The 35th Anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 35 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, Alan Taylor collected some recent images from the Hubble, whose mission is still ongoing.
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.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
kottke.org posts about photography
Whose Streets? Our Streets! Photos of NYC Protests, 1980-2000.
Whose Streets? Our Streets! is an exhibition of photos of protests in NYC taken from 1980 to 2000 by dozens of photographers.
New York’s streets were turbulent in the 1980s and 1990s, as residents marched, demonstrated, and rioted in response to social changes in their city as well as national and international developments. The profoundly unequal economic recovery of the 1980s, dependent upon investment banking and high-end real estate development, led to heated contests over space and city services, as housing activists opposed gentrification and called attention to the plight of thousands of homeless New Yorkers. Immigration made New York City much more diverse, but a significant proportion of white New Yorkers opposed civil rights and acted to maintain racial segregation.
Attempts to combat the high crime rates of the 1970s and early 1980s exacerbated concerns about police brutality, as innocent black and Latino New Yorkers died at the hands of the police. The culture wars wracking the nation had particular resonance in New York, a center of avant-garde art as well as of gay and lesbian and feminist activism, on the one hand, and home of the Vatican’s spokesman in the U.S., Cardinal John O’Connor, and a significant culturally conservative Roman Catholic population on the other.
The photos are grouped by subject: race relations, police brutality, war & environment, AIDS, queer activism, abortion rights, housing, education & labor, and culture wars. (via the morning news)
Swamped Skies
Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies:
The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX alone intending to launch over 40,000 satellites in total. The space industry is almost entirely unregulated, with no limits on the amount of satellites that anyone is able to launch and there is currently no regulation in place to minimise the light pollution they cause.
Photos of the Hands Off! Protests
On Saturday, millions of Americans flooded the streets of cities, small towns, and every other sized municipality in the nation to protest the illegal and damaging actions of the Trump regime. These photos published by a number of media outlets show the scale, enthusiasm, and creativity of these peaceful protests, in the US and around the world.
- Photos: Nationwide Protests Against Trump and Musk (The Atlantic).
- Anti-Trump protests hit cities worldwide — in pictures (The Guardian).
- Photos: See demonstrators around the country rally in ‘Hands Off!’ protests (NPR).
- Scenes and Signs From Saturday’s Mass Anti-Trump Protests (New York msagazine).
- In photos: “Hands Off!” protesters rally against Trump across the U.S. (Axios).
- PHOTO COLLECTION: Trump Hands Off Protests (AP).
- A pair of threads on Bluesky from @jbendery.bsky.social and @kremlplots.bsky.social.
- Anti-Trump protesters gather in Washington, other US cities (Reuters).
Comets Are Cool
From astronomer Yuri Beletsky, a photo of Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) arching over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Unfortunately, it seems like the comet disintegrated as it swooped around the Sun, always a danger.
The nucleus of Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) held together during a brutal perihelion but not for long. Lionel Majzik of Hungary was the first to report and record dramatic changes in the comet between January 18th and 19th. The bright, strongly condensed head rapidly became more diffuse, a sure sign that its nucleus was disintegrating based on past observations of crumbling comets. His superb sequence, photographed remotely from Chile, clearly reveal the dramatic transformation, which was later confirmed by Australian observers.
The tail will be visible for a few days after the breakup — such comets are called “headless wonders” by astronomers. (via @philplait.bsky.social)
Aerial Foodscapes
For his book Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food (Bookshop), George Steinmetz travelled the world with his drone, spending “a decade documenting food production in more than 36 countries on 6 continents, 24 US states, and 5 oceans”.
In striking aerial images, he captures the massive scale of 21st-century agriculture that has sculpted 40 percent of the Earth’s surface.
He explores the farming of staples like wheat and rice, the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, fishing and aquaculture, and meat production. He surveys traditional farming in diverse cultures, and he penetrates vast agribusinesses that fuel international trade. From Kansas wheat fields to a shrimp cocktail’s origins in India to cattle stations in Australia larger than some countries, Steinmetz tracks the foods we eat back to land and sea, field and factory. He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them.
You can read more (and watch a video) about the project and view a bunch of photos from the book.
