Arthur Batut was a French photographer and pioneer of aerial photography. He was born in 1846 in Castres, and developed interest in history, archeology and photography.

Following in the family tradition of academic excellence, he received his degree from of college of Castres before moving to the nearby town of Labruguiere. Batut was fascinated by the art and science of photography, which was still in its infancy. He excitedly purchased a camera and turned one of the rooms in his house into a laboratory. With a child’s curiosity, he would walk the streets of his hometown with his “magic box,” eagerly capturing whatever images caught his eye.

While he greatly enjoyed portrait photography, Batut’s attentions soon turned to aerial photography, to which he had been introduced by the popular French scientific journal, La Nature, founded by famed chemist and aviator Gaston Tissandier.

In 1885, Mr. Tissandier took aerial photographs of Paris with a camera suspended from a balloon that were published in La Nature. Mr. Batut decided to attempt the same feat with a kite, which he built with the help of a plan featured in the February 1887 issue of La Nature. He replaced his kite’s original wicker and bamboo frame with rectangular bars made from Carolina poplar wood. The camera was constructed with wood and cardboard, onto which Mr. Batut loaded film plates measuring 13 x 18 cm. The “Guillotine” shutter was operated with the use of rubber bands, and was activated with a spring that was released by the current generated from an electric fuse. The single objective lens would later be replaced with an anastigmatic objective lens. Wooden tripods supported the camera to ensure freedom of movement.

With construction finally completed, Batut took his first aerial photograph in May 1888, but quickly discovered that the poor image quality was due to the low shutter speed. He corrected this by increasing the rubber band thickness to achieve a 1/100 of a second shutter speed. While Batut’s foray into aerial photography received considerable international media attention, there were critics who complained that while a novelty, using a kite to take aerial photographs was of little practical use. Nevertheless, Batut perfected his techniques and acquired an impressive portfolio of aerial photographs. He wrote of his experiences in ‘La photographie aerienne par cerf-volant’, believed to be the first text on kite aerial photography.

His book on kite aerial photography appeared in 1890. It is believed that in 1887 or 1888 he was the first to use this method successfully. At the time, kite aerial photography had potential applications for aerial reconnaissance, but also for agriculture and archeology. The first aerial photographs had been taken by Nadar from a balloon in 1858. The use of unmanned kites promised obvious advantages in a military setting.

Although best known for his aerial photographs, Batut expanded his professional portraiture repertoire. After reading about Francis Galton’s experimentation with composite sketches of convicted criminals that emphasised certain facial characteristics, Batut began producing similar “type portraits” that were to be used certain distinguishing physiological traits of races, groups, or families (including his own).

Seventy-two-year-old Arthur Batut died of stroke on January 19, 1918. There is a museum in his hometown of Labruguiere that is devoted to celebrating and preserving Batut’s photographic genius and artistic vision.

Markéta Luskačová is a Czech-born photographer who spent much of her life living and working in the UK. Frequently drawn to people who are marginalised, she is particularly famous for her documentation of life in remote Slovakian villages and the East End markets of London. She is considered by many to be one of the best social photographers of her age.

Luskačová was born in Prague in 1944 and grew up in Czechoslovakia in the era of Communist Party rule. In 1963 she chanced upon a group of Pilgrims travelling to the city of Levoča and became determined to document those cultural and religious traditions which were under threat of erasure. She studied in Sociology of Culture at Charles University, graduating in 1967 with a thesis entitled Pilgrimages in Slovakia. She then went on to study photography at FAMU film and TV school in Prague.

Although taken at the very outset of her career, the Pilgrim Cycle photographs brought Markéta’s work recognition and acclaim. She had travelled around remote areas of Slovakia, concentrating in particular on the village of Šumiac. There life had barely changed for hundreds of years and had managed to escape alteration by the collectivism imposed by the communist government in the rest of the country. She depicted the lives, rites and religion of these enduring village communities in a collection of hugely evocative and beautiful photographs. Since the pilgrimages were rare and directly contravened state ideology, Markéta wanted to record this way of life, fearing it would soon be eradicated.

These pictures were first exhibited in Prague in 1971 at the Gallery of Visual Arts. The editor of Creative Camera, Colin Osman, was visiting from London and happened to see this exhibition. Consequently, his magazine subsequently published Markéta’s photographs, bringing her work to international attention.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the communist censorship attempted to conceal her international reputation. Her works were banned in Czechoslovakia, and the catalogues for the exhibition Pilgrims in the Victoria and Albert Museum were lost on their way to Czechoslovakia.

