A metaphor for the Web
This is what it feels like to use the Web sometimes:
That’s from National Geographic’s excellent Found blog; Porters transport a car on long poles across a stream in Nepal, January 1950.
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kottke.org posts about photography
Aerial photography pioneer George Lawrence
In the early 1900s, photographer George Lawrence built what he called the Lawrence Captive Airship, a series of kites and wires able to hold aloft a camera mounted on a stabilizing mechanism. With his invention, he was able to take aerial photos of cities all over the country — Brooklyn, Atlantic City, Chicago, Kansas City. You’ve probably seen his photos of a burnt-out San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
You gotta love anyone whose company motto was “the hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty”. (via coudal)
Single photograph looks like 4 individual photographs
Photographer Bela Borsodi fastidiously manipulated household items in the photograph below to create an image that looks like 4 photographs. Created as an album cover for the band VLP, I can confirm it’s possible to stare at this picture for many minutes.
Here’s the photo again from a different angle, and if you’re interested, here’s a video of the process used to create the image.
(via unified pop theory and reddit, thx, alex)
The quickening pace of modern life?
Ah, the good old days, when people used to talk to each other in public rather than looking at their phones or listening to headphones all the time. Except that’s not been the case for awhile as XKCD demonstrates with a series of quotes from various publications dating back to 1871. This is from William Smith’s Morley: Ancient and Modern published in 1886.
With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion… the dreamy quiet old days are over… for men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel… leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them… the hurry and bustle of modern life… lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day’s work done, took their ease…
In 1946, a young Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine and took this shot of NYC subway commuters reading newspapers:
The more things change, etc. More of Kubrick’s subway photography can be found here.
Watch the skies
Coudal Partners travelled to rural Nevada to capture this 6 hour and 21 minute real time film of the night sky.
Click through to YouTube to watch it in the original 4K resolution, which is much better than even 1080p. They produced the video in conjunction with the Night Sky edition of their Field Notes notebooks.
How the other half lived
Jacob Riis came to NYC in 1870 at the age of 21. He had $40 in his pocket, which he quickly spent. Unemployed, he lived for a time in the city’s notorious slums before working his way up the social and economic ladder to become one of New York’s strongest advocates for reform. Riis also took early advantage of flash photography to steer his camera into the city’s darkest corners — tenements, dark alleys, sweatshops, opium dens, beer halls — and emerged with photographs that helped shift public opinion on NYC’s poverty and slums.
Collections of Riis’ photography can be viewed at Museum Syndicate and the Museum of the City of New York. Riis included many of his photographs in a book he published in 1890 called How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. (via petapixel)
Portraits of grandmas and their food
Photographer Gabriele Galimberti travelled around the world (Morocco, Philippines, Italy, India) to get these shots of grandmothers and the foods they cook.
Each pair of photographs includes a recipe for making the pictured dish. Galimberti’s other projects are very much worth checking out as well. (via @youngna)
A history of color photography
From Luminous Lint, a brief but comprehensive history of color photography.
To understand what is happening in color photography today it is beneficial to know what has been previously accomplished. The quest for color photography can be traced to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1839 public announcement of his daguerreotype process, which produced a finely detailed, one-of-a-kind, direct-positive photographic image through the action of light on a silver-coated copper plate. Daguerreotypes astonished and delighted, but nevertheless people complained that the images lacked color. As we see the world in color, others immediately began to seek ways to overcome this deficiency and the first colored photographs made their appearance that same year. The color was applied by hand, directly on the daguerreotype’s surface. Since then scores of improvements and new processes have been patented for commercial use.
This is a photograph made by Louis Ducos du Hauron sometime between 1869-1879, a particularly early example of a vivid color photographic print that wasn’t colored by hand.
See many other examples of early color photography in the kottke.org archives. (via @ptak)
To the ends of the Earth
Alan Taylor recently investigated where Google Maps’ Street View coverage ends — “whether blocked by geographic features, international borders, or simply the lack of any further road” — and compiled a photographic look at the ends of the road.
(via @faketv)
Classical Statues Dressed Up As Hipsters
Photographer Léo Caillard makes images of classical statues dressed up as hipsters.
(via ★thoughtbrain)
Homemade inventions from China
This is amazing: Alan Taylor rounds up some homemade inventions from China, including DIY submarines, giant motorcycles, home-built robots, and can’t-possibly-fly airplanes. I can’t pick a favorite, but this homemade welding mask is outstanding:
Ok, and this giant motorcycle:
Oh, and this rickshaw-pulling robot:
And, and, and… (via @faketv)
Is this a photo of Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Jesse James?
