exhibits and make him the subject of a hit indie documentary.
As a way to cope with his new life after the attack, Hogancamp built a Nazi-besieged, World War II era town in his backyard at 1/6 scale and resurrected his childhood love for action figures. He populated the model town with miniature alter egos of him and his friends. Each one is a personality in his anachronistic narratives, which he tells through staged photographs that read like frames in a comic book.
The town Hogancamp has created is called Marwencol. The name is a combination of three names of real people: Mark (Hogancamp), Wendy, and Colleen (two of his crushes).
In Marwencol, Hogancamp’s avatar, Hogie, is assassinated and brought back to life by the town witch. He is tortured by the S.S. and then rescued at the last minute by three gun-toting women. Hogie is saved in a way Hogancamp could not be in real life. In place of real-world counselors and therapists, Hogancamp has created hundreds of imaginary ones.
“There was one rule in my town,” says Hogancamp, “That [people] be friends, be friendly with each other, behave. So they did, they were.”
The initial cordiality between Nazi and Allied Forces soon gave way to kidnappings and gun fights. For more than a decade, 1/6 scale dolls have played out existential and therapeutic stories of love and war, friendship and enmity, heroism and cowardice, and desire and restraint. In some cases, the stories of Marwencol mirror reality, sometimes they’re purely fantasy; usually they blur the two.
There are giant holes in Hogancamp’s memory from before the attack — the entirety of his Naval service, for example. In his past life, he was an alcoholic, sporadically homeless and an amateur artist. Due to the brain damage he suffered, he can no longer draw and the Marwencol project partially scratches his artistic itch. At one point during his rehabilitation, Hogancamp even had to rediscover that he enjoys wearing women’s clothing and that this was the reason his attackers beat him.
What began as private rehabilitation has become more and more public over the years. In 2005, Esopus Magazine published Hogancamp’s photographs for the first time after he was discovered by a local photographer. A copy fell into the hands of filmmaker Jeff Malmberg who, coincidentally, was already thinking about themes of reinvention and scouting for a story to test his ability as a director.
In a documentary released last year and out this week on DVD, entitled Marwencol, Malmberg takes audiences inside Hogancamp’s fictional city, his real life and his struggle with public recognition after his photographs started appearing in New York galleries.
“I thought it would be a weekend shoot, but it ended up being a four-year shoot,” said Malmberg in an interview at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last year.
Marwencolwon the plaudits of both critics and audiences on the independent film circuit during 2010. It was named Best Documentary of the Year by Rotten Tomatoes and the Boston Society of Film Critics.
More on Marwencol around the web:
New York Times – “In a Tiny Universe, Room to Heal” – by Penelope Green Wall Street Journal – “Illustrator’s War Games Prove Restorative” – by Steve Dollar Psychology Today – “Not Child’s Play” – by Ethan Gilsdorf Denver Post – “This Doc(umentary) Has Healing Powers” – by Lisa Kennedy
Photo Credit: All photos and captions (except the final two images) by Mark E. Hogancamp, courtesy the Cinema Guild.
As NASA starts retiring its space shuttle fleet to museums, photos of the Soviet shuttle counterpart show a strange and improbable endgame to a once grand space race.
Unfinished pieces of the mostly obscure Soviet shuttle program could recently be found in the courtyard of a random hospital, and the entire fuselage of another model was spotted behind a warehouse under a tarp, as shown in the photos above.
The Buran orbital vehicle was the Soviet answer to the U.S. space shuttle, but ended up being a Zune to America’s iPod. For half a century, the two great powers battled for supremacy in space, and the advantage traded back and forth. The Soviets surged ahead when Yuri Gagarin took flight 50 years ago Tuesday, but never matched the United States when it came to reusable space ships.
Only one Buran was ever completed and sent into orbit, completing just a single, unmanned mission in 1988. The program ended in 1993, and its lone space veteran was stored in a hangar at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The hangar collapsed in 2002. The accident claimed the lives of eight workers and destroyed most of the shuttle.
Amateur Russian photographers have documented what they describe as a Buran that was left unfinished after the program shut down. A private collector has reportedly purchased the abandoned carcass shown in the photos posted here, and is planning to move it to a still undisclosed location.
As of the last pass made by Google’s satellites, however, it was still languishing in an overgrown industrial yard in Moscow. The cockpit of another was reportedly purchased by a hospital for use as a hyperbaric chamber. But it never worked, so it ended up as a lawn ornament.
The company that created the Buran still exists. It’s now a private concern that draws on the technology of the Buran and other reusable space vehicles of the Soviet era. Through its efforts the achievements of the Soviet shuttle program may live on, even though its inventory has been scattered across the country.
