快猫短视频

JOHN LYDON鈥橲 trailer for his swim-with-the-sharks TV programme is brilliant: he points out that hundreds more people die from accidents with toasters than from shark attacks, yet we do not go out and kill toasters. He catches the eye as well as the ear, because he is wearing camouflage 鈥� except that his camouflage is an ironic take on what the word used to mean. Its swirls of eye-blinding orange and other colours light up the screen.

With a bit of luck, patience and an excellent visual memory you could probably find the exact pattern in DPM鈥檚 nearly 1000 pages of images and text. Predators and prey inspired the greatest consumers of camouflage ever: the military. Back in 1918, Abbott Thayer, a naturalist and painter, pointed out that 鈥淚n their superhuman perfection, the concealing coats of animals that hunt or are hunted are now the model for the armies鈥� camouflage corps鈥�.

Military camouflage fills one DPM book. Each pattern comes with history, context and quirky facts. The 鈥渕oons and balls鈥� design favoured by the Belgian army between 1951 and 1956 is a collector鈥檚 target, and Bangladeshi forces used US 鈥渟ix-colour desert鈥� patterns in the first Gulf war, a pattern also known as 鈥渃hoc chip鈥�. One of the aims of the book is to sort out these family trees while counterbalancing 鈥渢he images of violence and hate鈥� with peaceful quotes. But you cannot escape the fact that the inspiration for all these extraordinary patterns remains to beat an enemy or survive under attack.

DPM鈥檚 second volume examines nature and culture. D茅sir茅e Palmen鈥檚 subtle image (above) uses camouflage in an opposite way to Lydon鈥檚 dayglo: her photograph of somebody dissolving into the cityscape of Rotterdam confronts the installation of police surveillance cameras. In a watched world, to become invisible is to take direct action for privacy.

Visual patterns fascinate us wherever they are, and the joy of pattern recognition for pleasure rather than for survival takes camouflage outside a military setting. Of course, it could be that we enjoy disruptive patterns in a different setting because they do just that: disrupt. Hippies adopted bits of military dress as a way for the counterculture to confound and infuriate the establishment. Punks and random outsiders took second-hand military camouflage gear and transformed it, and bondage paraphernalia, into street clothes. As high fashion, we have camouflage that costs a fortune, recoloured and reshaped. Those disruptive patterns have spread into every area from painted city buildings to a Gorillaz CD. New patterns are invented and reinvented, from Andy Warhol鈥檚 Camouflage to The Sunday Telegraph magazine cover showing Tracey Emin in US 鈥渨oodland鈥� camouflage. Photographer Bill Cunningham took a walk round New York city this summer and found camouflage everywhere, from dogs to bikers.

So buy DPM or not? If I had seen only the spread showing 13 variations on Nike鈥檚 use of camouflage on shoes, I would have dismissed these as books for borderline obsessives, but the amazing images on page after page make these books covetable. Where else could you find artists and photographers such as Toby Ziegler and Francesco Simeti rubbing shoulders? A treasure trove.