In Training: A Book of Bonsai Photos
I was reminded recently of Stephen Voss’s lovely book, In Training: a book of bonsai photos (Amazon). Voss has a number of bonsai photo prints for sale as well as some videos of bonsai on his blog. This one is of a tree called Goshin, which has been in training since 1953:
The Search for the Mystery Man Who Took These Forbidden Photos of Nazi-Occupied Paris
In 2020, Stéphanie Colaux discovered an album of photos of Nazi-occupied Paris at a French flea market.
“As I flipped through the pages I realized, my God, it’s all scenes of [Nazi] occupied Paris. And I knew I’d found a treasure,” she says. “And then I read the little note in the front. ‘If you find this album,’ it said, ‘take care of it and have the courage to look at it.’ I thought, someone sent a message in a bottle and I just found it.”
The discovery set off a hunt for the unknown photographer, who took the photos at the risk of their own life — the unauthorized taking of such photos was “punishable by imprisonment or death”. The story of the search is very much worth reading.
Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos, written in block letters as if someone were trying to mask their handwriting. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was also often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, whom the photographer referred to, pejoratively, as “Fritzes.”
One read: “After 10 months of Occupation, the Fritzes still can’t find their way around Paris.”
“The words are very sarcastic,” Broussard says. “There is a kind of irony. For example, he says ‘our protectors.’”
Gobsmacking Image of a Stellar Nursery
Wow, check out this just-released image from the JWST team of star cluster NGC 602.
The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.
It is very worth your time to click through and look at this image in all of its massive celestial glory. I found this image via Phil Plait, who calls it “one of the most jaw-droppingly mind stomping images I’ve seen from JWST” and, directing us back to the science (remember the science?!), notes that NGC 602 is actively forming stars (it’s only about 5 million years old) and that it depicts “the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way”. Cool!
Stuffies & Lovies That Have Been Loved Too Much
Too Much Love is a project from Katja Kemnitz in which she photographs the beloved dolls & stuffed animals of young children alongside brand-new versions of the same toys. Anyone who is a parent or caregiver can relate to the destruction on display here, as well as the difficulty of replacing these items.
I show old, much-loved teddies and dolls and compare them with as good as new doppelgangers. I think the broken stuffed animals have a lot of soul. The project is inspired by my older daughter, who took her plush dog everywhere when she was little. One day I found this dog again without button eye and torn seams in the store and bought it. She did not like him. The old one was better and could not be replaced.
Artfully Arranged Junkyard Objects
In a continuation and tweak of his Coletivos project (which I posted about previously), Cássio Vasconcellos took aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects into dense photographic collages.
OVER presents a scenario that seems to point to a dystopian future, but which, in fact, brings together fragments of the present. The exaggerated agglomeration denounces the misleading idea of “disposal”, given that objects do not cease to exist in the world when we throw them away. Rather, they inhabit other places.
This video shows the artist’s process, from hanging out the side of a helicopter to arranging all the items in Photoshop.
The Best Panoramic Photos of 2024
The results of the 15th annual Epson International Pano Awards have been announced — you can check out all the winners & runners-up on the competition website. Here are a few of my favorites:
From top to bottom, the photos are by Tuan Nguyen Tan, Kelvin Yuen, Elliot McGucken, and Ignacio Palacios. (via in focus)
Finalists for the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
The finalists of the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition have been announced, so if you need a laugh, here you go.
There are so many “tag yourself” moments in these photos. You can check out all of the finalists here and vote for the People’s Choice Award until Oct 31.
Infinite Cosmos: Visions From the JW Space Telescope
Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.
Siegel wrote a piece about the book for Big Think, which includes an excerpt. Gravitational lensing is so cool:
Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.
Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.
Infinite Cosmos is available for purchase at Amazon and Bookshop.
Kodak and the Invention of Popular Photography
In 1888, the Eastman Kodak Company rolled out a new camera and a new slogan. “You press the button, we do the rest.” To say this moment revolutionized photography would be an understatement. But this story isn’t just about Kodak. It’s about what happens when a powerful technology, originally only understood by a select few, can suddenly fit in your hand.
And then, fast-forwarding to the 90s and 00s, Kodak gradually, then suddenly, missed a similar shift that further democratized photography: the move to digital.
Socials & More