The argument over whether photography should be considered an art form seems laughable to us today. Yet, beginning in the 1880s and lasting into the 20th century, members of amateur photographic clubs and societies the world over deemed the topic of artistic photography worthy of a decades-long shouting match.
PhotoSeed, representing an evolving online record of this early fine-art photography movement, is a
rich collection of photographs representing numerous vintage processes. From delicate platinum to exquisite hand-pulled photogravures, images produced singularly or published in portfolios and journals, as well as vintage source material, investigate the roots of the online galleries with the
PhotoSeed Highlights.
posted by netbros
on Oct 25, 2012 -
26 comments
Old Ships is a website packed full of evocative, interesting and historical pictures of old ships
from A to
Zambesi. It's a feast of
all kinds of other vintage maritime images, including
ports, docks,
ferries, harbors,
paintings, canals,
rivers, maritime scenes,
onboard pictures,
shipboard menus, lots of
great postcards and other
old historical nautical memorabilia (even
the ship's cat).
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Aug 24, 2012 -
13 comments
Driving through Time features roughly 2700 photographs and 76 interactive maps of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The website allows students, researchers, and digital tourists to uncover hidden stories, hear forgotten voices, and understand the often wrenching choices that the construction and preservation of a scenic parkway in a populated region have necessarily entailed.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Jan 22, 2012 -
4 comments
The Burns Archive is a collection of over 700,000 historical photographs that document
disturbing subject matter: obsolete medical practices and experiments, death, disease, disasters, crime, revolutions, riots and war. Newsweek posted a
select gallery this past October, as well as a
video interview and walk-through with curator and collector Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a New York opthalmologist.
(Via) (Content at links may be disturbing to some.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 26, 2011 -
15 comments
Of Another Fashion:
An alternative archive of the not-quite-hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of U.S. women of color.
posted by lalex
on Mar 4, 2011 -
11 comments
In 1937, the London News Chronicle published a photograph of five boys at the gates of Lord's cricket ground; two stood aloof in top hats and tails, with their backs to a group of three working-class lads. The resulting photograph became famous as a metaphor for the class divide in Britain, appearing in newspaper stories about school reform, inequality and bourgeois guilt and on the
covers of books. The photograph appeared in the Getty Images archive as "
Toffs and Toughs", and even was printed on a jigsaw puzzle in 2004. The identities of the three working-class boys were unknown until a journalist tracked them down in 1998;
here is an article on the history of the photograph and the lives of the five boys in it.
posted by acb
on Mar 23, 2010 -
36 comments
Glasgow's
Mitchell Library, designed by
William B. Whitie, is the largest reference library in Western Europe. Over the past decade, it has been digitising its collection of photographs, which has resulted in the
Virtual Mitchell, an unrivalled collection of photographs of Glasgow which covers the last 150-odd years of the city's history.
The photographs can be searched by
area,
street or
subject, all of which provide a fascinating insight into life in Glasgow over the past century and a half.
Some examples:
Charing Cross, 1950s;
1975;
The Mitchell Library, 1910;
Meadowside Shipyard, circa 1930;
New Astoria Cinema, Possilpark;
Royal Exchange Square, 1868;
Alexander "Greek" Thompson's church on Caledonia Road;
East End children in class in 1916
posted by Len
on Feb 3, 2010 -
14 comments
Peace and War in the 20th Century is an ambitious, in progress, massive assemblage of posters, photographs, propaganda, ephemera, letters, diaries, paintings, sketches, stories, letters, music and related items, from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The collection is international in scope. Some of the nodes lack content, and the navigation is a little confusing, so the jump I list some of my favourite case studies from their site.
[more inside]
posted by Rumple
on Jan 2, 2009 -
4 comments
"
I remember having rootbeer floats on the porch swing on hot summer nights... I remember playing with my cousins and the neighbors in the side yard. I remember running to the train tracks just a few blocks away and counting the train cars (sometimes over 100!) as they streamed by. I remember 'Uncle' Bill showing me his missing finger that he lost while working the trains... This is someone else’s house now but my memories still live there." From
Disappearing Places: An archive and collective map of places that no longer exist, at least not as they once did.
[more inside]
posted by katillathehun
on Dec 10, 2008 -
23 comments
The Secret Museum of Mankind ::
"Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index ... The tone of the commentary is dated, and uniformly racist in the extreme, often hilariously so. It reads like the patter of a carnival sideshow barker, from a time when the world was divided between "modern" Europeans and "savages" ... Presented here is the Secret Museum in its entirety, all 564 pages scanned and transcribed-- nothing is omitted or censored ... Treat it as entertainment instead of education (don't take it seriously and don't believe a word it says!), adjust for the blatant racial bias of the time, and enjoy."
posted by anastasiav
on Feb 14, 2008 -
67 comments
The Third View project is a fascinating presentation of "rephotographs" of over 100 historic landscape sites in the American West that presents original 19th-century survey photographs, photographed again in the 1970s, then once again in the '90s - from the original vantage points, under similar lighting conditions, at (roughly) the same time of day and year.
[Flash, and you'll probably need to allow pop-ups; a little more info inside...]
posted by taz
on Jun 15, 2007 -
13 comments
A nice
set of photographic glass-plate transparencies depicting life in Japan ca. 1910. These "Yokohama photographs" were sold to foreign tourists between about 1868 and 1912. I found the
Crafts and Trades section most interesting.
posted by Rumple
on Jun 7, 2007 -
18 comments
More than 16,000 photos related to the USGS from the years 1868 through 1992 are now available online where they may be easily searched, viewed, and downloaded free of charge.
