The house that used to be there

From Marcus Buck, imprints of demolished houses left on other houses.

Photo is from Pruned. (via janelle)

Update: Medianeras, series of photos of "party walls" by José Antonio Millán. (via artifacting)

Audio of Weegee and Cartier-Bresson

Rare mp3s of Weegee and Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about photography.

Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making. It's interesting to hear his voice, which is one of those accents you don't hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee's voice after Weegee visited Kubrick's set one day.

Yep, that's Strangelove, alright. (via conscientious)

Creepy puppet children

This might be the creepiest thing on the internet today: The Puppet Show, photos of real children modified to look like puppets.

Topless waitresses

Waiting Topless (NSFW) is a audio slideshow about a pair of waitresses who worked at the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop in the small town of Vassalboro, Maine.

"Yes, I am a topless waitress, but I'm just a regular normal person in society," Cunningham says. "I honestly don't think in this economy right that there is a job out there that would pay roughly the same."

The coffee shop recently burnt to the ground in a suspected arson.

Hey WSJ, where is Iran?

The Wall Street Journal's Photo Journal blog, the launch of which was inspired by The Big Picture, has posted exactly *zero* photos of what's going on in Iran right now in their "Pictures of the Day" feature. That strikes me as odd. In contrast, The Big Picture has posted three big entries dedicated to the elections.

Fallen Princesses

The Fallen Princesses project imagines Disney characters if their stories didn't end happily ever after.

As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales. These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.

Not so Charming. (via avenues)

Immersion: Porn by Robbie Cooper

You may remember Robbie Cooper's projects Alter Ego (photos of gamers and their in-game avatars) and Immersion (kids filmed with an Interrotron while playing video games). Cooper's new project is like Immersion, except with people watching porn. The video stills can be found in the July issue of Wallpaper but an 18-minute video is available on their web site.

In a film of startling power and unsettling intimacy -- produced exclusively for wallpaper.com -- video artist and photographer Robbie Cooper shoots back at active porn aficionados lost in ecstatic release and hears how their passion developed. Be aware that this is not easy titillation and some of you may find the footage shocking. But the film does throw up any number of questions about voyeurism and exhibitionism and makes clear the incredible nakedness of the solo sex act.

NSFW because it turns out that watching people watching porn at the office is no easier to explain to your boss/co-workers than actually watching porn at the office.

This image is messing with my brain

Tim Walker for Hermes. (via andrea inspired)

Update: Walker likely took his inspiration from Philippe Ramette.

The tank man of Tiananmen

The NY Times Lens blog, which has been really good right from the start, has a great story today about the photographers who took the pictures of the man in the white shirt staring down the tanks in Tiananmen twenty years ago.

As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.

I think his action captured peoples' hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.

Update: The Lens story prompted photographer Terril Jones to share a previously unpublished photo he'd taken of the tank man from a unique angle.

Update: From Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn't the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. Eisenstein used the Odessa Steps to demonstrate the corruption of the Czarist regime, but the regime didn't die until the soldiers refused to shoot the demonstrators. The successor regime didn't die until Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in August 1991. While there's some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don't doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity.

Growing into womanhood

For his The Girl Studies project, Charlie White paired photographs of two groups of people becoming women in very different ways: teen girls and adult male-to-female transsexuals.

In the images in White's series, both figures are blossoming into womanhood, though each along a different path. As observers, however, we have been taught to view the subjects in much the same way: with sheer terror.

These are fascinating. (via bygone bureau)

Saddam's palaces

BLDGBLOG has an interview with photographer Richard Mosse about his new project called Breach. Mosse went to Iraq and photographed several of Saddam's old palaces, many of which are occupied by American soliders living in improvised barracks.

It was extraordinary how some of the palace interiors had been transformed to accommodate the soldiers. Troops scurried beneath vaulted ceilings and glittering faux-crystal chandeliers. Lofty marble columns towered over rat runs between hastily constructed chipboard cubicles. Obama's face beamed out of televisions overlooking the freezers and microwaves of provisional canteen spaces.

Update: Flavorwire has another interview with Mosse about these images.

Getting the right photo

Art Wolfe details the process he went through to get just the right photo of some Chinese fishermen. There were many false starts.

By the time I was ready for the next shot, the darkening evening sky balanced the light somewhat. A 16mm focal length endowed the image with the depth I wanted and, combined with an f16 aperture, ideal depth of field. Waning light necessitated a one to two second exposure. Although blurred moving birds ruined most of the shots, they blocked direct light from the lanterns. I was making progress.

Perhaps even more interesting that Wolfe's process is the fishing method employed by his subjects; they use birds, not nets or poles:

For centuries fishermen on the Li River of Southern China have partnered with cormorants to catch fish. Each fisherman has a complement of half a dozen or so trained birds. The light of a lantern attracts the fish, and the cormorants return to the boat, fish in beak. They can't swallow them because the fisherman fix a band around their necks, but they eventually get their share.

(via penmachine)

Slow photography

In praise of slow photography.

One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.

When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behavior. A camera can trap a photographer sometimes. You can look so intently through a viewfinder that you are unaware of the picture in front of you. When I use an 8-by-10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It's very liberating.

Famous photos

A nice selection of "photos that changed the world". Warning: some of them are NSFW and/or disturbing/upsetting. The first photo on the web was new to me.

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

New NY Times photoblog

The NY Times kicks off their new photography blog with a video that shows just how short White House photo ops are.

When a photo-op is scheduled, the photographers, camera operators and reporters gather in the colonnade outside the Oval Office and wait -- sometimes it can be as long as an hour -- shuffling feet and making nervous small talk until the flutter of the fingers of the young staffer who calls, "Pool."

No downtime

Yesterday's Pictures of the Day at the WSJ were particularly fine, including a US soldier in Afghanistan who didn't have time to put on his uniform and gets caught by the camera taking up a defensive position in pink I [heart] NY boxers and flip flops.

Gaussian goat!

Some days I feel just like a gaussian goat.

This is perhaps what the world would look like if human vision could perceive all of an object's possible quantum mechanical states at the same time. (via today and tomorrow)

30 Rock

A photo of Rockefeller Center from 1933. The view is more or less looking west...that's St. Patrick's Cathedral in the foreground on the left.

Update: And here's another shot of 30 Rock from 1933.

Air Force One and The Statue of Liberty Photoshopped together

The hamfisted Air Force One NYC photo op cost taxpayers more than $320,000. Photoshop expert Scott Kelby says that using the graphics editing program for two minutes could have saved a lot of money and trouble.

Update: The NY Daily News had the same idea. (thx, @tshane)

Using NASA images

The Book Cover Archive Blog gets the skinny on using NASA images in creative work.

All of the media produced by NASA is public domain, meaning that anyone can use it any way (as long as they obey restrictions of publicity and privacy).

They also point to NASA Images, which is operated by Internet Archive and contains a copy of almost every image that NASA has ever produced. Just for the heck of it, here's the first photo of the Moon taken by a US spacecraft.

The Final Four of Everything by Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir

In a post on his great blog, The Year in Pictures, James Danziger discusses some of the photography featured in a forthcoming book, The Final Four of Everything, including Danziger's own selections for Iconic American Photographs. The Final Four of Everything seems to be a sequel of sorts to The Enlightened Bracketologist by the same authors...or perhaps just the same book with a much better title.

Moving photography

For the cover of Esquire's June issue, photographer Greg Williams shot ten minutes of video footage of Megan Fox, from which the best stills were selected for the cover and inside the magazine.

As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it's not such a huge shift for them. The photographer's exact set of duties has always been malleable; the recent shift from film processing in the darkroom to the digital darkroom is only the most recent example.

Esquire's moving cover reminds me of two other things.

1. Flickr encourages their members to think of short videos as long photos. When he guest edited kottke.org last year, Deron Bauman wrote about short video as a contemporary version of the photograph. Matt Jones argued that looping short video is the real long photography. So maybe the photograph of 10 years from now might not even be a still image.

2. In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering...that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

Clear all tabs

There's just too much good stuff on the internet today. So rather than flood the site with a bunch of posts, I'm going to clear out my tabs and round them up here.

Dear Prudence: "I cheated on my wife while sleepwalking. What do I do now?" I've heard quite a few weird/bad things about Ambien in the past few months. Also, paging Emily Gould from The Awl, please A this Q.

Rocketboom covers Single Serving Sites in their spin-off series, Know Your Meme.

The Big Picture peers into North Korea with a collection of photos of the dictatorship taken from neighboring China.

Maira Kalman visits Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, illustrating the story beautifully as usual.

I return to the court to hear Justice Ginsburg speak to law students. And in answer to the question "How does it feel to be the only woman on the court?" she answers simply, "Lonely."

The Society of Publication Designers has been busy posting nominees for their upcoming annual awards on their blog. Last year's winners are here. (thx, david)

Jamie Zawinski has used his keyboard so much over the past eight years that he's carved grooves into the M and N keys (with his fingernails?) and completely worn through part of his Alt key.

The Bride Was Beautiful

This was a tough series of photos to get through: The Bride Was Beautiful.

Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, held off cancer to celebrate the happiest day of her life. [...] Her organs were shutting down but it would not stop her from marrying Nick Godwin, 23, who was in love with Katie since 11th grade.

The last photo is just heartbreaking. (via cup of jo)

Composite NYC street scenes

Photographer Peter Funch spends weeks taking photos on Manhattan street corners and then pastes them together into single photographs.

I should add this (and Matt Webb's 4D experiment) to my time merge media post. (via capn design)

Chino Otsuka

Imagine Finding Me is a project by Chino Otsuka where she inserts her adult self into photos taken of her as a child. More examples at Wallpaper. See also Ze Frank's Youngme / Nowme and those neat half-kid, half-adult photos that I can't find a link to right now...little help? (via waxy)

Update: Age-maps! (thx, cindy)

So are the days of our lives

Microscopic photographs of individual sand particles, each grain "a tiny work of art". These are taken from Gary Greenberg's book, A Grain of Sand. More at Scientific American and Discover. (via lone gunman)

The death of a block

Jim Griffioen took photos of every house on a block in Detroit where most of the houses are abandoned and stitched them into panoramas.

