All-Art.org provides an extensive image library, essays and information on art history, organized by date and movement, up to the 20th century, including photography, design and classical music with audio samples. A small selection of the encyclopedic range offered: Erotica in Art l Paintings that changed the world l The Origins of Typography and Graphic design l Russian Silver Age l Japanese Prints l African l Posters l A Brief History of Western Literature l An illustrated dictionary of art and artists.
posted on Oct 4, 2008 - View this thread

Vintage 3-D stereoviews of old Japan, Meiji and Taisho era swimsuit girls, working people, geisha, and kids, old Japan salt prints, dozens of T. Enami glass slides, and strange or offbeat images: all part of a vast and superb collection of Japanese photos from 1862 to 1930 by flickr user Okinawa Soba.
posted on Sep 9, 2008 - View this thread

Forty years ago, Swinging London was yet to swing. Everything was in black and white and, in class-bound Britain, fashion photographers were trades-men – polite, smart, seen but not heard. A new breed of snappers changed all that – Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy, David Bailey and Terence Donovan. Bailey and Donovan started their careers in the West End studio of the doyen of fashion photographers – John French.
posted on Sep 1, 2008 - View this thread

Photo Tampering Through History. A regularly-updated collection, from 1860 to present, of examples of photo manipulation. Sometimes the changes are made for historical revisionism, sometimes for political maneuvering, and sometimes it's just a "wtf?" The page is part of a larger body of work by Dartmouth's Hany Farid, who has some other interesting goodies online. [Warning for the Pepsi Blue detectives: In some of his pages, he's shilling for his consulting services]
posted on Aug 30, 2008 - View this thread

10 Incredible Ancient Oases.
posted on Aug 24, 2008 - View this thread

Reaching: Joshua Heineman animates old photos from the NY Public Library collections.
posted on Jul 22, 2008 - View this thread

Burton Holmes, Extraordinary Traveler. Burton Holmes didn't invent travel stories, slide shows, moving pictures or cross-country lectures, but he put them all together and created the travelogue (a term coined by his manager) as performance art. The site is full of information, pictures and additional links (including companion pages about the Trans-Siberian Railroad) chronicling Holmes' life and legacy.
posted on Jul 21, 2008 - View this thread

Prvi svetski rat - Gritty and poignant Serbian postcards from the First World War. Just one of the seriously interesting (e.g. check out the collection of 78s) holdings at the Digital National Library of Serbia.
posted on Jul 20, 2008 - View this thread

Paris under the Occupation, in color.
posted on Jul 12, 2008 - View this thread

The Sidney D Gamble Photograph Collection at Duke University consists of about 5,000 newly digitised pictures, taken predominantly in China between 1917 and 1932. Browse by subject, category or location tags. Photos taken in 1908 are to be added in the future. [via]
posted on Jul 9, 2008 - View this thread

State of decay :"Over the years, Boston artist Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered objects, like termite-eaten books and fish skeletons."
posted on May 28, 2008 - View this thread

The Heritage of the Great War
posted on May 8, 2008 - View this thread

An Illustrated History of Digital Cameras until 1998.
posted on Apr 25, 2008 - View this thread

Soviet Museum has some great retro photography, industrial, postcards, propaganda, "Soviet Union" magazine, aspects of moscow, red army, etc [did I mention erotic too?]. It even has 'Vladimir Putin Favourite Places' (which as far as I can tell, is one place). Set aside some time if this sort of thing interests you.
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread

The evolution of Mars imaging from orbit: Mariner 4 (1964), Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 (both 1969), Mariner 9 (1971) (all NASA), Mars 5 (1973) (USSR), Viking 1 (1975), Viking 2 (1976), Mars Global Surveyor (1996), Mars Odyssey (2001) (NASA), Mars Express (2003) (ESA), up to this spy-quality shot of an active avalanche taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2005).
posted on Mar 5, 2008 - View this thread

Canal Zone Images is a collection of stories and images about the Panama Canal Zone. Did you know that the construction workers were paid in gold and silver ('spiggoty' dollars)? "Paper money was not used on the pay car at all. In the first place, there was always a danger of its blowing away, and in the second place paper money in the hands of negro workmen soon assumed a most unsanitary condition."
posted on Feb 25, 2008 - View this thread

