Photograph Works

  • Bathers at La Grenouillère

    In talking to my wife yesterday I realised I have an identification with some art galleries and museums. They are ones I have visited more than once and when I think of them I see a corridor here or a room there. I have become integrated in them.

    It’s a nice feeling and it’s thanks to Tamara because I don’t think I would have visited so many galleries and museums nor so often otherwise.

    And I need exposure to art.

    Now we live in London I can just ‘pop down’ to the National Gallery.

    And the subject for today is Claude Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère, which he painted in 1869.

    Monet and Renoir spent that summer painting together at La Grenouillère (The Frog Pond) on the Seine. It is. or was, a resort with a floating restaurant, a dance hall and riverside tables.

    I took this photo of the painting.

    What I see is that the woman on the right, facing us, has a face fixed a million miles away. Or is she looking at something in the distance? Or is she recalling a memory? Is it a good memory, a bad memory?

    She doesn’t seem to have any relationship with the other woman, nor with anyone at all. She could be catatonic for all we can see. From her passive body language she doesn’t seem to be interested in the scene around her, unlike the other woman. Perhaps she is hyper-aware and drinking in the sights and sounds as in a dream. Perhaps she is listening to the sounds that carry over the water.

    Perhaps it is her first visit out into the world since some terrible tragedy, and she cannot bear to take off her lace gloves for fear of being to exposed to the world.

    Perhaps the woman on the left is calming her, having taken on the task of accompanying her friend on her first foray out of the house.

    Are the two women of the same social status? Is the woman on the left in the employ of the other woman?

    And the title ‘Bathers at La Grenouillère’ – what bathers, where are they? Do these women fit the description of bathers?

    I read that Monet deliberately downplayed emotions because he wanted the women to function as elements in a composition about light and reflection, not as characters in a narrative.

    I can’t trace whether he said that or others said that is what he wanted.

    Strange.

    But do I like it? Yes, it is satisfying – all the colours and the arrangement – satisfying except for the woman. For me the whole painting pivots around her face and her expression. That is why I like it more than if it were just a scene of light and reflection.

  • This Never Happened. But This Did.

    This appeared in my X stream with people commenting how wonderful it was that the three could sing one last song together.

    Someone queried the placement of the three microphones stands but it didn’t seem to stop the positive comments.

    I see that one of the microphone stands is rising directly out of the bedding.

    It never happened. The image is entirely generated by AI.

    But This Did Happen

    According to a post from Anthropic entitled ‘Detecting and countering misuse of Al: August 2025’, a hacker used Claude Code, one of Anthropic’s products, to search for vulnerable companies, penetrate their networks, create software to steal sensitive information, craft psychologically targeted extortion demands, examine the victims’ financial documents to calculate how much to demand, and then write the extortion emails.

    According to the post, the hacker did what it did on ‘an unprecedented scale’

    This is the response from Anthropic, and reading it I don’t see how it can possibly foil hackers once the hackers recognise the triggers and work out how to circumvent them.

    “Our response: We banned the accounts in question as soon as we discovered this operation. We have also developed a tailored classifier (an automated screening tool), and introduced a new detection method to help us discover activity like this as quickly as possible in the future. To help prevent similar abuse elsewhere, we have also shared technical indicators about the attack with relevant authorities.”

    Hat tip to Charles Arthur for pointing me to this.

    And This Happened Too

    Again from Anthropic

    “We discovered that North Korean operatives had been using Claude to fraudulently secure and maintain remote employment positions at US Fortune 500 technology companies. This involved using our models to create elaborate false identities with convincing professional backgrounds, complete technical and coding assessments during the application process, and deliver actual technical work once hired.”

    I wonder who marked the coding assessments during the application process.

    Perhaps AI did.

  • Write For Seven Minutes, Rinse and Repeat

    A couple of nights ago I attended an online workshop on creative writing. Actually it was a taster for a language learning course rather than a gathering of writers, but that’s another story.

    Towards the end of the hour the person hosting it asked us to write without editing and to continue for seven minutes.

    As the minutes went by I half-formed an intention to ask ‘Why seven minutes?’ Why not six or ten or eleven. But that half-formed question was overtaken a more pressing question that came up in my mind, which was whether I could actually keep going for seven minutes.

    The first three minutes were easy because I built what I wanted to say on top of what the instructor had already used as a piece of creative writing.

    I could easily divert now and tell you what its strengths were and how easy it was to follow up on it. But that would take me away from what I am writing this for, which is what happened when I continued to plug away at writing.

    It reminded me of what happens when I walk really slowly. When I say slowly I mean so slow that a person observing would wonder what this person is doing. So, cutting to the chase, the benefit of walking really slowly is that you start to see things. Look to your right and look up and look here and look there. It is special and I recommend it to anyone whether they have a purpose in mind (such as photographing) or not.

    So.

    So when I was writing and needed to keep going, I wrote all kinds of things that a minute before would not have occurred to me to write.

    To fulfil the brief, the act of getting them down was more important than judging the quality of the ideas.

    And it turned out that the ideas were certainly no worse than what went before. I went in unexpected directions and opened up the storyline in ways I had never imagined I would do – and all because the instruction was to keep writing – for seven minutes.