Cave Painting & Maria

What does a little girl have in common with cave painting?

The Altamira cave, now famous for its unique collection of prehistoric art, was well known to local people, but had not been given much attention until in 1868, when it was "discovered" by the hunter Modesto Peres.

Sautuola then started exploring the caves in 1875. He did not become aware of the paintings, however, until 1879, when his daughter Maria, nine years old at the time, incidentally noticed that the ceiling was covered by images of bisons.

[source: Wikipedia]

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The Mighty Poato

Check out this photo of a potato. It may look like a rather ordinary photo, but it’s one of the most expensive photos in the world: it sold last year for a staggering €1,000,000.

The photo, titled “Potato #345 (2010),” is by photographer Kevin Abosch, who charges huge fees to shoot portraits of famous business people in the Silicon Valley tech industry.

“Kevin likes potatoes because they, like people are all different yet immediately identifiable as being essentially of the same species,” his studio tells PetaPixel.

The sale came about when a wealthy buyer who collects Abosch’s work was visiting the photographer’s Paris home in 2015. They saw the photo — a 162x162cm print hanging on the wall and inquired about purchasing it for their collection.

The price was non-negotiable: €1,000,000, but the buyer agreed to the price and purchased the photo, making it Abosch’s largest sale of a single image to date.

The price is a far cry from the $6.5 million that was allegedly paid for Peter Lik’s “Phantom” photo, but the sale price places this photo in the top 20 of most expensive photos of all time.

[source: PetaPixel]

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Reindeer in Art

This group of petroglyphs in the Alta Fjord, near the Arctic Circle, bears the traces of a settlement dating from c. 4200 to 500 B.C. The thousands of paintings and engravings add to our understanding of the environment and human activities on the fringes of the Far North in prehistoric times.

photo credit Jos van Wunnik

The property is situated in the northernmost part of Norway, far north of the Arctic Circle at the head of the Alta Fjord. It contains thousands of rock carvings and paintings located at 45 sites in five different areas at the head of the Alta Fjord and has been turned into an open-air museum. 

More rock art made by hunter-gatherers is found in Alta than anywhere else in northern Europe. This seems to indicate that for thousands of years, from approximately 5000 B.C. to about the year 0, Alta was an important meeting place far north of the Arctic Circle. 

The wide variety of imagery shows a culture of hunter-gatherers that was able to control herds of reindeer, was adept at boat building and fishing and practised shamanistic rituals involving bear worship and other venerated animals.

[sources: Wikipedia & UNESCO]

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