The Power of Photography (might or might not be NSFW) with accompanying articles: Stricken Child crawling towards a Food Camp [1994] | The Falling Man [2001] | The Youngest Mother [1939] | Born Twice [1999] (via)
posted on Feb 15, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Feb 14, 2008 - View this thread

The Mexican Suitcase
posted on Jan 27, 2008 - View this thread

Sacred Destinations. Nearly every culture in human history has sought to encounter and honor the divine, the mysterious, the supernatural or the extraordinary in some way. This most often occurs at sacred sites - special places where the physical world seems to meet the spiritual world. From ancient wonders, to Greek temples, to Biblical sites, and everything in between, the website has a vast collection of photo galleries and maps. The website's founder also maintains a travel blog and posts recent pictures on Flickr.
posted on Jan 17, 2008 - View this thread

In the early twentieth century, photographer Lewis Hine took now-famous photographs of American child laborers. In the nearly hundred years since Hine took those photos, surely many viewers have wondered what became of the children he documented. Freelance historian Joe Manning has taken it upon himself to find out.
posted on Jan 16, 2008 - View this thread

Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990
posted on Jan 13, 2008 - View this thread

India's Ancient Art. "Fifth-century painters created stunning murals in dim man-made caves. A gifted photographer brings them to light."
posted on Dec 25, 2007 - View this thread

Excellent post over at BLDBLOG on the history of Bannerman's Arsenal, a ruined island castle in the middle of the Hudson river, created by a war profiteer who was at one time the world's largest arms dealer. Bonus points for the amazing accompanying photos by Shaun O'Boyle, whose site Modern Ruins has been featured on the blue previously.
posted on Nov 17, 2007 - View this thread

This series of photographs, Iconic Moments of the 20th Century, was enacted by pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow. Aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in the vicinity of their Home to re-create scenes from well-known historic photographs
posted on Oct 27, 2007 - View this thread

Cartes de Visite
posted on Oct 5, 2007 - View this thread

A Life With Jazz is a collection of the wonderful photographs of Herman Leonard, focusing on the iconic figures of 20th century jazz music.
posted on Aug 30, 2007 - View this thread

52 Influential Photographs: From the oldest survivng photograph, to images of revolution, misery, beauty and humility, to...goatse and LOLCAT? You win some, you lose some, I guess.
posted on Aug 4, 2007 - View this thread

Public Domain Photos [via mefi projects]. An extraordinarily rich resource for free stock photography.
posted on Jun 22, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Jun 15, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Jun 7, 2007 - View this thread

Russia in photos: 1941-1945.
posted on May 11, 2007 - View this thread

Powerful photo ads for the Cape Times.
posted on Apr 22, 2007 - View this thread

“When a few of the space pioneers sat down to sketch out how a practical space camera should look one of them had suddenly exclaimed: ‘That's starting to look like my Hasselblad’." NASA originally didn’t think much of space photography until Walter Schirra brought his Hasselblad 500C along on his Sigma 7 Mercury flight. Impressed by the results, NASA responded by commissioning the Hasselblad Data Camera, a stripped-down HasselBlad 500EL that accompanied all Apollo missions to the moon. In the hands of moonwalking astronauts, the Data Camera’s custom medium format film and Zeiss Biogon 5.6/60mm lens captured images of remarkable clarity, color, and sometimes composition. What's your favorite? [warning: frameset - try the "Full Hasselblad Magazines" link].
posted on Mar 30, 2007 - View this thread

The destruction of the Paris Commune. African-American photo postcards. War models. Luminous Lint offers pages and pages of exhibits of vintage and modern photography and all sorts of related stuff. [via the excellent Bouphonia]
posted on Mar 20, 2007 - View this thread

Contact Press Images - 30 Years of Excellence - Digital Journalist highlights three decades of photojournalism from this premier independent agency dedicated to producing "in-depth photographic essays of pressing global concern." [more]
posted on Feb 10, 2007 - View this thread

Photos from Hiroshima in August of 1945. Long supressed by the occupying U.S. forces, a highly unsettling (and decidedly NSFW) collection of photos from the days immediately after August 6th. Via.
posted on Feb 6, 2007 - View this thread

Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music Photgrapher Henry Horenstein's Honky-Tonk: Portraits of Country Music, 1972-1981 captures a sound in transition. This evocative collection of informal, black-and-white portraits of country musicians and fans in bars, backstage, and on the road illustrate a decade when smoky roadhouses and venerated venues began to give way to the more mainstream Countrypolitan or "Nashville" sound. Seminal artists like Mother Maybelle Carter and Bill Monroe mingled backstage with shinier newcomers like Dolly Parton and Anne Murray. But even as the commercial sound was dominating, youngsters mixing with old-timers sparked the first wave of old-time/bluegrass revival, and some of the artists who got started then still carry the torch for a non-Nashville sound today. In this online exhibit you can watch it all unfold.
posted on Feb 2, 2007 - View this thread

Photography of the unexpected and neglected architecture. Romain Meffre and Yves Marchand travel the world photographing "singular and surprising buildings of all domains," mostly 19th and 20th century urban and industrial architecture. Don't miss the photos of Detroit (under Projects), or more of Marchand's stunning work at his personal site.
posted on Jan 15, 2007 - View this thread

Photos of Paris during the 1910 flood. More. Yet more.
posted on Jan 5, 2007 - View this thread

The Art of the Photogravure celebrates the process and the history of the all-but-forgotten art of the hand-pulled photogravure. In addition to the extensive collection of works from early masters to contemporary practitioners, check out the site's affiliated blog and some rich ambrotypes by site founder Mark Katzman. (via Gordon Coale)
posted on Dec 7, 2006 - View this thread

Kodachrome color photographs of American life, dating from the 1930s, 40s, & 50s. Selections via DailyKos.
posted on Dec 7, 2006 - View this thread

Images of Atlantic City Boardwalk from R.C. Maxwell. Photographs taken to give client's an idea of the traffic that would see their billboards, provide a record of the people who have thronged to the boardwalk since the early 1900's.
posted on Sep 13, 2006 - View this thread

Framing Canada is an online exhibit of early Canadian photography. Some images are quintessentially Canadian; others range from the sublime to the ridiculous. One picture just might settle a contentious debate once and for all. Most of the collection is organized into topical photo essays. [More inside]
posted on Aug 9, 2006 - View this thread

The Lafayette studio has one of the oldest histories of any photographic business in the world. It was founded in Dublin in 1880. The photographs can be viewed at the Victoria & Albert Museum but this site really shows them off in much more detail.
posted on Apr 19, 2006 - View this thread

Sechtl-Vosecek. A collection of photographs taken over the last 150 years are in the process of being digitized. Check out the Sokol costume ball Šibřinky or take a trip from Bechyně to Tábor. Also available is a selection concentrating on Bukhara from the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection. And much, much, more.
posted on Apr 17, 2006 - View this thread

Old photos of Shanghai from Virtual Shanghai is one of the best collections of old Shanghai photos (over 2000) I've found on the web, and it has a nice map collection too. Tales of Old Shanghai has a lot of great stuff, especially primary texts. Sinomania has a pretty eclectic collection of photos. Some of my favorites so far.
posted on Apr 3, 2006 - View this thread

The Narrow Gauge Circle hosts, among other fine features, the Ted Kierscey Collection -- page after page after page of historical photographs of Colorado's railroad and mining towns.
posted on Mar 23, 2006 - View this thread

He has cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW] and covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but Jürgen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank". Teller's first solo show in Paris is entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of a sequence of images (annoying Flash site, sorry) taken at the infamous Zeppelintribune parade ground, site of Nazi propaganda rallies, which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over several months, Teller (.pdf) has photographed the monument, the podium and the steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not. "It wasn't really maintained, but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be mysteriously replaced with a new one." Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers and lichen [NSFW] that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany, there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that events will eventually be forgotten".
posted on Mar 22, 2006 - View this thread

Rephotographing Atget: Eugene Atget photographed Paris from 1888 until his death in 1927. Christopher Rauschenberg retraced Atget's steps in 1997 and 1998, photographing the same scenes, and documents his project in a gallery at Lens Culture. The gallery includes an audio discussion of the project. [more inside]
posted on Feb 24, 2006 - View this thread

Twilight for Black Farms. An interesting topic at NPR. Photos. Audio. Essay.
posted on Feb 24, 2006 - View this thread