If you were to compare the current international housing crisis to a black hole sucking the equity out of our homes, this one-way street near the northern border of Detroit might just be the singularity: the point where the density of the problem defies anyone's ability to comprehend it. These homes started emptying in 2006.

(via greg.org)

Dinghies Clustered Around Dock

By Alex MacLean. (via year in pictures)

Photography criticism from the Stasi

Harald Hauswald, an East German photographer, published in West Germany a book of his work in 1987. The East German secret police, the Stasi, put Hauswald under surveillance and even went so far as to produce a detailed critique of his book, as a photo critic might. Joerg Colberg recently met with the photographer and obtained a copy of the Stasi report on Hauswald's work. From the report's introduction:

Especially the selection of the images gives away that we are dealing with a book that has a long-term purpose. People gathered everything somber, oppressive, from poor neighbourhoods, or primitive they could find. It seems apparent that color was intentionally omitted, because only black and white reproduction stresses the supposedly gray, bleak and dismal reality of East Berlin.

It's interesting to hear the charge of propaganda coming from the secret police of a Communist dictatorship.

Through Hubble-colored glasses

If the naked eye could see like a telescope, this is what the night sky might look like. (via rw)

You're doing it wrong

From a series of posts on how not to photograph (for serious/professional photographers, I would presume): playing possum, the zig zag, and the vacation slide show. I am glad I'm not a serious photographer. (via conscientious)

Photo mystery

Hello photographers! I just ran across this photo (via TrueHoop) and was wondering if anyone out there knows how it was made. My guess is a combination of an IR camera, IR spotlight, and a bit of digital darkroom colorization after the fact. How else would you get lighting like that during an actual game? Anyone?

Update: Thanks, gang. Looks like a remotely fired strobe light is the culprit. No IR shenanigans needed.

Apple I prints

20x200 has a print by Mark Richards of an exploded Apple I machine.

In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.

(via df)

Patterns in a morass of historical materials

Errol Morris returns to his NY Times blog with a five-part story about a photograph found in the hands of an unknown Union army soldier who died at Gettysburg. Start with part one. A description of the photograph made it into the newspaper and the identity of the man was pretty quickly discovered. But the story hardly ends there. My favorite part so far is the fourth, particularly the conversation between Morris and one of the unknown soldier's descendants, archaeologist David Kelley.

Producing Peeps

A photo gallery that shows how marshmallow Peeps are made inside the Just Born confection company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Seeing a shower-capped woman dye-coat sugar with an industrial-grade sprayer puts a supreme damper on my sugar high.

Tilt-shift my heart

Peculiar little video by Keith Loutit for a song called "Clementine." Utilizes tilt-shift photography to achieve its miniature look.

via Nothing for X

Ansel Adams' key to photography

In a short video clip, Ansel Adams explains that visualization is the key to making photographs. (via lens culture)

The ruins of Detroit

The ruins of Detroit, a series of photos by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre documenting vacant buildings in Detroit. Some of the photos are repeated with useful annotation in this Time photo gallery. (See also Brian Ulrich's Stores That Are No More.)

On the other hand, some are arguing that there is great opportunity in Detroit right now.

Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished.

Panoramas from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of panoramic photographs dating from 1851-1991. As with all of the LOC stuff, I wish it were easier to browse through these. Guess I'll wait until they add everything to Flickr. (via design observer)

When Keds ruled the Universe

Photos of people in Brooklyn in the 1970s. (thx, paolo)

2009's emerging photographers

PDN recently posted their list of 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2009. Go here to access the photos without popups. Some nice stuff in there, including a couple photographers featured previously on kottke.org. (thx, youngna)

The Tao of War Photography

Bruce Haley shares his Tao of War Photography.

11. Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here...? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question...........

61. Yes, those really are gruesome hacked-up snake parts in that big glass of homebrew you're expected to chug down, and YES, your hosts will be extremely dishonored and upset if you try to weasel out of it (or if they catch you dumping it under the table when they look away)... quit being such a pussy and just drink the damn thing.....

Andreas Gefeller photography

Andreas Gefeller makes some really nice (and abstract and surreal) aerial photos.

Robots!

The Big Picture collects a number of photos of robots...particularly robots interacting with humans. (The third one is particularly freaky/awesome.) I'm wondering how these photos will look 50/60/70 years from now when (presumably) robots are smart & capable enough that they are thought of a new sentient life form (rather than as machines) and are entitled to the rights that humans have.

Synchronized bridge jumping

Synchonized jumping from bridges is a thing in Russia now.

It's new fun in some Russian cities, to jump from the bridge with the rope in a big group, when there is no water under the bridge but raw firm ice, also they use to jump at that same moment when the train is going thru the bridge -- just imagine what the machinist could think when he sees a bunch of people standing on the rails just before the moving train, so he probably starts slowing down and then all those people jump out of the bridge...

Photos of the recession

Slate is organizing its readers in an effort to photographically document the current recession/depression/economic crisis. The 30s had photos of people in soup lines and the 70s had gas lines but what does the economic crisis look like when everyone is online?

You can't take a picture of the unemployed if they never leave the house.

Interested photographers can upload their photos to Slate's Shoot the Recession group on Flickr.

Auto polo

A photo of some fellows playing polo with horseless carriages.

Looks like someone depressed their halting caliper a bit too quickly.

Update: From the NY Times, a report from 1912 on auto polo. The same page of the newspaper also contains a report of two gentleman who crossed the United States in a car without getting a single flat tire.

The two front tires contained Oregon air when they reached Massachusetts.

(via harrisj)

Nightclub hand signals

A Continuous Lean found some great Life magazine photos of Sherman Billingsley, the owner of a famous NYC nightclub called The Stork Club, which club was frequented by celebrities, artists, and the well-to-do from 1929 to 1965. In the photos, Billingsley is pictured at his club giving secret hand signals to his assistant while sitting with guests.

Closeup of Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley [with his] palm up on table, one of his signals to nearby assistant which means "Bring a bottle of champagne," while sitting w. patrons over his usual Coca Cola, in the Cub Room.

Billingsley's signals cleverly allowed the club to provide seamless good service to his favored patrons while also letting him be the bad guy with less favorable customers without them knowing it. Billingsley went on to be the third base coach for the Yankees in the late 60s. (Untrue.)

A poor photographer blames his tools

Is your lack of fancy camera equipment -- you know, the $3000 21-megapixel DSLR with HD video and f/1.4 lens -- holding you back from making good photographs? Maybe the problem is with your thinking. Many of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, etc.) got by just fine with equipment about as flexible as the average point-and-shoot.

Low-light sensitivity? Ha! Your point-and-shoot may only be noisy at ISO 200 and below, but these guys were working with things like Kodachrome 25, eight times worse. Depth-of-field? Ha! Partially because of the style of the times, and partially because they didn't want to deal with careful manual focus, most photojournalism of the time tended to have everything in focus -- "f/8 and be there" was the rule.

I also enjoyed the advice for getting good photos of your kids with a point-and-shoot camera: "encourage them to play somewhere well-lit." (via gulfstream)

At work

The Big Picture collected a bunch of photos of people at work, spinning silk yarn, on a shoe assembly line, sanding and buffing an Oscar statue, checking flour-making equipment, inspecting cigars, assembling model trains, and making toilet bowls.

Polaroid experiments

Peter Miller has done a number of projects that involve directly exposing Polaroid instant film. Static Fields:

These Polaroids were illuminated by their own electrocution. They are cameraless images, which are immediate records of the bolts of electricity that passed through them.

Lightning Bugs:

My brother helped me catch these, we let them loose on the Polaroids in the basement. Polaroids are positives. This is a record of lightning bug dance-steps. Look closely and you can see the shadows of their legs.

Polaroid Self Portrait:

Polaroids are removed from their case in a darkroom, laid flat and exposed as a single, light sensitive array. After they are exposed, they are reinserted into the pack and -with the lens now covered- can be processed by simply pressing the camera's shutter and processing the film by ejecting it from the camera.

Stacked cans

This photo by Bobby Yip of Reuters captures the current zeitgeist pretty well.

Unused shipping containers were piled up at a storage depot in Hong Kong Wednesday. The government is looking for places to store hundreds of thousands of unused containers expected to flood Hong Kong in the coming months due to China's slow exports.

The world has so much stuff we don't need that we don't know where to put it all. Perhaps people will be living in those stacks of containers before too long. (via wsj)

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Photographer Jesse Chan-Norris caught the aftermath of an attempted murder in Manhattan this morning. From his Flickr page:

At 5:40am I was jolted out of sleep by a noise. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. I raced outside, I looked down, I saw the black car with its door open. I saw another car next to it. I saw the body in the middle of the street. I stood. I gawked.

Punk Abe Lincoln

Another photo of Lincoln taken a couple months before he died, featuring a surprisingly contemporary hairstyle.

Abe looks downright rebellious in that photo. (via flickr blog)

Earliest Abe Lincoln photo?

The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln is purported to be the earliest known photo of the 16th President, taken in the early 1840s when he was in his early 30s. The young man in the photo doesn't bare an obvious resemblance to a photo taken of Lincoln a few years later but the forensic evidence is compelling.

Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight.