This is purported to be a photo of (from l to r) Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, and Charlie Bowdre.
The story goes that the photo was taken in 1879 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, at a time when each of the men may have been in town. It’s entirely plausible that these men all met and posed for a photo, but as there doesn’t appear to be any provenance for particular photo, we’re left with trying to ID the long-dead from the very few authenticated photos that exist. So…maybe? But probably not? (via if charlie parker were a gunslinger…)
Update: Ah, here’s an even better photo that’s almost certainly mislabeled, purportedly featuring Wyatt Erp, Teddy Roosevelt, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid:
Contrast both of these photos with this (very real and accurately labeled) group photo of participants at the 1927 Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons:
Among those pictured are Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Neils Bohr, Paul Dirac, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Compton, and Hendrik Lorentz. (thx, mike)
All of Jerry’s best girls
Photographer Richard Prince took photographs of the 57 girlfriends Jerry Seinfeld had on the show and turned it in to the below composite.
See also Jason Salavon’s work. (via @sippey)
Update: Max points out I may have misread the article and these 57 girlfriends are not necessarily Jerry’s only. Supporting this is Sarah Silverman’s inclusion in the composite even though she’s was a love interest of Kramer’s.
Escalatorspotting
Miha Tamura takes photos of nicely designed or otherwise unusual escalators in Japan. Here, for instance, is a spiral escalator:
Pingmag recently interviewed Tamura about her photos.
The most amazing is the spiral escalator made by Mitsubishi Electric. Curving escalators were conceived from early on when escalators were invented, but they are very difficult and even today Mitsubishi Electric is the only one in the world who can make them. If I hadn’t come across this spiral escalator in Yokohama I don’t think I would have committed myself to escalators as much as I have.
Some people are really into escalators. (via coudal)
Those ridiculous cell tower trees
Dillon Marsh photographs cell towers disguised (poorly) as trees.
There’s one of these as you drive north out of NYC on the Hutch…it’s twice as tall as any other tree in the area, like a redwood that got lost while visiting its grandparents back east.
Up-close photos of celebrities
Up close, everyone looks a little weird. Even Anne Hathaway:
These remind me of macro photography of insects…when photographed close-up, people look like aliens too.
Digital time travel
Flóra Borsi inserts herself into historic photos, as though she were there photographing events with a contemporary camera. This is my favorite:
Borsi states she was inspired by “a Charlie Chaplin movie”, which is likely this clip shot in 1928 at the premiere of a Chaplin film which shows a woman who looks like she’s talking on a cellphone. See also Girl with a Pearl Earring and Point-and-Shoot Camera. (via @coudal)
Huge photos of small currencies
For a project called The Fundamental Units, Martin John Callanan used a very powerful 3D microscope to take 400-megapixel images of the lowest denomination coin from each of the world’s 166 active currencies. This is the 1 stotinki coin from Bulgaria:
And this is a small part of that same coin at tremendous zoom:
The 80s!
After an exhaustive search, I have decided this photo most exemplifies life in these United States during the 1980s:
And if not that one, then one of several other possible candidates from Roger Minick’s Sightseer project, for which he took photos of tourists at popular US tourist destinations during the early 1980s and into the 2000s.
When I approached people for a portrait, I tried to make my request clear and to the point, making it clear that I was not trying to sell them anything. I explained that my wife and I were traveling around the country visiting most of the major tourist destinations so that I could photograph the activity of sightseeing. I would quickly add that I hoped the project would have cultural value and might be seen in years to come as a kind of time capsule of what Americans looked like at the end of the Twentieth Century; at which, to my surprise, I would see people often begin to nod their heads as if they knew what I was talking about.
Slate did a feature on this series last week.
Earliest known aerial photograph is of Boston
While French balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon first photographed Paris by air in 1858, those photos were lost, and this photograph of Boston from 1860 by James Wallace Black is the earliest known aerial photo. The title is ‘Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.’ If I had to guess where in Boston this is, I’d say somewhere along Atlantic Ave.
Update: Several people have identified the steepled building at center left as the Old South Meeting House, which Wikipedia confirms: “Depicts area resembling Old South Meeting House; Milk Street; India Wharf, Central Wharf; and vicinity.” Looks a bit different these days.
