Musarium: discovering signs of intelligent life on planet earth

August 8, 2004 3:00 AM

I've been having a great time exploring the maze that is Musarium, wandering about and peeking into into various nooks and crannies to find such exotica as the wonderfully bizarre birdhand book, and absorbing cultural artifacts and musings, including the poetic Visions and Icons (I really love the way the text works with the images on this), the atmospheric Familiar Ghosts (the texts will cue you on clicking through this somewhat dream-like landscape), the time-capsule imagery of Balkan Portraits (1906-1910), the breathtaking portraits of photographer Steve McCurry (famous for his National Geographic portait of the Afghani girl), the subterranean monologue of Grand Central: the View Down Under, and the shocking and heartbreaking Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. There's a lot more, so take your time. You can use this page to access archived material.
posted by taz (13 comments total)

...the preview button
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:25 AM on August 8, 2004

Gorgeous lovely links. What a resource.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:27 AM on August 8, 2004

hmm. I thought I had fixed that last link. Let's try it again.
posted by taz at 4:15 AM on August 8, 2004

wow
posted by kozad at 6:26 AM on August 8, 2004

Be sure to check out the Rio work by Claudio Edinger. Absolutely stunning.
posted by photoslob at 6:29 AM on August 8, 2004

Vietnam Inc. by Philip Jones Griffiths is amazing and leads to interviews including stuff about Magnum and it's internal politics.
posted by arse_hat at 7:14 AM on August 8, 2004

photoslob How did you get into the Rio pics? Everytime I try one of the view Images links I get a database error.
posted by arse_hat at 7:17 AM on August 8, 2004

Great surfing site indeed, taz...I like some of the the pop culture stories on the site too...like the report of Harley week in Daytona and photos from a tattoo convention in Rutherford, NJ.

Here's an index page that describes some of the past featured stories.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:49 AM on August 8, 2004

This is really wonderful stuff; thanks taz! I particularly liked the Bird Hand series, both for the photography, and for figuring out which bird is which. Once I moved to AZ, where no one knows the name of the birds -- at least, no one I know-- I learned that one of the local birds was a grackle, but never learned which bird. Grackle quickly became my code-word for anything unfamiliar. And know I know which one a grackle is. Which destroys that tiny in-joke, but in the coolest possible way...

Oh, and speaking of Arizona, the Border States sequence is also pretty good.
posted by .kobayashi. at 8:47 AM on August 8, 2004

Aww. Nice grackle.

If you like Schrager, there's more of his "handiwork" here, in his Botany series, and here's his current exhibit. Booky.
posted by taz at 10:13 AM on August 8, 2004

Excellent site - best of the web, even. Thanks.
posted by kavasa at 10:22 AM on August 8, 2004

Lovely find as always, taz! Thanks.
posted by scody at 11:38 AM on August 8, 2004

The Balkan Portraits really knocked my socks off. Gorgeous, taz, thanks.
posted by Ljubljana at 2:55 PM on August 8, 2004