The Places We Live

The Places We Live features panoramic photos of slums, narrated by the people who live there (through translators). Really really engrossing. To access the stories in the restricting Flash interface, skip the intro, click on a city, and then on one of the households in the upper left corner. There's a book too. (via snarkmarket)

Bill Cunningham's Inauguration

Street photographer Bill Cunningham didn't have a ticket to the Inauguration nor did he have an assignment from the NY Times to cover it; he just bought a train ticket, went down on his own, and brought back these photos. Be sure to listen to Cunningham's wonderful narration; he even gets choked up when describing the moment of Obama's swearing-in. I wish all journalism were this professionally personal (if that makes any sense). (via greg.org)

Photos of George W. Bush

In his latest post for his NY Times blog, Errol Morris talks with three photographers -- one each from Reuters, AP, and AFP -- and has them select their ten favorite photos of George W. Bush.

He popped out that door, and when the door opened and he came through it, the look on his face was like no look I'd ever seen on George Bush's face in my life. [...] And I said, "If he wasn't just back there behind that door crying, I don't know what that look on his face is." Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it's just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.

The interview with the last photographer is the least interesting because he refuses to interpret any of the photographs but his set of photographs includes at least 3 photographs that I had never seen before and that weren't "published extensively in the United States".

Mapping the Moon

A zoomable National Geographic map of the Moon from 1969. Richard Furno worked on the map and tells the very long story of how it came about. One of the first images on the page is from a Soviet mission called Luna-3 that took the first photographs of the far side of the Moon. (thx, lynda)

A history of printing

The Printed Picture is an exhibition of physical specimens made using all the different ways that type and image can be printed on paper, metal, glass, etc, with a special emphasis on dozens of photography techniques, from albumen prints to dagguereotypes to color photography. On view at MoMA until June 1.

NYC Polaroid film cache

I know that Polaroid announced last year that they were ceasing production of their instant film and that people have begun to hoard film as it becomes more difficult to find. To NYC hoarders: there are 30-40 10-packs of Polaroid 600 film at the CVS on the corner of Nassau and Fulton. Didn't catch the price but they're at the photo processing counter past the registers. Or you could just wait it out.

An actual long photo

Simon Hoegsberg has taken a photo that's 100 meters long. It's actually several dozen photos stitched together into one big one. A good idea nicely executed. (thx, everyone)

The mystery of the Obama Hope photo

For all of the talk that Shepard Fairey is just a plagiarist, I think that the clearest indication that his art is above board and adding something new to the world is that until a few days ago, no one knew who had taken the photo of Obama that became the basis of the iconic Hope poster, not even Fairey or the photographer who took it.

Reuters are understandably somewhat put out on their own and Young's behalf, but like it or not, Fairey's use of the picture are well within the parameters of "fair use". His transformative use of the image - both in flipping and re-orienting it, adding jacket and tie and the "O" Obama logo, and converting it to his block print style make it consistent with all legal precedents for use.

Update: But, but ,but, not so fast. It looks like Tom Gralish has found the actual photo that Fairey used; it was taken by AP's Mannie Garcia at a National Press Club event in April 2006. (thx, ryan)

Video footage of Hudson River plane crash

I'm still fascinated by the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River late last week. Here are a few more things I've seen related to it over the last couple of days.

First the videos. Someone visiting the Bronx Zoo caught the plane on video, flying low in the sky just after the bird strike. A Coast Guard video monitoring station got a shot of the plane just after it splashed down...you can see the spray from the impact flying in from the left of the video just after the 2:00 mark.

Soon after the plane hits, the camera zooms in and you can see just how quickly people get out and onto the wings. And then this video shows it most clearly:

Look how low and level and steady Sully guided that thing in! Amazing!

The NY Times has a couple of good pieces in their extensive crash coverage. I loved reading what various passengers had to say about the crash, lots of little moments of heroism in there.

The life raft attached to the plane was upside down in the river, just out of reach. Mr. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Mr. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Mr. Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held onto the plane. Mr. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft. "Carl was Iron Man that day," Mr. Wentzell said. "We got the raft stabilized and we got on." A man went into the water, and the door salesman and the banker hauled him aboard. He curled in a fetal position, freezing.

The Times also comes through with the 3-D flight graphic I asked for the other day but they upped the ante with a seating chart of the plane where you can click on certain passengers' seats to read their thoughts. Mark Hood in seat 2A described the landing:

When we touched down, it was like a log ride at Six Flags. It was that smooth.

The whole thing is still so amazing. Looking at the underside of the plane as they lifted it from the water last night, you can see the damage to the bottom of the plane and just how close they all were to being flung all over the place or sinking quickly or a number of other different outcomes.

The Earth from above

Another excellent offering from The Big Picture: photos of the Earth from NASA's The Earth Observatory. Even if you don't care for cliches, some of these will literally drop your jaw.

The Selby

Every few weeks, I visit The Selby, an online collection of "photographs, paintings and videos by Todd Selby of interesting people in creative spaces", and spend way too much time clicking around, even on stuff that I've already seen. There are many magazines and sites -- Dwell, Domino, Apartment Therapy, etc. -- that run photographs of people and the spaces they live in, but those on The Selby feel more intimate and true to life; you get the feeling that Selby knows most of the people he features. Two of my favorite photos are Dustin Yellin and his huge printing machine:

and this lovely photo of Celestine Cooney and Harry Malt.

Update: Timely New York magazine interview with Todd Selby about The Selby.

Photo cliches blog

Photo Cliches is a blog dedicated to collecting, uh, cliched photos. Current categories include people groping statues, people pretending to have fake penises, and my personal favorite: people doing the thumbs-up Lynndie England pose. You may also be interested in the Charlie's Angels pose Flickr pool. (thx, phil)

Bill Cunningham and Greta Garbo

Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times. (I love Cunningham's On the Street dispatches.) The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he got interested in fashion and photography.

As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts -- you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit's. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, "I see you outside at lunchtime watching people." And I said, "Oh, yeah, that's my hobby." She said, "If you think what they're wearing is wrong, why don't you redo them in your mind's eye." That was really the first professional direction I received.

The second article is a collection of recollections of Cunningham from some of the people he has photographed.

He taught me how to tell a story with pictures and that it didn't always involve the best image. I'd say to him, "But isn't this a better photo?" And he'd say, "Yes, child, but this photo tells the story better." For him, it wasn't about the aesthetics of photography. It was about storytelling.

Both articles mention that Cunningham got his first street photography into the Times when he shot a photo of the famously reclusive Greta Garbo walking on Fifth Avenue. I couldn't find Cunningham's Garbo photo anywhere online so I tracked down the Times article and found only this poor scan:

Here's another shot Cunningham made that same day which didn't end up in the paper (Garbo's got her hand over her face). Interestingly, street photos of Garbo were not particularly rare. Here are a selection from the 1980s, including several that feature Garbo in similar clothing. Many of them were taken by creepy paparazzo Ted Leyson, who stalked Garbo for more than 10 years in NYC. Leyson took what is believed to be the last photo of Garbo before she died in 1990.

Abandoned in Harlem

Even in Manhattan, abandoned buildings can still be found. Jake Dobkin took some photos of an abandoned school in Harlem.

This building looked like it had been empty for twenty years. Trees were growing out of the floors and poking out of dozens of holes in the roof. All the windows were gone, and the floors that weren't covered with snow were thick with dust and the skeletons of dead pigeons. There wasn't any evidence of human habitation -- no footprints, homeless encampments, or graffiti.

He also found an abandoned ballroom, also in Harlem.

Update: Whoops, looks like Bluejake got swamped. I removed the links so the server can recover...here are the photos on Flickr instead.

Aquarium design

Photos from the 2008 International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest...AKA fancily decorated aquariums. (thx, dustin)

Infinite Jest Tour of Boston

A photo tour of the Boston-area locations mentioned in Infinite Jest. From the photographer:

Perhaps most interestingly, although "Enfield" is not a real town, it seems to substitute for Chestnut Hill. We found a school at the top of one of the larger hills in Chestnut Hill, which we believe is the location for ETA.

Perhaps someday there will be IJ walking tours of Boston that same way there are Ulysses -based tours of Dublin or Sex and the City tours of NYC.

TiltShiftMaker, make your own tilt-shift photo

The TiltShiftMaker site lets you make your own fake tilt-shift photo (you know, the ones that make everything look miniature). Just upload a photo or choose one from the web, adjust a few parameters, and you're all set...no Photoshop needed. Here's one I did of Ollie in Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (larger). (via chris glass)

Obama campaign art exhibition

The Danziger Projects gallery in New York is running an exhibition called Can & Did, a collection of art, graphics, and photography from the Obama campaign. The opening party is on Inauguration night (Jan 20) and it runs through the end of February. All details in the press release.

TinEye image search

TinEye is an image search engine. You give it an image and it'll find it on the web for you. If it works -- I didn't get to try it too much because it was down -- this is great for chasing down attribution and finding other pix by the same photographer and such. (via master kalina)

Abandoned London

Photographs of an abandoned London. Turns out that the streets of London on Christmas morning are extraordinarily empty. Details here. (thx, peter)

Photos of The Wire soundstage

Photos of the abandoned soundstage for The Wire.

So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for "The Wire" still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours. It's one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it.

(thx, hurty)

NY Times Year in Pictures

The NY Times' Year in Pictures for 2008.

Worst photo ever?

Is a recent Annie Leibovitz photograph shot for the 2009 Lavazza espresso calendar the worst photograph ever made?

This picture as a whole has absolutely zero connection to reality or honest depiction, but is unredeemed by any countervailing expressive or artistic purpose. And (and this puts it out in front of many other contenders) it was all done intentionally, front to back, top to bottom, money-no-object, by an army of the most talented professionals, from art director to stylists to make-up artists to baby-wranglers to lighting assistants to photographer to digital retoucher, all working assiduously in concert in pursuit of the utterly pointless.

It is a horrible photograph. Leibovitz's recent portrait of Queen Elizabeth was also digitally stitched up...the Queen was photographed inside and later matched with a garden background. I'm not going to say that these aren't photographs, but they aren't the kind of photographs that I'm fond of.

