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| [Note Guidelines] Photographer's Note |
I shot this from the base of the pedestal of the right-hand statue atop Hoover Dam with the focus and metering on the face of the statue. I took six exposures to capture the flag extending into the frame with the most profile showing. I used both UV and Polarization filters on the lens. I didn't have to change a thing in pp except the size of the image to make it fit on TrekLens.
From www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/artwork.html:
(The statue) is the work of Norwegian-born, naturalized American Oskar J.W. Hansen. Mr. Hansen fielded many questions about his work while it was being installed at the dam. In response to those questions, he later wrote about his interpretation of his sculptures.
Hoover Dam, said Hansen, represented for him the building genius of America, "a monument to collective genius exerting itself in community efforts around a common need or ideal." He compared the dam to such works as the great pyramids of Egypt, and said that, when viewing these man-made structures, the viewer often asks of their builders, "What manner of men were these?"
The sculptor, according to Hansen, tries to answer this question objectively, by "interpreting man to other men in the terms of the man himself." "In each of these monuments," he said, "can be read the characteristics of these men, and on a larger scale, the community of which they are part. Thus, mankind itself is the subject of the sculptures at Hoover Dam."
Hansen's principal work at Hoover Dam is the monument of dedication on the Nevada side of the dam. Here, rising from a black, polished base, is a 142-foot flagpole flanked by two winged figures, which Hansen calls the Winged Figures of the Republic. They express "the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment."
"The building of Hoover Dam belongs to the sagas of the daring. The winged bronzes which guard the flag, therefore, wear the look of eagles. To them also was given the vital upward thrust of an aspirational gesture; to symbolize the readiness for defense of our institutions and keeping of our spiritual eagles ever ready to be on the wing." |
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