The Memory of The Netherlands is an extensive digital collection of illustrations, photographs, texts, film and audio fragments from a large variety of Dutch cultural institutions. There are about 50 collections (in english).
posted on Feb 19, 2006 - View this thread

Creative Americans: The Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress consists of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964. The bulk of the collection consists of portrait photographs of celebrities, including many figures from the Harlem Renaissance. Portraits include those of Tallulah Bankhead, Salvador Dali, Truman Capote, Dizzy Gillespie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eartha Kitt, and Joe Louis. They are all available in medium or high resolution JPEG’s or uncompressed archival TIFF versions.
posted on Feb 17, 2006 - View this thread

A photographic tour of the Holy Land 1831-1910
posted on Feb 4, 2006 - View this thread

Here are some pictures of ruined cities and a few sanctuaries. (3rd link is to geocities)
posted on Jan 21, 2006 - View this thread

The past can be a fascinating place. An Anthropologist by training and finder of interesting things by avocation, Hugh Blackmer, began rescuing old photos from antique shops on Nova Scotia (the former Acadia) several decades ago. He's now posting them on-line for his Nova Scotia Faces project. He's using Flickr and experimenting with a wiki. He's finding some wonderful old moments.
posted on Jan 12, 2006 - View this thread

PictureAustralia lets you search across the image collections of a bunch of (mostly Australian, but a few international) cultural agencies. It's been running in various forms since 1998 and has just started accepting contributions through the Flickr groups PictureAustralia: Australia Day and PictureAustralia: People, Places and Events. [via Stuff v.3]
posted on Jan 6, 2006 - View this thread

World Art Treasures :What is essential in my approach consists of not "letting the others profit," as is too often thought, but to PROFIT ALONG WITH OTHERS from the dual experience of my studies and travel, sharing the emotions of my discoveries and encounters, to maintain faith in this miracle that is life. J-E Berger .
posted on Dec 21, 2005 - View this thread

The first known motion picture (Quicktime movie, somewhat slow to download) was produced by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince at Roundhay House, Leeds, UK some time before October of 1888. Its date can be verified, as the elderly lady in the film, Mrs. Sarah Whitley, died in that month. The two-second-long film was shot on paper or celluloid photographic film through a custom-made camera. Although the original paper film appears to have been lost, two photographic copies of the film dating from the 1930s remain in existence. Le Prince's second film, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, was shot shortly afterwards.

Le Prince is generally not well-known outside the film historical community, partly because he did not publicize his works, but also because he disappeared in 1890 during a journey to Paris, France. It's thought that Le Prince committed suicide over money worries, but his body was never found.
posted on Dec 3, 2005 - View this thread

Red Color News Soldier: "The project to bring Li Zhensheng’s photographs of the [Chinese] Cultural Revolution to the wider world was first conceived fifteen years ago in Beijing. It was there, at the Chinese Press Association's photography competition in March 1988, that Li first publicly exhibited twenty images from his "negative" negatives – that is, those which had been deemed counterrevolutionary under the political dictates of Chairman Mao Zedong."
posted on Nov 1, 2005 - View this thread

PictureHistory - a source of American historical photographs
posted on Oct 5, 2005 - View this thread

Selling the American Indian: The controversial work of Edward S. Curtis
posted on Sep 20, 2005 - View this thread

The Peleliu Project. The tiny Micronesian island of Peleliu was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. The U.S. invasion of the Japanese occupied island began in September of 1944, and was expected to last only a matter of days. Casualties on this 5 square mile island reached 20,000 by the end of the two-month struggle. U.S. soldiers were forced to pour aviation fuel into caves and ignite them in order to end the standoff of those who refused to surrender. One determined group of 34 Japanese soldiers remained in hiding until they were discovered in April of 1947.
Pharmacist Mate 3rd Class Russell Fee returned from Peleliu with a fierce, uncompromising vision of America which would have a profound impact on the life and work of his son. Fifty-three years later, armed with his father's snapshots and diary which he had just uncovered, James Fee went to Peleliu to see with his own eyes the place where his father's vision had taken shape. The result of his five year quest is The Peleliu Project. more inside
posted on Aug 21, 2005 - View this thread

An Image Bank For Everyday Revolutionary Life - The Siqueiros Photographic Archive is a collection of photographic images collected by Mexican mural artist David Áfaro Siqueiros..."The archive traces Siqueiros's visual research prior to painting on canvas or on the wall, and also documents his use of photography during the production of the works themselves." [via]
posted on Aug 18, 2005 - View this thread

