US National Archives on Flickr Commons
The US National Archives have added a number of photos to the Flickr Commons project. Flickr is quietly building the greatest collection of historical documents on the web.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
kottke.org posts about photography
Vans, vans, vans
Photos of vans and the places where they were. Suddenly, I want a van. (via matt)
The world’s tallest building, out of time
Martin Becka and Cedric Delsaux are a pair of photographers who feature Burj Dubai in their work. Becka’s Burj comes from his Dubai, Transmutations project in which he uses the photogravure processing technique to make images of brand-new Dubai that look as though they were taken in 1880.
Delsaux’s Burj image comes from a project called The Dark Lens, which features images of Star Wars characters populating the circa-2008 Earth. I believe that’s the Millennium Falcon docking at the Burj:
Many more of The Dark Lens images are available on Delsaux’s site.
Garry Winogrand interview
A 1970 interview with photographer Garry Winogrand on how he’s not trying to say anything with his work. Instead, he sets up photographic challenges for himself, which he then attempts to solve.
My only interest in photographing is photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA
Upcoming at MoMA: a retrospective of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs — and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.
After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.
The fake colors of Hubble photography
Those wildly colorful Hubble telescope photos…how do they get them to look like that?
The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren’t always what we’d see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object’s detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.
See also this informative Reddit thread.
Color photo of The Beatles in 1957
Well, not so much The Beatles as The Quarrymen, a band formed by John Lennon and some schoolmates that was the precursor to The Beatles. (via @brainpicker)
On the moon without being on the moon
Vincent Fournier has made a series of photos of astronauts training and of the interiors of the Chinese, Russian and US space agencies.
Looks alien, doesn’t it?
American Pixels
American Pixels is a project by Joerg Colberg that uses jpeg compression algorithms to create compelling images. From the technical notes:
ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting. As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real - so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible - ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.
2000 / 2010
Rachel Loshak is posting two photos a day on her A Year in the Day - 2010 blog; one taken in 2000 and one taken in 2010. The juxtaposition, as they say in the art world, is interesting. (via @ironicsans)
The Office intern’s photo blog
Ryan (the intern) from The Office has a photo blog.
Yes, acceptance is a theme of this photo, as well as all my photos; even the photos I take that capture isolationism have a theme of acceptance, a lack of acceptance. It is the ultimate compliment that this photo not only captured my soul, but yours as well.
William S. Burroughs’ stuff
The apartment that American writer William S. Burroughs inhabited while he lived in New York has been preserved since his death in 1997. Photographer Peter Ross took some photos of some of the contents, including a worn pair of shoes, some nunchucks, and a book called Medical Implications of Karate Blows.
Well, I bet I’ll go through half a dozen iPhones in the time it would have taken Burroughs to resole those shoes. That makes me feel greedy, wasteful, and self-indulgent. Maybe I’d be better off keeping the modern world out. Maybe we all would. Let’s all just grab our nunchucks, put on our shoes and hat and walk the streets of Manhattan.
Biosphere 2 in decline
Photographer Noah Sheldon took a series of photos of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. BLDGBLOG has more info.
The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature — wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings” — and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.
Paris, 1962
Images from Paris cafes and nightlife in 1962, the same week Yves St. Laurent’s runway show vaulted Dior to new heights. Many scenes around Les Halles (which no longer exists as it did then).
From the collection, a photo of some Les Halles butchers enjoying a drink at Au Pied de Cochon:
Update: As Wikipedia notes, Saint Laurent’s fabled show took place in 1958; Dior was gone from Dior by ‘62. Not sure whether the caption is wrong or the photos are really from 1958. (thx, alex)
The future of photography, circa 1944
In 1944, Popular Photography magazine asked several people, including photographers Berenice Abbott and László Moholy-Nagy, to speculate about the future of photography.
Their opinions differ. Yet somehow all seem to feel that the second hundred years will see the camera put to use as never before with the amateur often leading the way.
Skiing the Air Force Memorial
There was so much snow in the DC area this weekend that Rob Story decided to make fresh tracks down the slope of the Air Force Memorial.
