Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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René Dagron

René Dagron was a French photographer and inventor. During the siege of Paris, Dagron proposed to the authorities to use his microfilming process to carry the messages by carrier pigeons. Dagron photographed pages of newspapers in their entirety which he then converted into miniature photographs. He subsequently removed the collodion film from the glass base and rolled it tightly into a cylindrical shape which he then inserted into miniature tubes that were transported fastened on the wings of pigeons. Upon receipt the microphotograph was reattached to a glass frame and was then projected by magic lantern on the wall. The message contained in the microfilm could then be transcribed or copied. By 28 January 1871, when Paris and the Government of National Defense surrendered, Dagron had delivered 115,000 messages to Paris by carrier pigeon.

Palazzo Dario

Palazzo Dario is a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal of Venice at the mouth of the Rio delle Torreselle in the Dorsoduro section of Venice and located on the Campiello Barbaro. The palazzo was built in the floral Venetian Gothic style and was refaced with Renaissance features. The palace's formal address is "Dorsoduro 352". Palazzo Dario is often described as one of Venice's most exotic palaces and typically compared to Ca d'Oro. It resides on an enchanting little square, the Campiello Barbaro, named in honor of the patrician Barbaro family members who lived there. The square is shaded by trees and flanked by Palazzo Dario itself. The palazzo's eccentric beauty was of special interest to John Ruskin who described its marble-encrusted oculi in great detail.

Crush, Texas

Crush, Texas, was a temporary "city" established as a one-day publicity stunt in 1896. William George Crush, general passenger agent of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, conceived the idea to demonstrate a train wreck as a spectacle. No admission was charged, and train fares to the crash site were at the reduced rate of US$2 from any location in Texas. As a result about 40,000 people showed up on September 15, 1896 making the new town of Crush, Texas, temporarily the second-largest city in the state.

Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter was perhaps the most interesting of the fifties color photographers in his use of form. One of the most effective gestures in Leiter’s work is to have great fields of undifferentiated dark or light, an overhanging canopy, say, or a snow drift, interrupted by gashes of color. He returned again and again to a small constellation of subjects: mirrors and glass, shadows and silhouettes, reflection, blur, fog, rain, snow, doors, buses, cars, fedoras. He was a virtuoso of shallow depth of field: certain sections of some of the photographs look as if they have been applied with a quick brush.