Gone in the blink of an eye but captured by the release of a shutter, Stephan Tillmans‘ photographs of cathode-ray-tube televisions powering down are unexpected and elegant: analog moments preserved by digital trial and error.
Through tedious, button-pushing coordination on both TV and camera, Tillmans has perfected a surprisingly difficult task. It turns out photographing CRT-image decay and making it look like art is as hard as it is strange.
“Capturing the same picture twice is almost impossible. Timing really would have to be perfect,” says the Berlin photographer. “Not only does the moment the TV is switched off and the moment I take the picture matter, but also the duration of the TV being turned on. I take the pictures manually, and Iʼve never shot two images alike.”
To complete the images for his project, Leuchtpunktordnungen [luminant-point arrays], Tillmans set up a tent in his apartment to avoid getting dust or hair on the TV screen. His images are so precise that it’s almost impossible to retouch any stray elements after the photo has been taken. The tent also provides complete darkness and eradicates reflection.
Sitting in his apartment, in his tent, between TV and camera, Tillmans would keep one hand on the TV power switch and the other on the shutter release.
“I stayed like this for a couple of days, trying out different TVs and camera settings,” he says, “It can take up to 800 pictures until you get a sharp, crisp and good image.”
One of the biggest hurdles was perfecting the depth of focus on the camera lens to find the exact plane on which the desired activity existed.
“The TVʼs tube has a certain depth, which makes it difficult to focus on the right layer. If you set the focus of the camera to the fluorescent screen for instance, you also have to catch the light on that particular layer. But when the light is deeper in the tube you may have focused on the TVʼs shadow mask, but not on the light.”
As the project progressed, Tillmans improved his timing and would use single frames instead of continuous shooting. He describes each unique arrangement of light as a “breakdown of reference.”
“I press the release when the picture breaks down,” he says. “If I took the picture earlier, you would still see an image. You would see noise or even a signal. I am, however, interested in the moment these indications disappear, and when the photo turns from referential to non-referential and from abstract to concrete.”
All photos: Stephan Tillmans
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The work of Stephan Tillmans and eight other photographers will be on show at the Goethe Institute in Washington D.C., June 9 to Sept. 2. The exhibit Gute Aussichten [good prospects]: Young German Photography 2010/2011 showcases the award-winning photography of German graduate students.
May told NPR’s Terry Gross in an interview last year: “All throughout those days when we were in Queen on tour, I would get up and think, ‘Hmm. I’m in Philadelphia for one of few times in my life. What will I do?’ Very often I would go out and try to find someone who would sell me some stereoscopic photographs, because it was always a passion.”
These new cards allow anyone with an appropriate viewer to see the planets and stars depicted on them in visual stereo, a sort of static 3-D.
Developed in the mid-19th century, stereoscopic cards present two offset images separately to the left and right eyes, creating the illusion of depth for the viewer. Such is May’s commitment to the antiquated process that in 2008, he and business partner Elena Vidal resurrected the London Stereoscopic Company to reacquaint the public with “the magic of stereoscopy.”
The relentless May designed and put started manufacturing the OWL Stereoscope in 2009.
May’s book A Village Lost and Found was published the same year. It presented his own research on 59 stereo cards by photographer Thomas Richard Williams. Facts about Williams’ work had been obscured until May, a Poirot of photo-history, found that the previously unidentified village in Williams’ stereo cards was Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire.
New legislation in Sweden designed to protect bystanders against acts of voyeurism mixes ambiguously broad language with commonsense edicts, prompting one photographer to test the laws’ limits with hidden-camera portraits.
Parts of the new law define spaces such as bedrooms and changing areas as “private,” but also ban photography that “irrespective of place, occurs in a way which is obtrusive, intrusive, or hidden and that is meant to be a serious violation of a person’s privacy as an individual.”
With cryptic portraits of unknowing passers-by captured through a one-way mirror, Moa Karlberg’s Watching You Watch Me treads the fine line of these legal distinctions. While Sweden has better laws than many countries when it comes to safeguarding the activity of well-intentioned street and journalistic photographers, Karlberg is worried that new laws may engender a culture of suspicion.
“It can be hard to define when you are in a private space,” says Karlberg. “The law can easily be overinterpreted and affect other types of photography.”
The Swedish government was pressed into action following a series of disturbing cases of peeping-tom intrusion, including a landlord filming a tenant changing and a teenager who distributed images of his naked girlfriend without his partner’s knowledge. The previous lack of actionable law meant the digital voyeurs went uncharged and unpunished. Authorities were left red-faced.