Top 10 astronomy photos of 2009
One of the better lists out there: the top astronomy photos of the year. From the list, this is a more detailed view of the Martian landscape than we’re used to seeing:
My personal favorite, the photos taken by the LRO of Apollo 11’s landing site, made the list as well.
Ansel Adams’ Lost Los Angeles
While looking for something else at the Los Angeles Public Library, Gerard Van der Leun stumbled across some 1940s photos of LA taken by Ansel Adams. They had not been seen for a long while.
So I would conclude that with the LAPL material we are getting a rare chance to look at photographs a great photographer chose not to show the world. Obviously none of these images even touches upon the vast and central work that establish Adams as one of the greatest American photographers, but they do provide an interesting footnote to what Ansel Adams saw and thought worthy of photographing while ambling about Los Angeles during the opening months of World War II.
Hubble goes deep
In 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope took an image called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field; basically astronomers pointed the Hubble toward an “empty” part of space and took a long-exposure shot in the visible spectrum. What they found were thousands of far away galaxies from early in the development of the universe. Now the Hubble has peered even deeper into the universe in near-infrared and captured this image:
Each one of those little specks is an entire galaxy, some only 600 million years old. Here’s a zoomed-in section:
Portraits of power
At a United Nations meeting in September, New Yorker staff photographer Platon took photos of as many world leaders as her could get his hands on. Here’s a slideshow of the results.
What did the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ask the photographer before the shutter clicked? “Platon,” he said, “make me look good.”
Vogue Italia does Twitter fashion shoot
The December 2009 issue of Vogue Italia has a spread of photos taken by Steven Meisel presented in the style of Twitpic.
That’s Viktoriya Sasonkina; also represented are Karlie Kloss, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Gisele Bundchen.
Cities, before and after
Oobject has a collection of before-and-after photographs of cities, most of which have been hit by bombs (economic or otherwise): Hiroshima, Dubai, Warsaw.
Scenes from a contest
For today’s installment of The Big Picture, Alan picked a selection of photos from National Geographic’s International Photography Contest. I am a sucker for pictures of waves:
Photo is by Aaron Feinberg.
Bird photos
Andrew Zuckerman’s photos of birds are flat-out incredible.
That handsome fellow is the African Fish Eagle. The images are collected in a book called Bird.
A perpetual loop of seduction
The landing page for Natalie Daoust’s Tokyo Girls project (sorry no direct link because of Flash) presents you with a grid of 45 small animated photos of women performing stripteases.
It is kinda mesmerizing. NSFW. (via swissmiss)
The fall of the Iron Curtain in pictures
I’m sure there will be many of these published today. Send me more if you run across any and I’ll add them to the list.
Photos by Peter Turnley taken in Romania, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, and Hungary, most of them in late 1989.
Update: Pictures from a Vanished Country by Magnum’s Thomas Hoepker.
Earlier this year I realized we would celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I went back into my archive and discovered that I had boxes full of negatives that I had never seen before, taken in East Germany over the past 50 years. It was a treasure which had to be unearthed.
(thx, bojan)
Update: The Berlin Wall: Rise and Fall, photos from Life magazine.
Mediabistro has collected video of how the news was reported on American television.
Update: The Big Picture weighs in: The Berlin Wall, 20 years gone.
The NY Times asked their readers to submit photos of the Wall: The View From the Wall.
The Times also has some nice split-screen photos of before and after the Wall fell. (thx, mau)
Photos from Poland in the 1980s. (thx, tomek)
From the WSJ: Wall’s Rise and Fall. (thx, paul)
How an American soldier is made
The Denver Post followed high school graduate Ian Fischer as he enlisted in the Army, went through training, left for Iraq, and returned home; the photos tell quite a story.
Princess Leia and stunt double sunbathing on Tatooine
This did unsurprisingly well when I posted it to Twitter, so I’ve archived it here for posterity. This is Carrie Fischer and her stunt double taking a nap under the Tatooine suns during the filming of Jedi.
Stay Connected