Silhouettes of patrons at the American Museum
Silhouettes of patrons at the American Museum of Natural History by NYC photographer Joe Holmes. Joe also has a nice photo of the Manhattan Bridge up today on his photoblog.
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
Has Abe Lincoln been discovered in the
Has Abe Lincoln been discovered in the background of a pair of photographs taken right before the Gettysburg Address?
The new photos are enlarged details from much wider crowd shots; they were discovered by a Civil War hobbyist earlier this year in the vast trove of Library of Congress photographs digitized since 2000, and provided to USA Today. They show a figure believed to be Lincoln, white-gloved and in his trademark stovepipe hat, in a military procession.
The funny thing is, if you look at a similar photograph of Lincoln taken shortly after his speech, there are at least three men seated around him who are wearing stovepipe hats. The photographic evidence alone is not compelling. “Paging Errol Morris. Would Errol Morris please come to the information desk. Thank you.”
Jason Salavon’s Field Guide to Style &
Jason Salavon’s Field Guide to Style & Color, a reproduction of the 2007 Ikea catalog with everything but the structure and color excluded. You may remember Mr. Salavon from his composite photographs and videos of blowjobs, late night talk show hosts, and Playboy centerfolds.
Examples of photographic tampering from the 1860s
Examples of photographic tampering from the 1860s to the present. This would be more instructive with the unaltered originals displayed in situ.
Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be
Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent.
Trevor Paglen uses this technique to take photographs of military bases surrounded by miles of restricted land. (via 3quarksdaily)
This is the 2 billionth photo uploaded to Flickr. 2,000,000,000!
This is the 2 billionth photo uploaded to Flickr. 2,000,000,000!
A collection of group photos taken by
A collection of group photos taken by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair. That’s an unfortunate getup on Sarah Jessica Parker.
How are Don DeLillo, Flickr, and The
How are Don DeLillo, Flickr, and The Most Photographed Barn in America related? Read on, my friends.
These have been passed around the web
These have been passed around the web extensively in the past week or so, but if you haven’t seen these photos of a 1968 French nuclear test, now’s the time. Best viewed as large as you can zoom them.
Joel pointed to these iconic photographs of
Joel pointed to these iconic photographs of the 20th century duplicated with the elderly as the subjects last week. See also: iconic photographs recreated with Legos. I remember another set of photo recreations that I can’t seem to find…famous historical events as if they happened in a video game. Anyone recall seeing something like that?
Update: Screenshots is what I was looking for. (thx, rumsey)
And You Thought This Week’s Posts Were Long
Over at Slate, Jim Lewis assesses Errol Morris’s posts on Roger Fenton’s photographs in his Zoom blog for The New York Times:
He seems to have struck a nerve, or perhaps forensics is a more popular pastime than I would have guessed. The whole affair snowballed to browser-crashing size: If you add the readers’ comments to Morris’ own writing, you get a word count of about 223,000, which—just to put it in perspective—is slightly longer than Moby-Dick.
Iconic Moments of the 20th Century
Euro art collective Henry VIII’s Wives recreate iconic 20th century photographs using Glaswegian pensioners as models, all posed outside their housing complex in Glasgow. A real glaswegian kiss to the complacent gaze with which the original photos are too-easily met.
(thx, joseph)
FFFFOUND!, art curating for the masses
Alexander Bohn wrote a glowing review of FFFFOUND! at Speak Up the other day. My FFFFOUND! fandom is documented elsewhere, so I’ll comment instead on an observation Bohn made in his initial paragraph:
Graphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: The Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK (among countless others) offer designers and design aficionados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.
Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people. Smashing Telly is David Galbraith’s rolling film festival (or TV channel). By simply listening to the music that you like, Last.fm allows anyone to put together their own radio station to share with others. kottke.org is essentially a table of contents for a magazine I wish existed. Shorpy has freed old photography from the nearly impenetrable Library of Congress web site and presented it in a compelling blog-like fashion.
In the case of FFFFOUND! and other RCOPIWSs, I would argue that these sites showcase a new form of art curating. The pace is faster, you don’t need a physical gallery or museum, and you don’t need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like “is this person an artist or an outsider artist?” If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes. The last week’s output at Monoscope would make a pretty good show in a Chelsea art gallery, no? It’ll be interesting to see how this grassroots art curating will affect the art/design/photography world at large. Jen Bekman, who has roots in the internet industry, is already exploring this new frontier with her nimble gallery and the Hey, Hot Shot! competition. Others are sure to follow.
Ursine is a new series of photos
Ursine is a new series of photos by Jill Greenberg, who previously did monkey portraiture and crying children, the latter of which provoked some controversy in the blogosphere.
I was going to shoot grizzly bears because they’re safer than bloggers.
