Eideard

Liu Bolin’s amazing camouflage artwork

At first glance, this may look like a photograph of shelves in a supermarket. But look more closely and you may see a man painstakingly painted to blend in with the colourful background. Chinese artist Liu Bolin has become world renowned for his camouflage art. Liu uses a team of two assistants to paint the camouflage onto him to make him invisible, and each photograph can take up to ten hours to set up. In some cases, Liu has his assistants paint his body and then he remains extremely still until an unsuspecting passer-by happens to walk past.

Click on the photo to see a photo gallery of his work.

A Spanish politician said on Saturday that he was “stupefied” by the FBI’s decision to use his photograph to compose its latest image of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and is considering taking legal action. “Firstly I will ask the FBI for an explanation, which they haven’t given me yet, and then I will reserve the right to take legal action,” Gaspar Llamazares told CNN+.

“In the last few days I have seen the security services involved in some very strange things, some major failures, but I would never have believed they could have affected me so directly,” he said.

LLamazares is a former leader of Spain’s communist party Izquierda Unida and is currently its parliamentary spokesman.

An FBI agent said the organization was aware of similarities between the image — an “age-progressed photograph” intended to give an updated idea of bin Laden’s appearance — and that of “an existing photograph of a Spanish public official.”

Special agent Jason Pack said a forensic artist had been unable to find suitable features from the FBI’s database of photographs and used a picture from the Internet instead…

“I am stupefied the FBI has used my photo — but it could have been anyone’s — to compose a picture of a terrorist. It affects my honor, my own image and also the security of all us,” LLamazares said.

BTW – I hope you really don’t think they searched through the Web for the photo they used. Since he’s a Lefty, they probably got Llamazares’ image from one of their own databases.

The gifted young idealist who slips the bonds of civilization and prevails against the wild, or fails in the trying, is a recurring theme of the American West — not to mention Hollywood.

Everett Ruess in many ways defined the template. A poet, painter and confidant to a leathery set of Western artists in the 1930s, including Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, the 20-year-old Mr. Ruess rode off into the desert of the Southwest in 1934 with two burros and a notebook full of dreams, never to be seen again. Over the next 75 years, the West became tamer, but Mr. Ruess and his legend did not, and the lingering mystery of his disappearance only added to the romantic aura of the time and fueled the periodic search for evidence of his fate.

Now the circle has been closed with a tale that is gritty and grim — and scientifically gee-whiz at the same time.

Human remains were found last year about 60 miles from Escalante in southern Utah by a Navajo man who knew nothing of the Ruess story. The man has been searching for evidence of a killing that his grandfather had witnessed during the Depression. On Thursday, researchers at the University of Colorado connected the dots and said that DNA in the recovered bones matched that of living Ruess relatives. Citing the DNA evidence, as well as a forensic facial reconstruction that was compared with photographs of Mr. Ruess, the researchers concluded that the remains were those of the long-lost artist.

So it was that two family stories of secrets and mysteries became intertwined, and then resolved.

“Navajo oral tradition, the forensic analysis and now the DNA test,” said Dennis Van Gerven, a professor of anthropology at the university. “We can be certain that this is Ruess.”

RTFA. Track down the detailed magazine article. I can’t tell you what the breadth of space and sky out here is like, You probably need to experience it to understand how fully you can disappear in the back of nowhere.

Ruess disappeared into a much larger area – long before much of anyone other than the Dineh or Ute traveled through the region.

On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year’s presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington…

The AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement. “AP safeguards its assets and looks at these events on a case-by-case basis. We have reached out to Mr. Fairey’s attorney and are in discussions. We hope for an amicable solution.”

“We believe fair use protects Shepard’s right to do what he did here,” says Fairey’s lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School…

A longtime rebel with a history of breaking rules, Fairey has said he found the photograph using Google Images. He released the image on his Web site shortly after he created it, in early 2008, and made thousands of posters for the street…

The image will be included this month at a Fairey exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and a mixed-media stenciled collage version has been added to the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

Frankly, I come down on the side of the artist. Even selling an artist’s impression of the photograph is legit as far as I’m concerned. The artist has a right to interpret and reproduce what he sees – even if he’s looking at a photograph.