[Notice: Paragraphs with smaller size and faded color are intended to make them hard to read, because I thought those lines weren't necessary to convey my point. It was rather distracting. If you want to read them without disturbed by different sizes and colors, go to guardian.co.uk]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Gill likes to photograph things so insignificant they barely exist - the backs of billboards, cashpoint machines, and so on. Now he calls me and says he's been photographing invisibility. He shows me some of the pictures. They are of rail and street repair workers wearing bright, fluorescent "High Visibility" jackets. Stephen says he got the idea for the series because he wears a fluorescent jacket when he's taking photographs and doesn't want to draw attention to himself - when he wears his fluorescent jacket, he says, nobody gives him a second glance.
The fluorescent jacket has - it turns out - an appropriately wondrous and dazzling lineage. The story begins one day in the early 1930s when an Ohio teenager called Bob Switzer was unloading crates for Safeway in a railway yard in California. He tripped and hit his head so hard that he fell into a coma for months. When he finally regained consciousness, the doctor told him he should stay in a dark room until he recovered. And so, to pass the time, Bob took to waving fluorescent minerals around in the air. Then, when he got better, he started mixing them with wood varnish in the family bathtub. Before long he had invented the world's first fluorescent paint. He called it Day-Glo.
Bob and his brother Joe, both amateur magicians, used the stuff to create stage tricks such as the Headless Balinese Dancer. Bob is dead now, but his son Paul has a stack of letters that his father wrote at the time to fellow illusionists. He reads me one of them down the phone. It is addressed to "Kleeland the Magician". Bob, then 20, clearly felt that he could make a bit of money from selling Day-Glo paints around the conjuring community. "We are manufacturing a number of magical illusions that are most startling and weird," he wrote. "The Balinese dancer appears on a dark stage in a flash of brilliant light and dances in a strange manner. For the climax she twists her body in agony and raises her glowing hands with long fluorescent fingernails as she draws her head off of her shoulders. She continues to dance but slowly falls to the floor. Her head continues to move about the stage. This illusion can be packaged in a small bag and sent to you for $75."
Audiences were startled, and news of these Day-Glo feats spread until eventually the US army took an interest. Troops in north Africa were falling victim to friendly fire from allied planes, so the army commissioned Bob to mix his pigments with fabric. Bob began to experiment with his wife's wedding dress. It worked. Bob's wife's wedding dress was the world's first piece of high-visibility clothing.
"What's so great about fluorescent colour?" said Day-Glo's publicity material at the time. "Fluorescent colour is seen 75% sooner than conventional colour! Fluorescent colour is three times brighter than regular colour! Your eyes go back to fluorescent colour for a second look 59% of the time!" When Bob died in 1997, his obituary on CBS television began, "Thank you, Robert Switzer, for Day-Glo paint. The world is brighter now, since you came along. Even in the dark, the world is brighter."
"When he died," Bob's grandson Peter emails me, "I had the priest take a bright yellow golf ball I had brought with me to the funeral service and put it in his casket so the colour would be with him for ever."
But nowadays, it seems, if you want to be invisible, all you have to do is wear fluorescent clothing. Perhaps it is just because high visibility has become so ubiquitous. Hula hoops, children's pencils, packets of detergent, glossy magazines, national lottery scratch cards, tennis and golf balls, road signs, safety jackets, steering wheel locks - our landscape is scattered with Bob Switzer's colours. This is because scientists have recently worked out how to make them durable. Until a decade ago, fluorescence faded to white after just a few months in the sunlight. Now it keeps going for 10 years. (I can tell you exactly how the scientists have made this breakthrough. They discovered that Y/MacAdam Limit [x,y] provides an excellent prediction of the suprathreshold appearance of fluorescent colour [x,y]; where [x,y] represents the colour of the test stimulus in 1931 CIE chromaticity coordinates. That's how.)
So maybe ubiquity is to blame. Or perhaps, as dazzling as high-visibility clothing is, even more compelling is the public's desire not to notice those people who scurry around at our feet, fixing holes, mending tracks, cleaning up after us. We trust them and we don't want to think about them. This is how Bryan Ferry's son Otis and the other fox hunting aficionados got into the House of Commons to disrupt a debate last year. They put on fluorescent jackets and told the first policeman they met that they were "going to inspect the electrics". The policeman shrugged and waved them on.
The surveillance specialist Peter Jenkins - who teaches private investigators how to follow people without being spotted - is a fan of the fluorescent jacket, too. He says that if you're observing a target in a rural environment, use hedges and ditches and trees. But if you want to be invisible in a city, just put on a fluorescent jacket and sit in the passenger seat of a transit van, or queue up at a telephone box. (Remember to turn off your mobile phone first.)
Criminals have, of late, taken to wearing high-visibility clothing to avoid being spotted. Just last December 16, 14 men wearing fluorescent yellow overalls stole three and a half million cigarettes from a lorry in Killeen, Northern Ireland. The gardaì say they suspect the Provisional IRA was to blame, fluorescent disguise apparently being a recognised Provo trick. But regular gangs have picked up on this, too. An Asda superstore in Benton, Newcastle, fell victim to fluorescent-attired men on Christmas Eve. And the 12 men who tried to steal the 203-carat De Beers diamond from the Millennium Dome in November 2000 were fluorescent from head to toe. They must have glowed like fireflies, yet they went unnoticed by the 64 members of the public enjoying the Dome that day. Little did the robbers realise, however, that 200 undercover police officers were stationed around the Dome, waiting to swoop. The thieves didn't notice the police, though, because they were disguised as cleaners.
The writer Maggie O'Farrell used to work as a chambermaid in a posh hotel. When she was being trained, she was told never to make eye contact with the guests. She was to drop her eyes. On one occasion, she was cleaning a hotel bathroom when the guests came in and began to have a full-on row about his lack of fertility. She was desperate for a baby. He couldn't provide one. She was going to leave him. He burst into tears. O'Farrell continued silently cleaning their toothpaste mugs. "It's like that fairy story, The Elves And The Shoemaker," she says. "People want to believe that their room magically tidies itself."
article written by Jon Ronson @ guardian.co.uk
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I'm into looking at these highly visible construction tools at the street thesedays. Since they are at the site where you shouldn't get in, I haven't paying much attention to them before, especially from an aesthetical perspective.
One day, I was walking down the street at NYC, and I found out the form of construction baricades(?) are very interesting- they were designed to manufacture easily with single moulded plastic, and to have simple and clean cuts. However, I was not brave enough to take out my camera and took pictures of those scenes by myself. Thanks to photographer Stephen Gill, I can take his resources for my thought and research processes.
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