A complete series of photos are available on Greenberg’s web site, sadly buried in an inscrutable Flash interface.
Errol Morris finale on the Roger Fenton photographs
Errol Morris has posted the third and final installment of his quest to find out which of two Roger Fenton photographs taken during the Crimean War came first. It is as excellent (and lengthy) as the first and second parts. Morris asks “How can the real world be recovered from the simulacrum?” and arrives at a compelling answer (which I won’t give away here) via sun-maps, shadow experts, The Wisconsin Death-Trip Effect, and ultimately, the Dust-Plunging-Straight-Down Test.
It is insane, but I would like to make the claim that the meaning of photography is contained in these two images. By thinking about the Fenton photographs we are essentially thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography — about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence — about the relationship between photographs and reality.
Morris’ posts make me a bit sad though. Yes, because the series is concluded but also for two other reasons:
1. Morris’ investigation sticks out like a sore thumb, especially compared to most popular media (newspapers, magazines, blogs, TV news). Why isn’t Morris’ level of skepticism and doggedness the norm rather than the delightful exception? Choosing the easy answer or the first answer that seems right enough is certainly compelling, especially under limited time constraints. Once acquired, that easy answer often becomes tied up with the ego of the person holding the belief…i.e. “this answer is correct because I think it’s right because I’m smart and not easily duped and it proves the point I’m trying to make and therefore this answer is correct”. Morris encountered dozens of easy and plausibly correct answers and rejected them all based on a lack of evidence, which allowed him to finally arrive at a correct answer supported by compelling physical evidence.
2. At the same time, lessons in photography and philosophy aside, what did we really learn? In the course of this investigation, Morris spent dozens of hours, wrote thousands of words, flew to Ukraine, enlisted the help of several experts, and probably spent thousands of dollars. Based on seemingly insignificant details, he was able to determine that one photograph was taken slightly before another photograph. If so much energy was put into the discovery of that one small fact, how are we actually supposed to learn anything truthful about larger and more significant events like the Iraq War or global warming. Presumably there’s more evidence to go on, but that’s not always helpful. Does this completely bum anyone else the fuck out?
Photograph of the graves of Vincent and
Photograph of the graves of Vincent and Theodore van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. (Don’t quite know why I’m posting this…it just struck me is all.)
Historical photo detection sounds like an interesting
Historical photo detection sounds like an interesting profession.
Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car’s headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.
See also last week’s post on forensic genealogy.
A photo series of people and their
A photo series of people and their breakfasts. I’ve often thought that a photo series of people and their favorite condiment would reveal much about contemporary American society.
Kevin Kelly has a rave review of
Kevin Kelly has a rave review of a slide/negative scanning company called Scan Cafe. Here’s how it works: send off your slides and negatives to Scan Cafe, they catalog and send them off to India to be scanned, you go online to choose the which negatives/slides you want final scans of, and in a few weeks, you get your originals and a DVD containing 3000 dpi scans of your photos. Kelly says:
Some people are very concerned about sending their precious originals to India — or anywhere for that matter. They should not be. ScanCafe has a very elaborate tracking and shipping system that would work even if you were shipping jewels. Their scanning facilities in Bangalore (description and photos here) are more organized than you are. I have more trust in this system than I would handing them over to any neighborhood scanner.
Photo by Joao Silva that made the
Photo by Joao Silva that made the front page of the NY Times yesterday.
An Iraqi boy peered Tuesday inside a car that was towed to a Baghdad police station after two women inside were killed.
As I was rushing late to an appointment yesterday, I saw this on the newsstand and had to stop for a long look. An arresting image.
A bunch of climbers took a portable
A bunch of climbers took a portable jacuzzi up to the top of Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps, and took a soak. The photos are crazy. (via stupid)
The forensic genealogy quiz offers a weekly
The forensic genealogy quiz offers a weekly test of sleuthing skills. The viewer is presented with a single photo and two questions to answer about that photo. This week’s quiz is a photo of a 32-cent stamp about child labor reform and the challenge is to name the girl pictured in the photo along with her photographer. Read more on forensic genealogy. (thx, derrick)
In hopes of solving a mystery about
In hopes of solving a mystery about two photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War (which I mentioned last week), Errol Morris travels to Crimea to track down the spot at which Fenton took the photos, aided by Olga, a guide who had once led the Duke of Edinburgh around the area.
Furthermore, what do the shadows on a cannonball, a Crimean cannonball, circa 1850, really look like — not in a Fenton photograph but sitting alone, unadorned in the Valley of the Shadow of Death 150 years later? Olga seemed amused. I am not a great believer in certainty, but I am pretty certain the Duke of Edinburgh never asked to go to the Panorama Museum to borrow a Crimean War cannonball.
NASA and researchers at Carnegie Mellon have
NASA and researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a robotic camera mount that enables ordinary digital cameras to take gigapixel panoramic images (like these).
