T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.
Diet Eman has passed away at 99.
Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.
…
A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.
Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.
It has been a bad week for photographers.
Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”
Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.
I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.
Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.