In 1971 Markéta married poet Franz H. Wurm who, although a native of Prague, had British citizenship. Throughout 1970–1972, Markéta photographed the stage productions of the Theatre Behind the Gate as its house photographer. However, this brought her into conflict with the Communist Party which banned the theatre in 1972. She applied to state authorities to visit her husband in England and, eventually, emigrated in 1975. Nevertheless, she never stopped thinking of Czeckoslovakia as her home.

In London Markéta discovered a whole new inspiration for her work in the city’s markets, especially those of Brick Lane and Spitalfields. Short of money, she shopped in these markets for cheap produce but also found a rich and varied subject matter on which to focus her lens. When her son was born in 1977, she would push him around the streets in his pram and take photographs of the people and places she encountered. She would spend as much time as possible with her subjects, winning their trust and really getting to know them.

She continued to photograph these areas and their residents for decades and produced a long-running series of wonderful photographs which demonstrate tremendous veracity and humanity without ever veering into sentimentality. “I have not found in London any other better place to comment on the sheer impossibility of human existence”, she said. In 1991, Markéta had a one-woman exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery showing a selection of her photographs taken at the East End markets. Those pictures were the result of a two-year residency in which she selected from and printed her pictures taken between 1975 and 1990. Yet it is less widely known that these represent only a portion of those Markéta has taken in Brick Lane as result of her long-term relationship with the market which extends over thirty years. This exhibition cemented Markéta’s reputation as a vital photographic talent.

In particular, Markéta recorded the last days of the ancient market in birds and animals that existed in Sclater St and Club Row until it was closed down in 1990 as a result of protests by animal rights activists. Markéta shared a natural sympathy with the dealers, observing their affection for their charges, unlike the hard-line protestors, one of whom pushed her in front of a car.

She also famously photographed the sale of a lion cub in Brick Lane. She remembers that it was first offered at £150 and then the price diminished to £100 and finally £75, over successive weeks, as the cub grew and became less cuddly and more threatening. Eventually, the seller came back one Sunday without the lion but clasping a tray of watches that he had swapped the creature for. In Brick Lane, Markéta found her primary subject as a photographer, offering an entire society in realistic detail and a mythological universe of infinite variety.

It is said that Markéta Luskačová’s photographs reflect her own personality. They are simultaneously generous in their humanity yet unsentimental in revealing the nature of people.

From steel scrap to testing the final product with a ton of water pressure, here’s how Japanese manhole covers are made. The video is perhaps a little long in parts, so I would not blame you for skipping ahead to ~12:10 to see how some of the covers are hand-painted in brilliant color.

See also Japanese Manhole Covers Are Beautiful.

Ukraine’s friends have poured a considerable amount of weaponry into the nation’s fight for survival. The United States alone has provided more than $25 billion of matériel, including 160 modern artillery pieces, 38 medium-range HIMARS rocket systems, hundreds of armored vehicles, and tens of thousands of advanced munitions of all types. Allies such as Poland and the Czech Republic have done even more (in relative, not absolute terms), supplying hundreds of Soviet-model tanks, an array of modern artillery systems, and all kinds of nonlethal support. Even hesitant Germany has sent a score of advanced guns and missile launchers, some antiaircraft systems, and more. In total, the West has sent more than 320 tanks, 2,400 other armored vehicles, 450 artillery pieces, and more than 135 air-defense systems to Ukraine, and more is on the way.

This is still not enough.

With the material aid from the West, as well as intelligence support and similarly discreet training and advising efforts, Ukraine has been able, by its own extraordinary efforts, to drive Russian forces from Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv in the east, and Kherson city in the south. To finish liberating its territory, however, and to decisively defeat Russia’s forces, Ukraine needs not only greater quantities but also different types of arms, including modern battle tanks, extensive air and antiballistic-missile defenses, and, above all, deep-attack systems such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles. With such weapons, Ukraine can and will repeat and expand the disruption of Russian logistics that enabled its earlier counteroffensives.

[Anne Applebaum: Germany is arguing with itself over Ukraine]

Russia has been badly bloodied. Of its prewar army, perhaps a quarter of its troops were killed or wounded in its initial attacks on Ukraine. A hastily mobilized force of men swept up in a press-ganging effort is also suffering casualties at a horrific rate. But the losses have not yet broken the Russian army or the determination of the Putin regime in Moscow. Indeed, Ukrainian sources report that a new mobilization is being prepared with the aim of more than doubling the size of the Russian military to a total force of as many as 2 million personnel.