But more importantly, a photo of Providence, RI taken by Black in August of 1860 predates his Boston photograph by two months. The print, which is part of the MoMA’s collection, is badly damaged but it looks like some detail would be discernable in person.
So for some sufficiently flexible definition of “surviving”, Black’s photo of Providence is the oldest surviving aerial photo. (thx, david)
Tumblr of the day: What Ali Wore
Zoe Spawton often photographs a particularly well-dressed man who passes her cafe in Berlin each day. She’s documenting the results at What Ali Wore.
Wonderful. Ali used to be a doctor but is now working as a tailor.
Intricate body calligraphy
Israeli artist Ronit Bigal does intricate calligraphy on the human body and photographs the results.
Update: I read the page wrong…the calligraphy is printed on the photographs to follow the contour of the skin, not on the skin itself. Still cool. (thx, @lorp)
Beautiful horizon rainbow in Paris
Paris even does rainbows better than the rest of the world. This is a photo of a horizon rainbow taken over the Parisian skyline last week by Bertrand Kulik.
What the heck is going on there? Astronomy Picture of the Day explains:
Why is this horizon so colorful? Because, opposite the Sun, it is raining. What is pictured above is actually just a common rainbow. It’s uncommon appearance is caused by the Sun being unusually high in the sky during the rainbow’s creation. Since every rainbow’s center must be exactly opposite the Sun, a high Sun reflecting off of a distant rain will produce a low rainbow where only the very top is visible — because the rest of the rainbow is below the horizon.
(via @DavidGrann)
First photo of Radiohead
Technically this photo was taken several years (probably in 1986 or 1987) before Radiohead officially came to be, but it features four out of the five members, back when the group was called On a Friday.
From left to right, Thom Yorke, Phil Selway, Ed O’Brien, and Colin Greenwood. This occasion marked one of the last times that Yorke smiled for a photo. (via buzzfeed)
Images of Iraq from the ten years since the invasion
Maybe the most depressing part of this three part series of photographs of Iraq from the past ten years is not the photos of all the horrible things people are capable of doing to each other, not the [God, I can’t even think of the right set of rage-adjectives here] faces of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, but the fact that there is a part two to this series that starts in 2003, just after the fucking asinine MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner.
But maybe it was all worth it? To see these happy faces riding an amusement ride? Or these young people able to express themselves? Was it the right thing done the wrong way for the wrong reasons? I dunno. I just don’t know.
Kids from around the world photographed with their favorite things
Gabriele Galimberti takes photos of kids with their most prized possessions.
But how they play can reveal a lot. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian, who would often join in with a child’s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”
This reminds me of Peter Menzel’s photos of what families from different parts of the world eat in a typical week. (via df)
Lifelike baby dolls and the people who love them
Photographer Rebecca Martinez photographs reborn dolls and the people who collect/care for them.
Babies create strong emotions for the bearer, holder, and observer. I have discovered this holds true even when it is known the baby is not real.
I am photographing dolls that are created to look and feel like living babies. They are constructed and weighted to feel like infants, which includes a head that must be supported while in one’s arms. They are the most powerful objects I have ever worked with, I am struck by the strong and palpable emotional reactions they produce. They provoke the dominant biological instinct to nurture and the entire spectrum of human behavior.
Some of the collectors care for their reborn dolls as if they were their own children:
Many of the women involved have an especially strong passion for the stage of mothering babies and this is a method to keep this stage permanently in their lives. There is a wide range of personal stories and motivations for being involved in this community. Some create or collect these dolls because they cannot continue to give birth to living babies, or have lost a child, or cannot have one of their own. Some women admire the art form and are doll collectors, others create nurseries in their homes and integrate the babies as part of their families and lives.
Sometimes, women who have lost a newborn have commissioned artists to make a reborn doll that looks exactly like their deceased baby. Modeled after photographs of the real infant, these dolls are called portrait babies.
Escaping the waves
Mark Tipple takes underwater photos of people swimming under crashing waves, which happens to be my favorite genre of surfing photography.
Prints are available. (via @DavidGrann)
National Geographic’s new photo Tumblr
National Geographic has launched a new Tumblr site that features the less-celebrated-but-still-awesome parts of its vast photographic archive. I want this car:
(via the verge)
Large-format photos of NYC’s past
NYC Past has hundreds of large format historical photos of New York City. Like this one:
I’m not through all 49 pages yet, but I am getting pretty close.
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