Archive for July/2010

Rafael Puyol

Las cigüeñas se asocian a la buena suerte, la felicidad, o la llegada de un nuevo retoño .Hay una leyenda que trata de explicar porqué los niños vienen de Paris a pico de cigüeña , pero no se la voy a contar, entre otras cosas porque la capital francesa ha perdido la exclusiva como expendedora de niños y sus blancas cigüeñas sufren la competencia de compañeras de viaje de todos los colores que transportan niños de variada tonalidad. Así está sucediendo en España desde finales de los 90 con la llegada de cigüeñas distintas que trasladan los niños que después las madres extranjeras alumbran entre nosotros .Su cifra ha ido creciendo hasta alcanzar en 2008 la cantidad de 108.000,un volumen que representa el 21 % de todos los niños nacidos en el país. Pero en 2009 ,todas las cigüeñas ,las blancas y las de colores, parecen haberse tomado un descanso.

Lo saben Uds: la natalidad en el país, después de una década de subidas ininterrumpidas, ha vuelto a caer y , como era de esperar , se ha utilizado la crisis para explicar ese descenso. No se puede negar que haya podido tener un cierto papel reductor. Pero no hay que olvidar que la demografía tiene sus propios mecanismos, posesos de un alto valor explicativo .Si en 2009 se han alumbrado menos niños que en años anteriores es porque empieza a haber menos madres españolas ( hijas nacidas en épocas de fuerte caída de la natalidad ) y extranjeras ( descenso de la inmigración). Luego esas madres pueden decidir tener menos hijos o ,lo que es mas probable, aplazarlos hasta que vengan tiempos mejores .El desempleo aflige a las cigüeñas que hacen la ruta de España .Esperemos que, como las golondrinas, vuelvan pronto a nuestros balcones con los niños en el pico y el pan bajo las alas.

As published in the New York Times

Photographs From the Philadelphia Museum of Art

By RANDY KENNEDY

PHILADELPHIA — The critic Clement Greenberg once described Thomas Eakins's signature brand of darkness as "an ideal chiaroscuro." Eakins was known to knock down even the brightness of a cheerful blue sky with a sober dimming wash.

So it often struck scholars as odd that his greatest symphony of darkness and light — the huge, still unsettling "Gross Clinic" from 1875, showing an operation in a surgical theater, a bloody union of human progress and frailty — always seemed to have a little too much light in it, in all the wrong places. The two figures standing in a corridor behind the godlike surgeon Dr. Samuel D. Gross appeared to be emerging from an orange inferno, with parts of their clothes aflame, drawing the viewer's eye away from the drama at the painting's center. Many of the medical students arrayed in the darkened galleries above were too bright and reddish, as if some were fiddling with flashlights.

"This is the picture that's been in a thousand textbooks," said Kathleen A. Foster, senior curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, staring despondently last week at an image of the work on a computer screen. "It's the painting everyone knows. Unfortunately it's not the one Eakins painted."

But on the wall next to the computer towered the one he did, the original, out of its frame and glowering once again with all the menace and murk its creator intended. Over the past 10 months, in a high-ceilinged conservation lab, Ms. Foster and Mark Tucker, the museum's chief paintings conservator, have led an ambitious restoration effort to reverse extensive changes made to the work sometime between 1917 and 1925 under the direction of its former owner, Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. The painting, which has not been seen in public since last July, will go back on view Saturday at the museum in the exhibition "An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing 'The Gross Clinic' Anew," which will continue through Jan. 9.

The show will mark a rebirth in another sense as well. It will be the formal reintroduction of the picture to the public since a dramatic fund-raising effort in 2007 and 2008 that ensured the painting would stay in Philadelphia. The museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts raised the $68 million needed to keep it after Thomas Jefferson University, the medical school's parent, announced plans to sell it for that price in a joint deal to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, being built in Bentonville, Ark., by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton.

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Zwelethu Mthethwa's name is not easy to pronounce, but his photography is pretty simple. He is one of South Africa's pre-eminent photographers. And his work, according to Okwui Enwezor (another fun name) of San Francisco Art Institute, marks a major departure "away from the visually exotic and diseased — or "afro-pessimism," he explained to Aperture.

Mthethwa photographs the environment, social issues and people, with an intimate sensibility that yields colorful, insightful images. "I was trying to portray these people in a different light," he explained in an interview with Enwezor. "They are poor … but I wanted to portray them as human beings."

Poverty and disparity have plagued South Africa in the wake of apartheid. But rather than showing suffering and sadness, Mthethwa's images are quiet and strangely empowering. By photographing people in their houses, he captures them in their most comfortable environment, which also lends a certain intimacy. Only when you step inside a South African house do you see the texture and color that enrich the people's personal lives. Mthethwa's approach proves that it's possible to show struggle without overbearingly depressing or sensational imagery.

A selection of his work will be on display at New York City's Studio Museum in Harlem starting Friday, coinciding with the release of his eponymous first monograph by Aperture. Check out this video of the photographer in conversation with Enwezor:

For more information please go to National Public Radio.

Zwelethu Mthethwa and Okwui Enwezor from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

A recent study found that more patients die of medical mistakes in the month of July than any other month. Inexperienced and overtired doctors may be part of the problem. David Phillips, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, talks about study findings with Michele Norris.

A new study has documented a bit of anecdotal medical wisdom. It's called the July effect. And it happens this month every summer, when thousands of new doctors arrive at hospitals to begin their residency programs and take care of patients for the first time.

The notion that some of these rookie doctors would bungle their responsibilities because of inexperience and sleep deprivation has long been a hospital ward myth. David Phillips wanted to find out if the July effect is more than just a myth. He's a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His study was published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Click here to listen to the full interview with David Phillips on National Public Radio.