Big Picture's photos of the year

The wonderful Big Picture presents part one of the year 2008 in photographs. I'll say it again, seeing these fantastic photos large is a whole 'nother ball game. Parts two and three to come later today and tomorrow.

Update: Part two.

Update: And part three.

Obama, Time's Person of the Year for 2008

In an obvious move, Time named Barack Obama their Person of the Year for 2008. But give Time credit; they got Shepard Fairey to do the cover based on his iconic poster of Obama.

Update: They've also compiled some of the best photos of Obama from Flickr.

Update: Here's a video of Fairey talking about his work and how he created the Time cover.

Changing New York

Included in the NYPL's recent addition to the Flickr Commons project is Changing New York, a selection of photos taken of NYC in the 1930s by Berenice Abbott as part of a government program for unemployed artists. Here are the Starrett-Lehigh Building and looking north from Washington Square...so open! And the buildings are so low too. The Cyanotypes of British Algae set is worth a look as well.

Seed's science photography portfolio

Seed Magazine has collected some of the wonderful science-themed photography which appears in the pages of the magazine into an online portfolio.

Bacteria photo by Eshel Ben-Jacob.

Scooters

Top: The Jackson 5, Encino, CA, 1970. Photographed by John Olson for Life Magazine.

Bottom: "Bad Route" by Miguel Calderon, 1998. Featured in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Book cover contest

The challenge: create a fictitious book cover using an image from the Life magazine photo archive. Aside from the first few created in a rush, some of these are pretty good.

Ballet, with sword

An arresting image:

Seventeen-year-old Yamaguchi Otoya uses a foot-long sword to kill Japan Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inajiro on a public stage in Tokyo. Yamaguchi was upset with Asanuma's support of a U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty.

The Best of LIFE

The Best of LIFE blog is mining Google's Life Magazine archive and Flickr's Commons for the best photos.

Photos of all the street corners in Manhattan

Richard Howe takes photographs of Manhattan street corners. From March to November 2006, Howe took a photo of every single street corner in Manhattan, around 11,000 in all.

I photographed each corner just as I found it, almost always as seen from its diagonally opposite corner. Some of the photographs have no people and no traffic, others are completely dominated by people or even, in some instances, by traffic; the majority are somewhere in between. Most of the photographs simply show what people were doing on the corner when I got there: crossing the street or waiting to cross it, shopping, hanging out, riding a bicycle, and so on -- in short, doing what people do at almost any street corner anywhere in Manhattan.

The old hero of Gettysburg

1863 photo of John L. Burns, War of 1812 veteran and sharpshooter in the Battle of Gettysburg.

Burns, born ca. 1793, was a 70-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 when he was wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, having volunteered his services as a sharpshooter to the Federal Army. He died of pneumonia in 1872.

And from the comments:

Mr Burns' flintlock is at half-cock with the frizzen down, ready to ready to fire.

Photography is for Jerkoffs

The language on this one might offend some, but I thoroughly enjoyed this expletive-laden anti-photographer rant: Photography is for Jerkoffs. Here's how to be a photographer in seven easy steps:

1) Make sure you have a LOT OF FUCKING NATURAL LIGHT.

2) Make sure the natural light SOURCE is behind you

3) Make sure the flash on your camera is OFF. If you need a FLASH, it means you don't have enough NATURAL LIGHT. (step 1)

4) Look through the viewfinder: Make sure that everything in your shot is symmetrical. If a tiny bit of it isn't, like a bird or a queer walking down the street, that's OK because it makes the photo "cool." Go watch every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made if you don't understand this. (Study Alex's fake eyelash as the archetypal stylistic symmetry violator)

5) Take pictures of everyday shit from stupid angles but make sure it's all SYMMETRICAL and that it isn't MOVING.

6) Make sure YOU don't move or have your fat black fingers in front of the lens when you push the button. (priceless tip: push the button down halfway, wait for a clicky sound, and then push it all the way in - this is the BIG photography secret that professionals don't want you to know.)

7) Take TONS of photos of the same thing and then only use the good ones where the bird or the queer wasn't blinking.

You're done. You're a fucking photographer. See how easy that is? That's because it's for JERKOFFS.

(via avenues)

NYC, then and now comparison photos

The NY Times has photographer David Dunlap running around NYC taking updated versions of the photos he took of the city for Paul Goldberger's 1978 guidebook to Manhattan, The City Observed: New York. Recent Now/Then comparisons include Grand Central Terminal, the corner of 59th St and 5th Ave (where the Apple Store is), and, perhaps the most striking pair of photos, the Hudson River shoreline.

A fashion model for the ages

Vogue Paris has an editorial in the November 2008 issue which features a 20-year-old model photographed as if she were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. The hands betray her true age in the 40, 50, and 60 shots but the 10-year-old photo is a little bit of brilliance...just the right angle and lighting. (via the year in pictures)

Life magazine photographs online

Wow, Google is hosting millions of photographs from Life magazine from the 1860s to the 1970s. Would have been nice to see these on Flickr instead (so that people could add tags, annotate, etc.), but this is an amazing resource. (via df)

Advice for young photographers

Alec Soth asks a bunch of photographers a) when did you first get excited about photography? and b) what advice would you give young photographers?

Don't stop questioning yourself (it'll make you less arrogant). Push. Push, scratch, dig... Push further... And stop when you don't enjoy it anymore... But most of all respect those you photograph...

(via conscientious)

Battle of the HD video cameras

Now that the Flip has released their handheld digital HD video camera, here's a little rundown of the offerings currently out there and coming soon.

Kodak Zi6 - 128MB of built-in memory, expandable to 32GB, 720p, 1280x720 at 60 fps, 2.4 in. LCD, AA rechargable batteries. $180. (Video sample.)

Flip Video MinoHD - 4GB of built-in memory (~60 min of video), 720p, 1280x720 at 30 fps, 1.5 in. LCD, very slim handheld. $229. (Video sample.)

Nikon D90 SLR - expandable SD memory, 720p, 1280x720 at 24 fps for 5 minutes at a time, 3 in. LCD, and almost every single setting and control that's available on a SLR camera. $1200. (Video samples.)

Canon 5D Mark II SLR - expandable CF memory, 1080p, 1920x1080 at 24 fps for 30 minutes at a time, 3 in. LCD, and almost every single setting and control that's available on a SLR camera. $2700. (Video sample.)

Red One - Not going to list the specs on this one, except to to say that you can shoot whole feature length movies on this thing at a higher resolution for less money than pretty much any other camera out there, digital or otherwise. $17500. (Gorgeous video sample.)

European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008

Check out the winners of the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 competition...lots of amazing photography here. Warning: the winning image is a little disturbing for the faint of heart.

Final photos

A list of final photographs taken of people before they died. Included Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, and Adolf Hitler. (via cyn-c)

Female bodybuilders

Photos of women bodybuilders. If you cover up the faces with your hands, they look like men in bikini tops and if you cover up the bodies, meth addicts.

New York in the 1930s

A lovely photo set of New York City from the 1930s. My favorites are the crowded beach scene at Coney Island, Margaret Bourke-White's shot of hats in the Garment District, and a shot of "the Lung Block" on the Lower East Side. In due time, that then-notorious but now-beautiful block was razed to make way for one of Manhattan's first large apartment complexes, Knickerbocker Village which at various times housed several members of the Bonnano crime family and Julius & Ethel Rosenberg. (thx, mark)

1908 basketball

Photo of a less-than-fast-paced game of basketball at Columbia University in 1908.

Really busy Brooklyn

For his Fabric of Brooklyn project, Tom Mason took photos of scenes in Brooklyn and combined them to depict super-bustling neighborhoods. Reminded me of this wonderful composite image of a busy airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu.

Photographic buildings

Filip Dujardin samples photos of buildings to create new photographs of improbable, impossible, or fantastical buildings.

These are great.

Update: More fictional architecture, this time by Philipp Schaerer. (via today and tomorrow)

Touching strangers

Richard Renaldi's photos of touching strangers seem a little predictable to me -- white guy with black family, blue-collar guy with white-collar guy, blig black guy with white family -- but still worth a look. Joerg Colberg thinks they're amazing:

Asking two complete strangers to not only pose with each other, but to also touch each other while doing that... And this in a culture whose discomfort with touching someone you don't know, or touching something that someone else might have touched still baffles me, even after having spent almost ten years in it! I remember I asked Richard how he actually did that. How do you ask complete strangers to pose with and touch each other? How do you do that in New York City of all places?

The act of making a photograph turns the subjects into actors, and two actors touching each other isn't that unusual. When I look at many of these photos, I see actors and that detracts from the intimacy. Even so, I love this one.

Lost photographs of the bombing of Hiroshima

A month after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, the US government imposed a code of censorship in Japan, which means that photos of the effects of the nuclear device are somewhat difficult to come by. Enter diner owner Don Levy of Watertown, MA.

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor's house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.

He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges -- snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.

The photographs were taken by the US Strategic Bombing Survey immediately after the war and are now in the possession of the International Center of Photography. A copy of a report made by the US Strategic Bombing Survey is available online at the Truman Library.

A small audience at the Lincoln Memorial

When it looked as though Obama was going to win the election, former photojournalist Matt Mendelsohn went to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC expecting to find a huge crowd of celebrants.

I'd spent most of election night in front of the TV in Arlington, Va. But around 11 p.m. I couldn't sit idle any longer, which is why I sped to the memorial. When I arrived, I found a TV crew sitting on the plaza above the Reflecting Pool, waiting, I assumed, for a mob to arrive. I approached with cameras in hand. One of them looked up and said with a slight roll of his eyes, "Nothing to see here."

Instead he found a small group of people listening to Obama's acceptance speech on a transistor radio and shot this wonderful picture of the scene. I can't think of an image that better characterizes the grass-roots, get-out-the-vote, small-donations-by-millions-of-people aspect of Obama's campaign. (via 3qd)

Update: Here's another view of the same scene. (thx, andy)

Obama bits and loose ends

Flickr is getting slammed right now (I'm getting a lot of "hold your clicks" messages) because of the behind-the-scenes election night photos the Obama campaign put up yesterday. Maybe bookmark and come back in a few hours?