The story behind an iconic photo
The story behind an iconic photo of Elizabeth Ekford, one of the Little Rock Nine on her way to the newly desegregated Central High School. Oddly, she became friends with the white girl in the photograph who yelled “Go home, n***er! Go back to Africa!” at her. Even stranger is the fact that Central High is *still* segregated, more or less:
Central High School looks as imposing as ever, but over the past 50 years, its innards have changed unimaginably: the school is now more than half black. It’s all misleading, of course, because Central is really two different schools, separate and unequal, under one roof. The blacks go to different classes, sit on separate sides of the cafeteria, have different, and far lower, levels of performance and expectations.
FFFFOUND!
For the past few months, I’ve been closely following the activities of FFFFOUND!, a social bookmarking web site and one of my favorite finds of the past year. The technology and presentation are fairly straightforward. Site participants select images to bookmark and the images show up on the site along with the related URL. Users can also bookmark images that other users have already bookmarked, which creates connections between images and users, allowing FFFFOUND!’s software to build recommendation lists (e.g. if you like this image, you may also like…). And then people like me who aren’t participants can just sit back and view people’s image streams. Mike Migurski wrote a nice introduction to the site and its capabilities back in July.
But the thing that makes the site work is that the current participants have really good taste in imagery. The project appears to have been started by Yugo Nakamura, who old school web folks may remember as one of the first true Flash artist wizards (see Mona Lisa matrix, MONO*crafts, and Industrious Clock, for example), and has expanded slowly while in beta; each participant gets only a single invite to pass along. The site’s slow expansion from Nakamura and a small group of his art/design pals & associates has kept the quality high and focused. I hope the quality can remain high as the site gains in popularity and weathers the eventual opening up of participation to the web at large.
PS. I know you’re probably just supposed to pronounce it like “found” but I’ve been favoring “fuh-fuh-fuh-found”, even though that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Update: I do not have any invitations for FFFFOUND! Sorry.
Which Photo Came First?
Errol Morris writes several hundred words about two iconic photos taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, during which he explores the interplay between “clear” evidence and the interpretation of that evidence by people with different agendas and ideas.
As I’ve said elsewhere: Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious - even to them. The use of the word “obvious” indicates the absence of a logical argument - an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of something by saying it a little louder.
This might be the best blog post I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to see Standard Operating Procedure, Morris’ upcoming documentary on Abu Ghraib and, from what it sounds like, the culmination of his exploration of truth in photography.
Bringing back the housecall
Dr. Jay Parkinson M.D. emailed in to tell me about his new medical practice in Williamsburg. He’s got no office (housecalls only), takes appointment requests via SMS, email, or IM, handles some follow-ups over video chat, and specializes in the 18-40 age group without traditional health insurance. The goal, states Parkinson, is to “mix the service of an old-time, small town doctor with the latest technology to keep you and your bank account healthy”.
To give you an idea of how the practice operates, here’s a recap of his first day on the job:
Yesterday went quite well and I was very happy with the amount of money I kept out of the hands of companies that attempt to take advantage of how difficult it is to find prices for medications and healthcare services. For example, the first patient I saw needed a medication that Walgreens offered for $60. I called my tried and true Williamsburg mom-and-pop pharmacy only a few blocks from Walgreens and talked to Arthur the Pharmacist who said he sells it for $15. “Thanks Arthur.” “No thank you Jay.” The way it should be done.
My second patient was getting a certain medication for years every month by mail from Walgreens that costs $63 per month. I knew where she could get the same medication for $42 a month. I just saved her $252 per year. After she made her $200 down payment on my services via PayPal, her monthly fee for my services is now only $17 a month. But I just saved her $21 a month on her monthly mail order medication. She’s essentially getting the rest of the year of my services for free. Not bad.
Sounds fantastic. If only every doctor was this much of an advocate for his patients.
P.S. Parkinson also happens to be a heck of a photographer (@ Flickr). Some photos NSFW. I linked to this interview about his photography between him and Joerg Colberg last May.
Update: The WSJ Health blog has a short interview with Parkinson, followed by a lengthy comment thread.
Monique Henegouwen is taking direction from her
Monique Henegouwen is taking direction from her blog audience as to how to retouch a photograph of herself. Here’s a video of some of the changes so far. (via clusterflock)
Weegee Photo Boothing Marilyn
Speaking of Weegee, I stumbled across some photos he made based on his well-known portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
He created the funhouse photos by manipulating negatives and distorting the light falling on the photographic paper from the enlarger. They remind me of images captured by OS X’s Photo Booth with the distortion filters on.
(Photo credits, L to R: Blueberry Pony, Spullara, Winstonavich, Thelastminute, Mysistersabarista)
Stay Connected