The Russian military is, by Western standards, poorly motivated, poorly trained, badly led, and inadequately supported. Its units have to be kept at the front by the fear of blocking units that will gun down soldiers fleeing the battlefield. Its maintenance practices are primitive, its rations outdated, its command unable to coordinate the combined-arms operations of modern war. But Russia retains three large advantages.

The first is, simply, size. With a population of 146 million, it still has plenty of bodies it can throw into the fight against Ukraine, a country of 43 million people, perhaps a third of whom have become refugees or have been internally displaced. Russia also retains vast stocks of military matériel accumulated during the Cold War—even if those have now been depleted. These are dwindling strengths, as skilled young men flee the country and sanctions retard and disrupt the war economy, but for now they matter.

Russia’s other advantages are less tangible. One of these is sheer ruthlessness. President Vladimir Putin and his generals simply do not care, from a human point of view, how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of their soldiers are killed or mutilated in war. They equally have no compunction about inflicting mayhem on Ukrainian civilians in apartment blocks, schools, or hospitals. They will feed soldiers and civilians alike into the furnace of war until such behavior threatens their own survival.

Russia has, in addition, the benefits of a homeland sanctuary. Ukraine has managed a few daring strikes into Russian territory, but it has not yet been able to inflict militarily significant damage there, much less to ruin the Russian economy.

Against these strengths, Ukraine has many and indeed more of its own. This war has reminded us of the transcendent importance of motivation. Ukrainians know what they are fighting for, and they will go on to the end. They have a growing edge in skill over their enemy, and all the creativity of a free society and an engaged civilian population that supports the front in many ways; this includes creating improvised drone squadrons and articles of war, and supplying food and tactical information to frontline units.

Wars are, in some measure, tests of a society’s will and resilience, and this one has shown just how different Russia and Ukraine are. Wars are also a test of vitality. Putin is 70; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is 44. Russia’s chief of the general staff (and now overall commander in Ukraine), Valery Gerasimov, is 67; Ukraine’s chief of staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, is 49. Support for Russia’s war is strongest among those who remember the Soviet Union, and the war is being conducted by the aging men in Putin’s inner circle.

In contrast, support for Ukraine’s war is across the board, and the war is being led by a generation in its prime, no more than middle-aged. This is, in many ways, a war between a calcified society lost in its brutal past and a free society looking toward a decent future.

Behind Ukraine lie the powers of the West, understood in the old-fashioned sense of a free coalition of states led by the United States. Despite understandable fretting about the slowness of its military-industrial mobilization, the Western allies have enormous and growing capacity, and they have—too slowly, and at times even stingily—provided Ukraine with battlefield technology that outmatches that deployed by Russia. Over time, that disparity will grow, if the Western commitment matches even a fraction of that of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers.

“War weariness” in Western democracies is a tired trope. We in the West are sacrificing nothing beyond modest financial resources—no comparison to the blood tax paid by the people of Ukraine. As a number of analysts have noted, spending some tens of billions of dollars to shatter the land and air forces of one of our chief opponents, Russia, is a bargain. Spending some tens of billions of dollars more, for as long as it takes, is no less worth it.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Cut the baloney realism]

Ukraine’s most urgent needs are, as Kyiv has made clear, air and ballistic-missile defenses, heavy tanks, and long-range strike systems. It has received some of the defense systems, but not yet the armor and offensive weapons. The excuses that Germany, in the first case, and the United States, in the latter case, have made for not freeing up the supply of Leopard tanks and systems such as ATACMS are at once flimsy and shameful.

Ukrainians have repeatedly shown themselves able to master complex military technology with astonishing speed. An honest audit of how long Western experts expected Ukrainians would need to learn how to operate them, and how long it actually took them, would be revealing and embarrassing. Similarly, Ukraine has shown remarkable restraint: The idea that long-range missile systems would be used to strike indiscriminately into Russia has no credible support. And fears of Russian escalation to the use of nuclear weapons have been discredited repeatedly, including in The Atlantic.

The real reasons for reluctance look to be timidity and a lack of imagination. So perhaps the best thing for Western leaders who cannot bring themselves to treat war as war is to clarify for them what they have to fear if they do not take the actions that both strategic calculations and moral imperatives demand.