I've updated the post about the NY Times' use of 96-pt type for their Obama headline. They've used the big type at least one additional time, on 1/1/2000.

Kristen Borchardt made an awesome video that takes a number of Nov 5th newspaper front pages and animates through them using each papers' Obama photo as the focal point...very much like YTMND's Paris Hilton doesn't change facial expressions.

Obama photo mosaics.

I've also updated the election headlines post with a few more collections that popped up.

Hopefully I'll have some time this afternoon to update the 2008 Election Maps page; I've got lots of good submissions waiting in my inbox. Thanks to everyone who sent in links and screenshots.

Idea for the Obama administration: fireside chats. On the radio, on satellite radio, as a podcast, transcripts available online soon after airing. Done live if possible, a genuine lightly scripted chat. Maybe Obama could have special guests on to talk about different aspects of policy and government. Bush does weekly radio addresses but they're short, boring, and scripted.

Newsweek has posted the rest of their seven-part piece on the 2008 election: part four, part five, part six, part seven. I wrote about the first three installments yesterday.

More related stuff on kottke.org: the barackobama, 2008election, and politics tags.

And I gotta tell you, if change.gov is indicative of how the Obama administration is going to use the web to engage with Americans, this is going to be an interesting four years.

Ok, that's probably the last Obama post for a bit. Back to your irregularly unscheduled programming.

Classic Star Wars photos

Three collections of old Star Wars photos and illustrations: 1) a huge collection of classic Star Wars stills, set photos, etc., 2) a smaller collection of photos from the set of the first film, and 3) some early storyboards from the first movie, tentatively titled "The Star Wars".

Great photos of Obama

The Big Picture, the best new blog of the year, celebrates the victory of Barack Obama, no doubt Time's Man of the Year for 2008, with some of the best photos of the President-Elect taken over the past few months.

Star location service

If you submit your astronomy photo to the Astrometry group on Flickr, a tool of the same name will look at the image, tell you the location of the field of view, and label all of the celestial objects contained within it. Here's an annotated photo of the Pleiades.

Your assignment: use the Astrometry and Exif data to stitch all these photos together into a huge Hockney-esque map of the sky. I am also wondering the extent to which you can fool Astrometry with, say, a painting of a portion of the sky. It would be neat if you could submit a drawing of a constellation and get the correct star IDs back. (via mouser)

The completed Metropolitan Life Tower

Shorpy has posted a photo of the Metropolitan Life Tower taken in 1909, the year the building was completed. I recently wrote posts about the building and about an odd death that occurred there. (thx, finn)

Photos of NYC signs

A collection of photos of signs located in NYC from 14th St to 42nd St in Manhattan. Many of the photos were taken in the 80s and 90s and the signs they depict are already gone. The photos are extensively annotated...this is a real history lesson.

Historic Paris photography

It seems like I've linked to this before but why not again? Paris en Images is a huge collection of historic photos of Paris.

Choosing Flickr photos by color

Idée Multicolr Search Lab is pretty amazing. You select up to ten colors and it returns Flickr photos with those colors. I couldn't stop playing with this.

An intimate look at Obama

A fantastic series of photos from Time photographer Callie Shell of Barack Obama. Shell has been photographing Obama since 2004.

Obama listens from a back stairwell as he is introduced in Muscatine, Iowa. It was his second or third speech of the day. Unlike many of the politicians I have photographed in the past, I find it is easy to get a photograph of Obama alone. He lets his staff do their jobs and not fuss over him.

I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn't have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I've encountered.

Two staffers had just passed this site and done two pull-ups. Not to be outdone, Obama did three with ease, dropped and walked out to make a speech.

It's always the little things.

PhotoSwap

PhotoSwap is a simple iPhone app: you take a photo, the app sends it to another user at random, and you get a random one in return. Check out a review and a bunch of photos people have received through the app. (thx, david)

Fenway as scale model

A fake tilt-shift photo of Fenway Park in Boston makes the ballpark look like a scale model. I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick. (via let's go mets)

Best news photos

Vanity Fair has a list of the 25 best news photographs. Many are familar but I had never seen the photo of Roman Polanski sitting outside his house after his wife's murder. (Quite a few of these photos are disturbing. Viewer beware.)

Photos of the Sun

The Big Picture collects photos of the Sun. I've featured a number of these on kottke.org before but it never hurts to look often at the Sun.

The Metropolitan Life Tower

The Metropolitan Life Tower is located on the east side of Madison Square Park at 1 Madison Avenue. It has quietly become one of my favorite buildings in the city; I find myself peering up at it whenever I'm in the area. (I took a photo of the building while in line at the Shake Shack last spring...it's a lovely color in the late afternoon light.) Inspired by a photo posted recently to Shorpy that shows the tower under construction -- and before the addition of the building's iconic clock -- I did some research and discovered three things.

One. Modeled after the bell tower of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, the Metropolitan Life Tower was completed in 1909 and at 700 feet, it was the tallest building in the world until the Woolworth Building was completed four years later.

Two. The NY Times ran a story in December 1907 about the eventual completion of the structure and how it would take over as the world's tallest building, surpassing another then-unfinished building, the Singer Tower. In the era before widely available air travel, the building's vantage point was remarkable.

The view from the top was of a new New York. No other skyscrapers obstructed the vista in either direction. Passing the green roof of the Flatiron Building, the gaze literally spanned the Jersey City Heights and rested on Newark and towns on the Orange Mountains, fifteen miles away.

To the southward the skyscrapers bulked like a range of hills in steel and mortar, the Singer tower rising in the midst, a solitary watch tower on a peak. This hid the harbor, but to the left beyond the bridges, reduced at this height to gray cobwebs, the eye caught the sunlight on the sea -- a long strip of shimmering silver beyond Coney Island and the Rockaways.

Three. Star architect Daniel Libeskind is allegedly working on an addition to the Metropolitan Life Building, an addition that by some accounts would reach 70 stories. You can guess how I feel about the prospect of one of those residential glass monstrosities literally and emotionally dwarfing the existing 50-story clock tower, Libeskind or no. Of course, the Metropolitan Life Tower may never have become so iconic had Metropolitan Life's plans for a 100-story tower one block north not been scrapped because of the Great Depression. They only finished 32 floors of that building, which today houses the celebrated restaurant, Eleven Madison Park.

Junk drawer photos

Paho Mann photographs other people's souls junk drawers and medicine cabinets.

My work explores the persistent mark of individuality in a culture that brands, packages, and relentlessly promotes conformity. Even among those who attempt to fit into society, there is an amazing wealth of information each individual reveals in near-privacy, spaces such as junk-drawers and medicine cabinets. The near-private nature of these spaces force the viewer to contend with the natural desire of humans to collect, categorize, and by doing so, manage to give clues about their personality and identity.

(via the moment)

Tilt-shift video

Tilt-shift camera lenses have been around for awhile and have been typically used in architectural photography to straighten perspective lines. A few photographers have recently begun to make what look like photographs of scale models, using these lenses to control the angle and orientation of the depth of field. Vincent Laforet or Olivo Barbieri for example.

Pretty freaky, right? Keith Loutit has posted three videos to Vimeo that use the same effect. Seeing those miniatures in motion really blows your noodle. (via waxy)

Update: Director Matt Mahurin used the tilt-shift technique in music videos in the early 90s. Take Bush's Everything Zen video for example. (thx, siege)

Photos of earth from above

The Big Picture has a selection of photographs from Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who is the answer to the question "hey, who takes those amazing aerial photos of all these different places on earth?" Many more images are available on Arthus-Bertrand's web site and in his many books.

Some of these photos are coming to NYC in May 2009 in an exhibition in Battery Park City.

Distressed jeans factory

David Friedman of the excellent Ironic Sans blog took some photos of a Kentucky denim factory that distresses jeans for high-end designers.

I used to scoff at paying a premium for jeans that come with holes in them already. Then I saw just how much work goes into distressing jeans, and I realized that these people are artists. You can't just have any loose threads, you have to have the right loose threads. They can't just be faded. They have to be the right color. A lot of work goes into making these jeans look just right.

On editing (photographs)

A photographer talks about how he edits his photos and collects editing approaches from other photographers as well.

You usually have a hunch, but the great thing about photography is that it's so unpredictable, so you never quite understand how and when a good photograph comes about. But when editing, I do contact sheets, then machine prints and then select from that.

And when asked what makes one image stand out more than another, is it emotional or an intellectual reaction he answers: "It must be intuitive. If it were intellectual, I'd be able to explain what happens. That's why I'm a photographer. I express myself visually, not verbally.

Two main themes emerge: 1) take some time off from your images in order to evaluate them more fairly, and 2) edit with an outside party, someone you trust to be tough but fair. (via conscientious)

Fashion models transformed

Several photo series of fashion models transforming into different outfits. It's amazing how different they can look with changes in makeup, hair, and clothes.

What photographers see

Five noted photographers choose films they've been influenced by. Blue Velvet appears on more than one list.

The most interesting boring photos on Flickr

The most interesting boring photos on Flickr (i.e. the "boring" tag sorted by interestingness). Got this from ni9e, although he used a slightly different technique.

Self-stalking

Wired writer Sonja Zjawinski commissioned for-hire paparazzo Izaz Rony (previously) to follow her around for the day and take photos.

I leave the coffee shop with Rony trailing unobtrusively. I'm beginning to understand why celebrities go nuts, shave their heads, and bounce in and out of rehab; I would, too, if I had relentless photographers on my tail 24/7. When I stop to peruse a pair of shoes at an outdoor stall, Rony snaps away at me through a rack of dresses, startling a fellow shopper. "Sorry," I sheepishly explain. "That's, uh ... my photographer."

