Hasta La Gadget!

Federico Patellani called himself “a new kind of journalist” in an article published in 1943; a journalist who learned to find “living, contemporary, thrilling” images from the movies. Because of his unique gift of “blending the values of documentary and beauty into a single photograph,” Patellani’s images have made history.

Among Patellani’s most iconic image is the radiant face of a girl bursting through the newspaper Corriere della Sera on June 2, 1946, her features lit up with the joyous news that Italy was about to become a republic. He took the shot for Alberto Mondadori’s Il Tempo, a weekly inspired by Life and known for skillfully pairing reporting and evocative photography. It was a philosophy Patellani could embrace wholeheartedly; though journalistic photography was a profession, not an art, it had to be beautiful in addition to bearing witness. This was a fairly novel concern for the time, but a natural one for a man who had been an artist in the past. This desire to meld beauty and truth is what made Patellani the first true Italian photojournalist.

In his photos, Patellani immortalized an Italy that was trying to forget the trials of its recent past. The country was licking its wounds after World War II, while contending with a rapidly evolving cultural landscape that combined economic success, the rise of the beauty pageant and cinema’s return to glory. Slices of that tumultuous time are captured in 90 images that are now on display at the Palazzo Madama in Turin, in an exhibition entitled “Federico Patellani — Profession: photojournalist.”

Patellani didn’t limit himself to Italy. He was a foreign correspondent in Russia, reporting from the Eastern front and signing his work with the pseudonym Pat Monterosso. In 1954 he went to Greece and Turkey; the following year he traveled through southern Italy shooting television documentaries. In 1956, while traveling through America, Patellani shot a full-color movie, “America Pagana (Pagan America),” as well as a series of photographs for the weekly magazine Epoca. Epoca would later publish Patellani’s “Paradiso Nero (Black Paradise),” 160 pages covering the 1,500 miles the photojournalist traveled with his son Aldo aboard a Land Rover, driving from the Belgian Congo to Kenya.

From ancient European universities to recently-liberated African countries, from South America to the Pacific Islands, from Africa to the Amazon, Patellani traveled around the world many times over, reporting faithfully as he went. His last report was sent from Sri Lanka in 1976, one year before he died.

Here are some of the photographs Patellani took over his long and luminous career as a photojournalist.

This post was originally published on HuffPost Italy and was translated into English.

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It’s quite an accomplishment to live to 100, but a survey of centenarians revealed it’s your attitude that can get you there. UnitedHealthCare released its 10th annual 100 @ 100 survey today, with clues to what helped centenarians live so long.

The survey asked 100 centenarians about their views on health, aging and keeping a positive attitude, as well as other topics.

A sunny outlook is said to be one of the key factors in living a long healthy life, according to the survey. One in four seniors surveyed said staying positive is critical for longevity, with just over six in 10 saying they overall are positive people.

Diet and exercise, unsurprisingly, also were thought to be factors. Twenty-one percent of centenarians said a healthy diet was key while 10 percent said exercise, above all, is important. Various research has backed up the virtues of a positive attitude. A 2012 Yale University found that seniors with a positive attitude were over 40 percent more likely to bounce back from disability than those who were negative. Yet another Yale University study found that older people with positive views on aging can live up to 7.5 years longer than those who view aging negatively.

Besides staying positive, nearly half of the centenarians said they stay active by taking a walk or going for a hike at least once a week, while many others reported a variety of wellness habits including stress-busting activities like meditation, as well as lifting weights. Spending time with family was also important, with 90 percent saying that spending time with loved ones makes them happy.

“The survey reaffirmed that being and feeling healthy isn’t just physical -– and that’s a lesson that seems to come with age,” Rhonda Randall, UnitedHealthcare’s chief medical officer told The Huffington Post in an email. “The centenarians tell us that mental, emotional and social health are linked when it comes to healthy aging and feeling young.”

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the survey, UnitedHealthcare also invited 100 10-year-olds to take the survey as well. When asked to describe being 100, the kids came up with adjectives like “calm” and “peaceful.” Some of them even said they looked forward to how different the world would be, with better technology, in another 90 years.

But the most striking part of the study was this: Despite being aged in the triple digits, 52 percent of the centenarians said they felt younger than their age and 60 percent said they didn’t feel old at all. Amazing.

Just goes to show, age is nothing more than a mindset.

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For many New Yorkers, the May 1 opening of the new Whitney Museum in lower Manhattan signifies really only one thing: the center of gravity of America’s greatest city has dramatically and irrevocably shifted downtown. With the Whitney move, proclaim certain commentators, Chelsea and the far West Village in 2015 have become the social and economic and cultural equivalent of the Upper East Side in 1966, when Marcel Breuer’s building opened its doors on Madison and 75th Street.