These are old stereo pairs, sites drowned by dams, geologists and surveyers in horse drawn wagons, petroglyphs, national parks, Mount St. Helens, John Wesley
Powell, hoodoos, arches, ruins, mines...
posted by the Real Dan
on Apr 14, 2005 -
16 comments
OK, Seattleites, see the American flag
here ? On the sidewalk below is where your 3rd & Pine McDonalds now sits. Man, I can see five buildings here that are still standing, but that red brick one at the lower right got replaced
early. Now here's the
Northern Life Tower. Note how the bricks lighten towards the top, so as to make it look taller from below--very subtle, that. It's one of Seattle's two Art Deco buildings, the other being the
Exchange Building. You can cut through that one, coming off the ferry at First Avenue and take the elevator to walk out on Second Ave rather than climb that steep hill, you know.
And consider on what
playground equipment our grandparents got to play. Lucky stiffs--you can't even find a decent 50s era swing set in a park in this town anymore.
Penny Postcards From King County, from
Penny Postcards of Washington, from
Penny Postcards. Man, I loves me some vintage postcards. And if you do, too, check that last link--it's got all 50 states.
posted by y2karl
on Dec 19, 2004 -
17 comments
I saw a feature on ESPN last night about
Britt Gaston and Cliff Courtney, two Georgia teenagers who are indelibly linked to history as the kids who
ran alongside Hank Aaron after the famous 715th home run. Then I googled around a bit and discovered
Jim Leavelle, the former Dallas cop who will forever be known as
the guy in the hat watching Ruby take care of Oswald in the precinct basement. And then there's
Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway who was photographed wailing over a dead body at Kent State in 1970. And, of course, there's
Afghanistan Girl. Can anyone think of other bystanders to historical events whose faces we all know but identities remain anonymous? Is there anyone who has not yet been rediscovered?
posted by PrinceValium
on Apr 7, 2004 -
25 comments
Vanished America If you've ever wondered what to do with all of your old vacation photos and slides, wonder no more. A fellow named Charles Cushman bequeathed his collection of over 14,000 slides and photos taken over a period of three decades, from 1938 to 1969, to Indiana Univiersity. IU has decided to create
an amazing digital archive of his photos as a history project.
The photos are nothing special in themselves. He took countless pictures of things he and his wife saw as they took driving tours across the United States, mostly near their home in Chicago and in the West. They are no different than and no better than anybody else's amateur photos. But, as the director of the project points out, without realizing it, Cushman captured an America already beginning to disappear in the middle of the 20th century, and did so by documenting its disappearance unwittingly over a thirty-year period. I lightly perused the
slide show of 120 images and the photos are indeed both banal and compelling all at the same time. A very nicely done site with a lot of rich material.
(via
The Cartoonist)
posted by briank
on Nov 12, 2003 -
45 comments
Staffordshire Past Track. History and images of an English Midlands county :
old photographs and
online
exhibitions on
historic churches,
celebrations,
birth,
death,
serial killers and
mining (and
the 1984-85 strike).
Related sites :-
the
Museums of the Potteries, the area around Stoke-on-Trent which played a major role in the Industrial Revolution;
thepotteries.org, including
postcards and
photographs;
In
Search of Agenoria, black and white photographs of the post-industrial Black Country landscape;
A Miner's Son- more mining history in the Midlands (with more on the 1984-85 strike, possibly the most divisive political event in recent British history);
save Bethesda Chapel, a historic Methodist chapel in Stoke; panoramic views and history of
Lichfield Cathedral and
other
Staffordshire places.
posted by plep
on Aug 25, 2003 -
4 comments
Borscht Belt Memories When I was a kid my family would all pack up and go to the Pines Hotel. Located in South Fallsburg NY, it was classic Borscht Belt even when we visited it in the 70's, with
Morris Katz painting using his trademark toilet paper to manically dab the trees with color, racing to staple the frame and sell the painting to somebody to that quasi-celebrity fellow who was known for the Simon Says games in the lobby.
The hotel has been
abandoned I have found out and a pang went through my heart -- surely I will have to take my gal Jenn up to visit the ruins. The photos at the site are interesting and the descriptions are too. I was hoping to go back there and rediscover the place but who knew it would be this way.
posted by RubberHen
on Aug 19, 2003 -
21 comments
Wow. The little Afghani girl whose eyes captivated a nation back in 1985 (when her portrait graced the cover of a National Geographic magazine) has been located (alive!).
posted by silusGROK
on Mar 12, 2002 -
38 comments
The Polaroid photographic archive is under threat The archivists are trying to sell the collection together, but as always seems to happen in these cases, it looks like it might be separated. If buildings can be listed, why can't collections like this, which documents six decades of social and artistic history, be protected as well?
posted by feelinglistless
on Jan 4, 2002 -
7 comments
Early (around 1910) amazing COLOR photographs from Russia by Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for the Czar. He essentially had three cameras, each with a separate Red, Green, or Blue filter, and snapped the same shot at the same time. So all the "reds" were recorded, in B&W, on one photographic plate, and likewise down the line. Then he could use the filters to recreate the scene and project it onto a screen in color. (more inside) (props to slashdot for the link)
posted by jwells
on May 7, 2001 -
58 comments