I don't feel like a celebutante hounded by the media anymore; I feel like the lamest lame-o in Phonytown. And I've had enough of it. I call off the shoot.

(via fimoculous)

America the Gift Shop

More new work from the busy Phillip Toledano: America the Gift Shop.

If American foreign policy had a gift show, what would it sell?

I like the Cheney shredding secret documents snow globe.

Funhouse mosaic

If I'd been walking at the time -- perhaps at my treadmill desk -- this photo from Cornelia Hediger would have stopped me in my tracks.

It falls apart under scrutiny but each time I go back to it after a few minutes, my initial reaction is always, "wow, cool". (via heading east)

17 years of daily self-portraits

Dan Hanna has made a rotating self-portrait video assembled from 17 years of daily photos, a la Noah Kalina's Everyday video.

17 years worth of taking 2 photos a day as my head rotates in sync with the Earth around the Sun.

The split screen is a nice touch and I love watching the hair on his shaved head grow back like a Chia Pet every few months. Here's a description of the rig he uses to take the photos. (via heading east)

19th century Arctic exploration photos

Photos from two Arctic expeditions, one in 1854 and the other in 1875-6.

This photo is part of the National Maritime Museum's contribution to Flickr's Commons project.

2008 Summer Paralympic Games photography

I don't mean to link to every single thing on The Big Picture, but Alan's knocked it out of the park again with these fantastic photos of the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games. These sports look more difficult than the ones at the regular Olympics. Take, for instance, goalball:

Participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents' goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves. Blindfolds allow partially sighted players to compete on an equal footing with blind players.

The Games aren't being broadcast on American TV but you can catch them on the web at Universal Sports.

Bridal preparations

T&A is not my usual schtick here, but I found these photos of brides in their underwear -- most are pictured getting dressed for the ceremony -- appealing for non-obvious reasons (the titillation factor here is almost zero unless you're 12 years old). There's something about the natural, unguarded informality of the preparation in comparison to the fussiness and solemnity of the ceremony itself...it makes the wedding part seem artificial. It's also disturbing that all these intimate photos ended up online, likely without the consent of the undressed. Really NSFW.

Annie Leibovitz on photography

Annie Leibovitz talks about her photography and how her process has changed, from toting a single camera around to capture the rawness of the Rolling Stones to the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars that VF spends for Leibovitz to make a few photographs for the magazine.

I learned about power on that tour. About how people in an audience can lose a sense of themselves and melt into a frenzied, mindless mass. Mick and Keith had tremendous power both on and offstage. They would walk into a room like young gods. I found that my proximity to them lent me power also. A new kind of status. It didn't have anything to do with my work. It was power by association.

I've been on many tour buses and at many concerts, but the best photographs I've made of musicians at work were done during that Rolling Stones tour. I probably spent more time on it than on any other subject. For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. You can get amazing work, but you've got to be careful. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

Hurricane photos

Absolutely scrumtrilescent photos of hurricanes from space. The Big Picture once again. I feel as though Alan is reaching directly into my brain and asking, "hey, what photos do you want to see next to flood you with high levels of dopamine?"

Watch politicians age

Video compilations of several months of photos of John McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. Completely mesmerizing, especially the Bush one. See also: Noah Kalina Everyday and Paris Hilton doesn't change facial expressions on YTMND.

Digital Journalist photo blog

The Digital Journalist has launched a photo blog modeled after The Big Picture. Well done. I've followed this site on and off for years but always found it too difficult to navigate through to find the photography, which is shot by top-notch photojournalists and is amazing. Nice to see the photography put front and center. Case in point: this wonderful selection of sports photos by Walter Iooss Jr., punctuated by stories of the athletes he was photographing (Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, etc.). Here's Iooss' account of photographing Jordan at the 1988 dunk contest:

The problem with shooting the NBA slam-dunk contest was that you never knew how the players were going to dunk, especially Jordan. In 1997 [sic, it was actually 1987] he had twirled and dunked with his back to me. But by this time I knew him a little better. As he sat in the stands three hours before the contest, I said, "Michael, can you tell me which way you're going to go, so I can move and get your face in the picture?" He looked at me as if I were crazy but then said, "Sure. Before I go out to dunk I'll put my index finger on my knee and point which way I'm going." I said, "You're going to remember that?" And he said, "Sure." So later, when they announced his name, I looked over to him on the bench and there was his finger pointing left. I got up and moved to the right side of the basket so I could see his face. He went left every time he dunked. On his last two dunks he ran the length of the court, took off from the foul line and slammed the ball through. On the next-to-last one he landed in my lap. On the last one I set up in the same spot. He looked at me as if to say, "Go left a little, give me some room this time." And that was it, the picture was made: 1000th of a second frozen in time.

BTW, I've heard that The Big Picture has spawned a number of copycats around the web, including this one from the WSJ.

Best photos of the Beijing Olympics

Three galleries of the best photos taken at the Olympics. Part 2 and part 3. NSFW.

Update: Caveat to the links above: all the photos above are lifted from elsewhere. You may prefer the collection at Big Picture instead. I've got mixed feelings about sites that take photos from other sites without proper attribution. On one hand, the photographers are not getting their due credit and payment for those photos but on the other, the act of collecting and curating adds something new to the work and results in something worthwhile. I wish there were a way for sites to make groups of photos like these without the hefty licensing expenses...the photographers get more of their photos out there and we get all sorts of neat views through the lenses of the photographers and talented curators. (thx, josh)

Water Cube panorama

Awesome panorama of the Water Cube in Beijing from the top of the 10 meter platform. Looks way higher than on TV.

Juergen Teller, photographer, isn't sexy

I found this New York magazine profile of fashion photographer Juergen Teller pretty fascinating. For one thing, none of Teller's photos are retouched.

But perhaps most rare for fashion photography, Teller's pictures are absolutely never retouched. "I'm interested in the person I photograph," he says. "The world is so beautiful as it is, there's so much going on which is sort of interesting. It's just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It's just pointless to me."

And then there's this anecdote. After a bad encounter with a subject who didn't like how old she looked in Teller's photographs, he went to see his friend Charlotte Rampling.

Despondent, Teller called his friend Rampling, who offered to cook him dinner. They talked about how it feels to be photographed, and how it feels to age. "I just thought, Fuck this, I'm going to photograph myself," he says. And then there the two of them were, in the Louis XV suite of the Hotel de Crillon, with Teller way too fat to fit into any of the Marc Jacobs samples save one terribly shiny pair of silver shorts.

"I thought, Fuck," Teller says, "I don't even fucking fit into these clothes. I'm really fucking stuck now."

So he pulled on the shorts in the bathroom. "I came out and I had my socks on and I had these shorts on and no top, and I just said, 'Ta-da!' And she said, 'Oh my God. What are we going to do?' And I said, 'Well, I don't know. But really, honestly'-and I could hardly bring it out of my mouth-I said, 'I just want to kiss you and fondle your breasts.' And she didn't say a word. She just leaned back in her armchair and went into her handbag and got a cigarillo out and lit it and the air was thick and I was mortified. And then she sort of dragged on her cigarette and said, 'Okay. Let's start. I'll tell you when to stop.'"

Here are some of the images that resulted from that shoot (NSFW).

Disassembled household appliances

Photos of disassembled household appliances.

this was my senior thesis project at the hartford art school this past year...i took apart used cooking/cleaning appliances, and arranged their interior parts very systematically on a white sheet of bristol board. my intention was to explore the hidden "brains" of these appliances; allowing us to view these everyday objects from a new perspective.

Photographer Miroslav Tichy

This is Miroslav Tichy, a Czech photographer:

This is one of Tichy's homemade cameras, fashioned from cardboard tubing, string, and thread spools:

Here's a photo taken with one of his homemade cameras:

Of the apparent quality of his photography Tichy says:

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

Awesome. (via this is that)

Chimping

Chimping is the practice of checking your just-taken photos on your DSLR's LCD screen. (via textism)

Vincent Laforet's Olympic photos

Photographer Vincent Laforet, formerly of the NY Times, is in Beijing making photos of the Olympics. Here's a look at some of the stuff he's been shooting and the process behind getting those wonderful overhead shots of his.

Getting a photograph of Phelps from above is priceless -- so it's all worth the hassle. Here he is winning gold in the 200 meter individual medley. This was shot with a 400mm 2.8 handheld--oh yeah, hand holding a 12 pound lens ain't easy. Luckily it was strapped to me -- and I to the catwalk with oodles of safety cables. We weren't allowed to being extra CF Cards or even a paper start list, which is pretty extreme if you ask me. We were patted down before we went up by the photo escorts, and we all tried to get things in -- even our credentials were left behind. While extreme, I agree with one of the photo escorts who said that if even one sheet of paper floated harmlessly down from the catwalk. it would be game over for everyone -- no more catwalk access.

You can keep up with Laforet's Olympic output at his blog. (thx, stacy)

Fake Louis Vuitton products

A collection of photos of custom and counterfeit Louis Vuitton products. Big omission: David LaChapelle's photo of an LV'd Lil' Kim. (via quips)

Library of Dust

BLDGBLOG tells us about Library of Dust, a book of photographs of an Oregon state psychiatric institution.

Esteemed photographer David Maisel has created a somber and beautiful series of images depicting canisters containing the cremated remains of the unclaimed dead from an Oregon psychiatric hospital. Dating back as far as the nineteenth century these canisters have undergone chemical reactions causing extravagant blooms of brilliant white green and blue corrosion revealing unexpected beauty in the most unlikely of places. This stately volume is both a quietly astonishing body of fine art from a preeminent contemporary photographer and an exceptionally poignant monument to the unknown deceased.

Vintage business signs

This is a fantastic set of photos of old business signs, many of them neon. As Ben says, "is it possible to favorite every photo in a set at once?"