Yet the Whitney’s debut on Gansevoort Street is a sign of something much more significant: it is the consecration of New York’s return as a true waterfront city. This is much more meaningful in the long run than the fact that ‘downtown’ is somehow the ‘it’ place to be — urban centers of gravity constantly shift over time, after all, depending on economic and real estate cycles. But returning to the water… now that’s a big move. Ever since the grid system of Manhattan was laid out by far-sighted city planners in 1811, New York has done its best to turn its back on the majestic Hudson and East Rivers and the vast New York Harbor. While commerce was first made on the water, by trading the beaver skins that came from upriver, wealth sought to be inland, away from the waterfront. Robber barons built their mansions on Fifth Avenue and midtown, not on the water’s edge. By the turn of the 20thcentury, the height of fashion was to look out over the green expanse of Central Park, which became a powerful magnet for orienting the city both northward and inland. Not for nothing was the Metropolitan Museum built on Fifth Avenue and the Park.

The rivers and the harbor, after all, were foul, industrial places. New York’s first hospitals — like Bellevue and the old Gouverneur Hospital were on the water’s edge — bodies and effluvia could easily be whisked away by the tides and the river currents. Though Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller would help romanticize the waterfront , the fact remains that for close to two centuries, it meant rotting piers, desolate places where mobsters could take care of their enemies, social and economic shadiness. Socially, it meant Hell’s Kitchen and hookers on 11th Avenue.

Over the last ten years or so, this has been changing dramatically. In New York as in other coastal cities and ports around the world, waterfronts that were long derelict because of the transformation of the shipping industry, came to be seen as potentially valuable inner-city real estate. From Battery Park City to South Street Seaport and Hudson Park, activity on New York’s extensive waterfront has now extended to the Brooklyn Bridge Park and Red Hook. The 15-acre Hudson Yards project along the Hudson River in midtown proclaims itself to be the largest private real eastate development in the United States; it is certainly the largest development in New York since Rockefeller Center was built in the Depression. Tomorrow, other projects will include the Greenpoint waterfront and the Brooklyn Navy Yards, to name only some of the most important.

What is surprising, in fact, is just how late New York has come to the global waterfront rediscovery party. London’s South Bank began to be developed in the 1950’s, while the massive Canary Wharf business district, which replaced the old commercial entrepots along the Thames, started rising in the late 1980’s. The competition for the waterside Sydney Opera House were unveiled dats back to 1956. Shanghai’s Bund began to be restored to favor following Deng Xioping’s economic reforms in the mid 1970’s. For cities like Miami, Tel Aviv and Rio de Janeiro in the post-war era, premium housing almost always overlooked the water. In New York, it rarely did.

But New York is in full transformation now. New York’s rediscovery and redevelopment of its waterfronts are also going hand in hand with a revolution in urban lifestyles. Apart from Staten Island residents, few New Yorkers ever dreamed of setting foot on a ferry. Now they are much more frequent, plying the waterways separating Brooklyn and Manhattan, crisscrossing the Hudson and the East River. Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling for an even more massive increase in the their use. New York, says the Mayor, “is the ultimate coastal city.”

Somewhat counter-intuitively, developing the water’s edge is the best defense AGAINST the water. Building resilient up-to-code structures along its coasts means New York will better be able to withstand the ravages of rising sea-levels and the next Hurricane Sandy. The redevelopment and rediscovery of its waterfronts thus augur well for the health of New York in the 21st century.

To glimpse the promise of New York in the new century, take a ferry from South Street to Governors Island. As the boat plies the water, look back at Manhattan, with its gleaming new towers around Ground Zero. To the west are the soaring towers of Jersey City, then the urban archeology of Ellis Island, and finally the Statue of Liberty. To the east Brooklyn, now almost as dense and shiny and new as Manhattan. This is truly one of the greatest urban seascapes in the world, as breathtaking in its way as Venice, Hong Kong Harbour or Rio. This is the New York of the future.
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John Rossant is the founder and chairman of the New Cities Foundation, a leading global non-profit institution dedicated to improving cities everywhere.

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Yesterday, Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle ventured out on its first developmental test flight. The Jeff Bezos-founded organization reports that the launch was a success—though it didn’t manage to recover the propulsion module as it hoped.

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Avid photographers that are looking for an artsy lens to use on their compact cameras might want to give the Lomo LC-A Minitar-1 Art Lens a good look. The lens is handmade to the same standards as other lenses in the Lomography Art Lens series. The Minitar-1 promises vivid colors and vignettes from a range of different analog and digital … Continue reading