Sunday, October 12, 2025

Lions on the beach

Somehow -- you know how click leads on to click -- I ended up reading a BBC article called "'Their resilience is a lesson to us all': The maritime lions hunting seals on the beach," featuring this striking photograph by Griet Van Malderen:


It took me a second to think what it reminded me of: the Frederick Stuart Church painting I posted back in March in "More lions and doves":


It didn't mean anything to me at the time, but looking at that painting now I can't help but notice that the center of attention appears to be a blue-green crystal ball.

After that he began to dream of the long yellow beach and he saw the first of the lions come down onto it in the early dark and then the other lions came and he rested his chin on the wood of the bows where the ship lay anchored with the evening off-shore breeze and he waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy.
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

2 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@Wm - Striking as a picture; however, to me it immediately seemed as if the foreground (Lion on the pebbles) had been photoshopped onto the background of sea and spray.

Whether this is correct or not, it demonstrates how my appreciation of any image is now pre-filtered by awareness of the prevalence of CGI/AI and other such tamperings.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Yes, the era of "photographic proof" turns out to have been relatively brief. We're back to the understanding that all pictures and reports are produced by people (or, worse, algorithms!) and may or may not reflect reality.

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