Video game faces

If you can brave the Flashcrapular flippa-dee-do-da interface, Evan Baden's Illuminati photos are worth a look. They depict people's faces bathed in the light of their computer screens, iPods, and video games. See also Phillip Toledano's Video Gamers series. Toledano is also behind the fantastic Days with My Father. (via conscientious)

Update: Also see also Dennis Chamberlin's Screen Culture photos. (thx, blaine)

Rich people rooftops NYC

A photo series of some elaborate roof decks and gardens in NYC. (thx, rob)

Stupid ideas captured

Maggie collects the top ten stupidest ideas depicted on Flickr. These are pretty amazing.

Large Hadron Collider photos

I've been waiting patiently for this one. Big Picture has 27 photos of the Large Hadron Collider and they're stunning. The scale of this thing, it's overwhelming.

Faces of Evil, Hans Weishaupl

For his Faces of Evil project, Hans Weishäupl made composite photographs of the world's worst dictators by photographing hundreds of people in each dictator's country and stitching them together. The results are a bit disturbing, particularly when viewing very large, clear, vibrant color photos of long-dead monsters like Stalin or Hitler. (via conscientious)

Quiet Paris

If Paris is getting quiet again, it must be the end of July, a nice set of photos from Rion Nakaya.

Diorama construction photos

The Natural History Museum in NYC has put a collection of historical photos online, including some fantastic images of the construction of some of their famous displays and dioramas. Pruned pulled out a few of the best for a recent post.

During the first decades of the 20th century, the AMNH posed its T. rex bones in an upright position, propped on its tail. Skeletons were broken, some bent and others removed altogether so that it looked like the "marauding predator" people thought they were. And also so that it didn't look too diminutive in the large exhibition hall. Natural history as a function of architecture: it had to reach high up to the ceiling, fill up all that space, loom large over the crowds.

Yummy farmland

A fractal canyon devours farmland in New Mexico.

Art to last 10,000 years

In order to create art for the 10,000-year Clock chamber, Edward Burtynsky has been investigating how to make photographic prints that last a long time.

Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn't work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called "carbon transfer print." It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone-the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany-and the black ink is carbon.

On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

Interview with Hilla Becher

A year after her husband died, photographer Hilla Becher was interviewed by a German magazine about her work and her husband.

SZ: Why was your husband not interested in such photos?
HB: He rejected them because he was not interested in taking them. Actually, he was never interested in photography.

SZ: That is an unusual statement about a man who spent his whole life on it.
HB: Originally, Bernd did sketches. In the beginning, he sketched industrial landscapes. But he never managed to finish his work, because he was so precise. Often the object was demolished right in front of his eyes, back then heavy industry in the Siegerland was being abandoned for good. The demolishing, the decay happened faster than he could sketch it.

SZ: So then he took photos?
HB: Right. He borrowed a 35mm camera and took photos, to use them for his sketches. That's how it started, photography as the means to an end.

The Bechers worked tirelessly to photograph all kinds of industrial machinery.

Ghost towns

Photos and descriptions of some of the world's neatest ghost towns. I've seen many of these elsewhere but hadn't heard of this village in France before.

The small village of Oradour-sur-Glane, France, is the setting of unspeakable horror. During World War II, 642 residents were massacred by German soldiers as punishment for the French Resistance. The Germans had initially intended to target nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres and mistakenly invaded Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10th 1944. According to a survivor's account, the men were herded into barns where they were shot in the legs so they would die more slowly. The women and children, who had been held in a church, all perished when their attempt to escape was met by machine-gun fire. The village was razed by the Germans afterward. Its ruins still stand today as a memorial to the dead and a reminder of the events that took place.

Labs At Night

Seed Magazine has posted Noah Kalina's photos of science labs at night. The Salk Institute is represented of course.

Five dollars

A collection of photos of things from around the world that cost $5.

To explore the relative value of five dollars we are collecting examples from around the world by asking people to submit photos of objects or services that cost the equivalent of $5.

(via clusterflock)

Mike Tyson's mansion

Photos of Mike Tyson's abandoned mansion. What an odd house. Half of it is bathrooms & an indoor pool and looks like it was designed by Homer Simpson.

Portraits of librarians

From what I can gather from these portraits, librarians are white, bearded if male, and have glasses.

The most beautiful suicide

On May 1, 1947, Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Photographer Robert Wiles took a photo of McHale a few minutes after her death.

The photo ran a couple of weeks later in Life magazine accompanied by the following caption:

On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. 'He is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure.

From McHale's NY Times obituary, Empire State Ends Life of Girl, 20:

At 10:40 A. M., Patrolman John Morrissey of Traffic C, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a swirling white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the Empire State. A moment later he heard a crash that sounded like an explosion. He saw a crowd converge in Thirty-third Street.

Two hundred feet west of Fifth Avenue, Miss McHale's body landed atop the car. The impact stove in the metal roof and shattered the car's windows. The driver was in a near-by drug store, thereby escaping death or serious injury.

On the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray of the West Thirtieth Street station, found Miss McHale's gray cloth coat, her pocketbook with several dollars and the note, and a make-up kit filled with family pictures.

The serenity of McHale's body amidst the crumpled wreckage it caused is astounding. Years later, Andy Warhol appropriated Wiles' photography for a print called Suicide (Fallen Body), but I can't find a copy of it anywhere online. Anyone?

Update: A not-so-great representation of Warhol's version of this photograph is available at Google Books. (thx, ruben)

Update: Here's a better photo of Warhol's print. (thx, lots of people)

Stock photography futurism

The sales of stock photographs can tell you a surprising amount about what's going on in the world but they can't predict the future.

"We had a bad day when Dolly was cloned," says Denise Waggoner, vice president of creative research at Getty. "We hadn't been studying biotechnology, and suddenly everyone wanted a shot of 25 sheep on a seamless white background. So now we try to keep our toes dipped in the water in lots of different fields, so we can be ready."

Trek cosplay

Photos of Star Trek fans (and other sci-fi enthusiasts) dressed up as their favorite characters in their otherwise non-Trek homes.

Abstract satellite photos

An amazing collection of abstract satellite photos, demonstrating the "impressionist, cubist and pointillist" side of the earth's landscape.

The images you see below were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA's scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.

You must see these. Bonus: all the images are available in wallpaper size for your computer desktop.

Dennis Darzacq's falling photos

You've likely seen Dennis Darzacq's photos of people who look like they're falling and about to hit the ground at a high velocity. Lens Culture has a video that shows how Darzacq makes those photos; he plays a clever mind trick on viewers that makes jumping look like falling.

Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes. These moments really occurred. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in a modern urban setting. And the photographer shot the images, intervening only to give a few guidelines as to their movements. However, at the moment of the leap, chance and gravity also intervened.

Nick Veasey, x-ray photographer

It's been awhile since I've checked in on Nick Veasey's work. Veasey takes x-ray photos of all sorts of items, from feathers to pens to underwear to people to entire buses. Well worth poking around.

Color photos of occupied Paris

André Zucca's color photographs of Paris during the German occupation of WWII have provoked controversy because Zucca worked for a German propaganda magazine. But Richard Brody argues that Zucca's photographs are true to the Paris of the time and don't just show the "cheerful ease" of the city's residents.

Certainly, Zucca couldn't get the whole story: he photographed Jews wearing the star but couldn't show the roundups or the deportation to Auschwitz; he could show German soldiers but couldn't show the arrest, torture, and execution of resisters. He couldn't, but nobody could; the problem wasn't that he worked for a propaganda rag: photographers who actively worked for the Resistance couldn't do it either. But what he did do was to capture the paradoxes of the Occupation, where horror and pleasure coexisted in shockingly close proximity, where the active resistance to Nazi occupation was in fact far less prevalent than the feigned daily oblivion of those who kept their heads down and tried to cope.

More of Zucca's photos are here.

Snack food sexual innuendo

A photo gallery of snack foods that sound a bit naughty. Salted Nut Roll, Dutch Crunch, Double Creme Betweens, etc. (via buzzfeed)

Old NYC newsstands

For the past two years, photographer Rachel Barrett has been documenting NYC's vanishing newsstands as the city replaces them in favor of more modern kiosks. Here's a slideshow.

Until recently, newsstand operators owned their stands and paid the city $1,000 for two-year licenses. In 2003, the city enacted Local Law 64, which required owners to give up their stands but allowed them to operate city-owned structures at no cost. In 2006, the city signed a contract with the Spanish conglomerate Cemusa to build 3,300 bus shelters, 300 newsstands and 20 public toilets.

More photos are available on Barrett's web site. One of these new stand just went up by my office and has all the personality of a block of concrete. The new stands are also super tall so that the cashier towers over the customer, creating a weird impersonal dynamic and, for those of below average height, a need to stretch to hand your money over.

Dustin Humphrey photography

Dustin Humphrey's surfing/underwater photography is difficult to explain. Pro surfers + underwater naked steampunk maybe? NSFW. (via avenues)

An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research - Flong

Attention time merge media fans: do not miss Golan Levin's extensive collection of slit scan video projects as well as Eddie Elliott's related list. (via migurski)

Barbara Probst

The Morning News has an interview with photographer Barbara Probst. I've seen her work at the MoMA but this one is new to me and a definite favorite.

Image Fulgurator

The Image Fulgurator is an ingenious device that detects the flash from nearby cameras and quickly inserts a message onto whatever is being photographed so that it shows up in any photos being taken.

It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

Check out the results. (thx, red)

Autochrome photography

I'm fascinated by early color photography...it takes a time we think of being in black & white and makes it accessible and modern. In the hands of Auguste and Louis Lumière, the "lowly, lumpy potato" made color photography possible in the early 1900s. The photos were called autochromes.