Because Russia is big, ruthless, and counting on the sanctuary of its territory, the war can be concluded on reasonable terms only by the decisive defeat of its forces in Ukraine—their elimination by flight, capture, wounds, or death. Some 100,000 casualties have not been enough, but Russia’s will and resources are not infinite. If Moscow’s losses have to be several times that, the West has the ability to ensure such an outcome with little risk to itself. If Ukraine has heavy armor and long-range strike systems, the Russian position in occupied land can be rendered untenable. A defeat of that magnitude will likely bring about the internal changes that will deter Russia from pursuing its present path.

Should Western leaders, through their passivity or reluctance, bring about a cease-fire that leaves Russia with Ukrainian territory under its control, they would disgrace themselves as much the French and British leaders did at Munich in 1938—and with less excuse. They will lay the grounds for future wars because, after some period of recuperation, Russia will surely try again. Already, Russia does not recognize the legitimacy of Ukrainian independence; already, blood is on Western hands because of a failure to arm Ukraine and deter Russia on previous occasions. Next time will be even worse.

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

If fear is the only thing some Western leaders understand, they should consider this. For other nations, the lesson of a Ukraine that is not allowed to win this war is very simple: get yourself nuclear weapons. Finns, Poles, Kazakhs, Ukrainians for that matter, and many others will conclude that conventional strength alone is not enough. That South Korea’s leadership has begun talking about the need to reintroduce nuclear weapons to the peninsula is not coincidental.

In a world where a large predatory state is stalled but not beaten decisively, the only resort for its smaller neighbors is to acquire weapons of cataclysmic power. Their leaders would be irresponsible if they did not consider that option. And the leaders of the major Western states are not just irresponsible but willfully negligent if they fail to take the measures—all well within their power—to avoid the world that this failure would bequeath to succeeding generations.

Louis Boutan was a French biologist and a pioneer in the field of underwater photography that would be unmatched by anyone else for decades. He was born in Versailles and studied biology and natural history at the University of Paris where he became a lab assistant at the age of 20.

In 1880, he was named deputy head by the Ministry of Public Education just one year later and assigned to organise the French exhibit at the Melbourne International Exhibition, the eighth World’s fair officially recognised by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) and the first official World’s Fair in the Southern Hemisphere. Invested in naturalism, he stayed in Australia for 18 months, travelling the continent and identifying new animal species including the grape phylloxera found in the Australian vineyard and — while diving naked in the Torres Strait. The mother-of-pearl producing mollusks famously captured his imagination. He also collected a large number of giant clams during the trip home, which concluded on March 9th, in 1883. Upon his return, Boutan continued his research.

In 1886, Boutan was named maître de conférences at the University of Lille. It was here that he first began to imagine the possibilities of underwater photography. In the same year, he learned how to dive. In 1893, he was named professor at the Laboratoire Arago. The Arago Laboratory is situated above the bay at Banyuls-sur-Mer, a small fishing village close to the Spanish border, which, for centuries, had a strong sideline in smuggling. Arago was opened in 1882 by Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, a highly respected zoologist from the University of Paris, for the study of marine biology. 

During that year, with his brother Auguste, he developed equipment for underwater photography. In an article in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, he described his apparatus; the article included an illustration of one of his cameras and several underwater images. Boutan developed a flash bulb that could be used underwater. He later used carbon arc lights for illumination.

Boutan’s first dive to examine the mollusks that so interested him took place there in 1886, but it was only after he joined Lacaze-Duthiers in Paris five years later that he began to refine his ideas about underwater photography. The experience of diving appears to have been revelatory for him. He later recounted, “It was all so beautiful and so strange that I often found myself longing to be able to sketch or paint the scene, so as to be able to bring up to the surface a souvenir of what I had seen below.” Boutan resolved to photograph these “submarine landscapes.”

By the early 1890s, photography had come a long way since Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre introduced his eponymous daguerrotype to the world in 1839. Despite the advances, the process still required glass or metal plates, chemicals, and carefully calculated exposure times. Boutan recalled his own doubts as to whether the underwater environment was suitable for taking good photographs.

Boutan wasn’t the first to experiment with underwater photography. In 1856, an English solicitor William Thompson rowed out into Weymouth Bay, Dorset, to see what he could achieve with a wet collodion glass plate camera housed inside a specially made wooden box. He lowered the box 18 feet into the water and, using a length of string, pulled the shutter. The result is regarded as the world’s first underwater image, though the resulting photograph depicts only murky greys. However, Boutan knew that there were two major issues to contend with in underwater photography: pressure and light. So, like any good scientist, he began to experiment.