The Lumière brothers gathered up their potatoes and ground them into thousands of microscopic particles; they separated this powder into three batches, dying one batch red-orange, one violet and one green; the colored particles were thoroughly mixed and sifted onto a freshly varnished, clear glass plate while the lacquer remained tacky; excess potato bits were swept from the plate, which was pressed through steel rollers to flatten the colored grains, transforming each into a minuscule color filter measuring from .0006 to .0025 millimeters across. Gaps between the colored particles were filled in with carbon black, the plate was varnished again and a thin, light-sensitive emulsion of silver bromide was brushed over that. Now the plate was ready for the camera. When the shutter was opened, light filtered through the translucent potato grains, and a multicolored image was imprinted on the emulsion. After the negative plate was developed in the lab, it was washed and dried, covered with another piece of glass to protect the emulsion and bound with gummed tape. Et voilà! A color photograph unlike any seen before.

Here's a slideshow of some photos taken by this process. Here's some autochromes of Mark Twain from 1908.

More early color photography (not necessarily autochromes): Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's stunning photographs of Russia circa 1909-1915, photos of WWI, photos of WWII, and photos of America in the late 30s/early 40s (color corrected). (thx, david)

Bill Cunningham's street photos

I've not been paying enough attention to Bill Cunningham's street fashion photography slideshows. Each week, Cunningham goes out on the streets of NYC to find out what people are wearing. Even better than the photos are his enthusiastic descriptions of what he's found.

This week he looks at women's handbags, which he calls "the engine carrying the fashion world". Cunningham finds that bags are growing almost "cartoonishly large" and discovers a unique glove/bag combo. Last week, he looked at the glittery belts that some men are wearing with their saggy jeans. If this was the type of fashion that filled the pages of Vogue, I would subscribe in a second. (thx, alaina)

Flickr Commons project

Of all the things that Flickr has done, The Commons project might be the most significant. If, in two years, there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of old photographs previously unavailable to the general public from collections all over the world -- all tagged, geocoded, annotated, contextualized, and available to anyone with a web browser -- that would be an amazing resource for exploring our recent history.

Pseudohuman

Daniel Barron makes photographs of things that look human but aren't. Maybe. Sorta. I don't really know! Can you tell? (via that's a negative)

Eddie Murphy's giant head

Here is today's dose of surreality.

Microsoft then and now

The iconic photo from 1978 of Microsoft's founders and early employees has been reshot.

Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow (center of new picture), who missed the original sitting due to a snowstorm. (When Lubow, now retired, first met Gates, she couldn't believe that disheveled kid was the president.) Absent for the reshoot was Bob Wallace (top center), who died in 2002; after leaving Microsoft in 1983, he pioneered the idea of shareware.

They should submit this to Ze Frank's Youngme/Nowme.

Alan Taylor interview

Andy Baio interviews Alan Taylor, the fellow behind The Big Picture, the journalistic photo blog that's taken the web by storm.

Internally, externally, everywhere, people are being really thankful to me. I need to make sure (with some link-love in my upcoming blogroll) that the response gets directed to the photographers as well. I'm just a web developer with access to their photos and a blog - they're the ones out there working hard to get these amazing images. "Photographers" here is a loose term, encompassing photojournalists, stringers, amateurs, scientific imaging teams and more.

Old photos of NYC

A whole bunch of old photos of NYC. More here.

Black models in Vogue Italia

For its July 2008 issue, Vogue Italia is featuring only black models and feature articles about black women in arts and entertainment.

Having worked at one time with nearly all the models he chose for the black issue -- Iman, [Naomi] Campbell, Tyra Banks, Jourdan Dunn, [Liya] Kebede, [Alek] Wek, Pat Cleveland, Karen Alexander -- [photographer Steven] Meisel had his own feelings. "I thought, it's ridiculous, this discrimination," said Mr. Meisel, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. "It's so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race -- every kind of prejudice."

Here's a slideshow of some of the images from the magazine. As I've said before, Vogue Italia is doing some interesting things with the editorial nature of the magazine's photography (see State of Emergency and Super Mods Enter Rehab, both by Steven Meisel).

Three things I saw at the MoMA today

1. Perhaps the most playful art I've ever seen in a major museum is Olafur Eliasson's Ventilator, a fan hung on a long cord in the main atrium in the museum. Watching it blow around the huge room, chased by children, is hard-to-beat fun.

2. The rest of Eliasson's show on the third floor. His art seems so conceptually and constructurally simple yet, I dunno, I just wanted to hang out in the gallery all day, like I was required to remain part of the experience. Left me wishing I'd made it to London to see The Weather Project.

3. The typology photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Recommended if you like photography and multiples of things.

Irritated that I missed: van Gogh's Starry Night (out on loan to Yale until Sept...I've seen it 20 times at least but still like checking it out whenever I'm there), the exhibition of George Lois' Esquire covers, and lunch at Cafe 2.

Iowa flood pictures

I have to hold off linking to every single entry on Big Picture (best new blog of the year so far, hands down), but these photos of the flooding in Iowa are amazing. I went to college in Cedar Rapids and my mind is boggled seeing so much of downtown under so much water.

Undressed stuffed animals

Photos of singing/talking stuffed animals, dressed and undressed.

I've always been curious about stuffed animals that sing, dance, light up, or talk back. There must be a fascinating robot underneath the fur and fluff, right? Surely the robot hiding in the bear's clothing, vestimentis ursum, is impressive. So: armed with my childish curiousity and the spurious excuse of 'product design research,' I set out to discover what, exactly, these creatures are hiding.

(thx, janelle)

The "american gothic" tag on Flickr is

The "american gothic" tag on Flickr is quite interesting; I like the ketchup and mustard one myself.

Phone sex operators

Slideshow of photos of phone sex operators by Phillip Toledano. (via waxy)

Photography before Photoshop

Photographer Sam Haskins, well known for doing in-camera montage, briefly describes how composite photos were made in the time before Photoshop.

Its a single exposure with the model viewed through optical glass at 45° and the fabric positioned to the side. At the time there was zero retouching after the event. Now of course I have the luxury of scanning the transparency to clean and refine the image in Photoshop - God bless its digital socks.

Ice lickin' hot

It's been hot in NYC for the past few days, but I don't know if it was ice-lickin' hot.

Space photos

Beautiful photos of the Space Shuttle lifting off and of earth from space. Check out the cloud wake and the thunderheads.

Robert Kennedy funeral train photos

In July 1968, a train delivered the body of Robert Kennedy from NYC to Washington D.C. so that he could be buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to his brother. Photographer Paul Fusco was on that train and shot a bunch of photos of the hundreds of thousands of people that spontaneously turned up along the train route to mourn Kennedy, photos that were recently rediscovered. Fusco narrates a slideshow of the photos.

The amazing photos will be on display at Danziger Projects from June 6 - July 31...Danziger has more about the photos -- which he calls "my favorite body of work in photography" -- on his blog.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but I'll also tell you the only area where Paul and I disagreed. For Paul, the event and the photographs represented the end of hope. To me they represent the indomitability of the American spirit.

Either way, the photos are powerful but also show the ordinary American-ness of that time period.

Spotting fake photos

Five ways to spot a faked photo. Comparing the light reflection in the various eyes in a photograph is an especially clever technique.

Big Picture

Big Picture is a fantastic and dead-simple new site from boston.com. Each entry tells a story through high-quality newswire images displayed at large sizes; recent entries include a look at Saturn from the Cassini space probe and the daily lives of soldiers in Afghanistan. If you're frustrated by the tiny news imagery we get spoon-fed to us on the web, this site will be a welcome addition to your daily browse. Alan Taylor, the project's instigator, has a post on his blog about Big Picture.

The sizes of the photographs are deliberately large - taking advantage of the majority of web users who have screens capable of displaying 1024x768 or larger. The long-held tradition of keeping images online tiny and lightweight is commendable still - when designing a general purpose site. But one dedicated to quality imagery should take full advantage of the medium, and I hope I've struck a good balance with The Big Picture.

When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I'm glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com)

Pajamas as outerwear

Photos of pajamas as outerwear in Shanghai.

The prevalence of pyjamas, Guariglia explained to me, was due to both the extreme summer heat and the lack of plumbing. Most Shanghaians share outdoor communal toilets and thus the boundaries of what was considered one's home have expanded past people's houses to the public bathrooms. Once that relaxation of the dress code became acceptable (starting around the 1980s) the perimeter for p.j.-wear just kept expanding until many people were wearing them day in day out.

Wedding then earthquake

Absolutely incredible photos of a wedding and then an earthquake.

Can you imagine what it was like to have been photographing a wedding in Sichuan, China when 7.9 earthquake hit and shakes for three minutes? From what I understand, there were thirty-three missing guests in this church.

Like the Rolling Stones

Fantastic collection of photos by James Mollison of music fans who tend to dress like their idols. A book featuring the photos is due out in October.

Over a three-year period, James Mollison attended pop concerts across Europe and the United States with a mobile photography studio, inviting fans of each music star or band to pose for a portrait on their way into the concert. The result is The Disciples, an original and highly entertaining series of fifty-seven panoramic images, each featuring eight to ten music fans mimicking the manners and dress of their particular heroes. Featuring fans of Dolly Parton, Iggy Pop, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Snoop Dogg, and Motorhead, among many others, The Disciples is a surprising, sharp, and hilarious take on popular culture.

(via waxy)

Nikola Tamindzic

The NY Times' City Room blog has a short profile of photographer Nikola Tamindzic.

He uses long exposures, then shakes the camera while the shutter is still open, causing colors to blur and lights to streak. "I'm not recording what is really happening, but it's something like what the brain is seeing late at night, especially if maybe you're drunk or very excited," he said. "I like that hour between 3 and 4 in the morning when desperation sets in, when you see all the anticipation of going out starting to fade. The masks drop and everybody realizes the night is not going to be everything they were hoping for."

You may have seen Tamindzic's photos on Gawker or on his own site, Home of the Vain. Here's the photo with Huffington, Murdoch, et al. An archive of his photography is available at Ambrel.