The first apparatus he designed, with the help of his brother Auguste, an engineer, was a detective camera (a small inconspicuous style of camera for the time) in a waterproof copper box. A lever operated the shutter and plates, and a rubber balloon, linked to the the box via a tube, squeezed air into the box as it descended and the pressure of the water built up. Boutan first tried to use this device in 1893, but he found the results “uniformly beclouded.”

He continued to experiment, using a blue filter to offset the cloudiness, and moving to the neighboring bay of Troc for better visibility. Then, in 1896, he tried something completely new: a camera in which the plates were left unprotected from the water. He used specially varnished plates to counteract the effect of the salt water, but the results were, in Boutan’s words, “mediocre.” So he revisited his first apparatus, with improvements. He made the lens astigmatic to account for refraction. The box that held the camera was made of iron, not copper. These additions added some complications: It took three men to move the device. The new lens could not be focussed by pointing it down at the sea bed, so the camera had to be lowered just beneath the surface using a pulley. Boutan placed a slate containing writing at a fixed distance from the lens and adjusted the focus accordingly.

Whether Boutan was himself submerged to take the photograph (in a metal-helmed diving suit) or not depended entirely on depth. If he was diving he would get into position and signal, via a rope, for the captain to lower the apparatus, in three parts: the stand, followed by the box itself, then a weight to stabilize the whole thing. Once set up, he signaled, via the rope, for the captain to start timing the exposure. The captain would then tug on the rope when the time was up, Boutan could close the shutter, and both he and his contraption could return to the surface.

On other occasions, Boutan simply lowered the camera from a boat and pulled the shutter with a cord, just as Thompson had done in Weymouth Bay decades before but with a tweak.

Throughout his experiments, Boutan, like modern underwater photographers, was forced to address the critical problem of light. He tested different apertures and, along with electrical engineer M. Chaufour, created what was essentially an underwater flashbulb from a glass bottle containing oxygen and a magnesium wire that could be ignited with a current. But it was unpredictable. The bottle could explode or the light could be obscured with vapor or shine unevenly.

He searched for another light source, but in the end, a light source found him. An optical manufacturer had produced two telescopes to photograph the stars for the 1900 Paris exposition, and wanted to include in his display images of the ocean. The president of the company wrote to Boutan and offered whatever he would need to create an underwater electric light source—with the proviso that any photographs Boutan took would be used in the exposition display.

With this much-needed round of funding, Boutan built two battery-powered underwater arc lamps that could burn, submerged, for half an hour, though it took 70 hours for a steam engine to charge them. Boutan tested them one moonless night in August 1899, and after another dissatisfying result, he repositioned the lamps on either side of the camera, and lowered the entire apparatus to 165 feet. His choice of subject was a submerged sign that read “Photographie Sous-Marine.” It took an hour to haul the equipment back on board, the total weight of which was between 1,100 and 1,320 pounds. But it had been worth it. Despite the depth, the image was sharp and clear.

He published the first book on underwater photography La Photographie sous-marine et les progrès de la photographie. Slides of his underwater photographs were shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Through his relentless experimentation, Boutan created photographs the world had never seen before. He took an underwater self-portrait, his cheeks comically puffed with air. And he took a portrait of a diver, his assistant, Joseph David, on an autumn morning in the bay of Troc, using his third and last underwater device.

In 1904, he was sent to Hanoi to investigate improvements to rice and the culture of pearl oysters. He returned to France in 1908. In 1910, he was named professor of zoology and animal physiology at the University of Bordeaux. In 1914 and 1916, Boutan and his brother worked on a diving suit for the French army.

After the war, he began research into the artificial production of pearls, one of the first people to investigate this subject. In 1921, he was named director of the Station Biologique d’Arcachon. In 1924, he was named to the chair of general zoology of the faculty of science at the University of Algiers; he was also named director of the Station d’Aquaculture et de Pêches de Castiglione and inspector for the Algerian fisheries.

In 1929, he retired to Tigzirt in Algeria. He died there at the age of 75

The Albert Kahn departmental museum in France has released nearly 25,000 color photos of early 20th-century life into the public domain and over 34,000 others that are free to use as part of a project to assure visual history is not forgotten.

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