Theatre Ephemera. A terrific collection of photographs and drawings of pre-twentieth century American theaters and the actors who graced their stages. Sumptuous auditoriums, gorgeous costumes and famous faces. [Via Bibi's Box]
posted on Aug 10, 2005 - View this thread

Photomuse - a searchable (and growing [NYtimes]) collection of "masterwork photography" combining the collections of the George Eastman House and the International Center of Photography... [via]
posted on Jul 20, 2005 - View this thread

Images of the American Civil War
posted on May 20, 2005 - View this thread

Faces young and old, mothers and children, dolls; hunting rabbit, making fire, dancing: Archived photographs of Arizona's Indians from the turn-of-the-twentieth. Plus reference materials.
posted on Apr 7, 2005 - View this thread

Close to Home: An American Album. 'This exhibition is devoted to American family photographs that were separated from their owners and then rediscovered by artists, writers, collectors, and museum curators. ' Highlights and site visitors' submissions.
Site of related interest :- BBC Family History; and Third Generation: Family Photographs and Memories of Nazi Germany.
posted on Feb 26, 2005 - View this thread

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighbourhoods 1889-1963. Scholarly urban history project.
posted on Feb 19, 2005 - View this thread

Pansies! Think you've got it bad? Bad like this? Bad like this? Perhaps you think you've beat this one? Visit the Digital Snow Museum to put things in perspective.
posted on Jan 22, 2005 - View this thread

American Photographs: The Road "In 1935, the collaborative satirical writers Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and Evgeny Petrov (1903-1942) traveled to the United States from the Soviet Union on assignment as special correspondents for the newspaper Pravda. Shortly after their arrival in New York aboard the French luxury liner Normandie, they purchased a Ford automobile and embarked upon a ten-week road trip to California and back."
posted on Jan 1, 2005 - View this thread

New York Changing. Rephotographs from then and now.
posted on Nov 22, 2004 - View this thread

The history and technology of Technicolor. The iconic color process, however, had some competition. There's plenty of other fun stuff to read at the Widescreen Museum.
posted on Nov 5, 2004 - View this thread

Big Hats and Eroticism is just one of the many features of Tallulahs.com, an excellent site dedicated to images of the vintage nude. There's also lots of wonderful trivia and commentary, such as a brief biography of the Mante sisters (immortalized in the brilliant ballerina images of painter Edgar Degas), and the story of Liane de Pougy, convent girl turned runaway wife, turned celebrated dancer of the French stage, turned Romanian Princess. Or you can read about the mystery of H. Traut, elusive photographer of "the gentle eroticism of fairyland" whose images graced hundreds of postcards for several years until he seemingly vanished from the scene some time before WWI. Interested in drawing or painting nudes yourself? Here's a page of classical nude poses - studies in various categories that you can work from, including "The beauty of butts" and "seductive smoking"! Plus, you can peruse Tallulah's own art nudes, and a fabulous links page. NSFW, obviously.
posted on Aug 9, 2004 - View this thread

Defunct amusement parks. It has postcards and historical photos. It also has relatively current photos of parks in various states of disrepair. A great site for fans of entropy, like myself. (via Linkfilter)
posted on Jun 16, 2004 - View this thread

Gallery of the Unamed. As much as i love digital cameras, i doubt that in a hundred years our descendants will rummage thru stacks of old flash cards or CD's looking for pictures. Here is almost 10,000 old photographs...not only the unknown, but Civil War veterans, railroads, fire departments...or you can search by location or surname. I've already spent hours and hours looking. Have some of your own? Go ahead and send them in...
posted on May 24, 2004 - View this thread

The only photographs known to have been taken immediately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
The photographer's (Yoshito Matsushige) testimony from Hiroshima Witness, talking about taking the pictures. This article waxes on about how few exposures he made, how many he framed but did not take.
posted on Apr 20, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Apr 7, 2004 - View this thread

Notecannons. An online pictorial history of National brand stringed instruments from 1920 - present.
posted on Mar 26, 2004 - View this thread

CBGB Photographic History. Includes one of the coolest Ramones photos I've ever seen. (One or two of the thumbnails are probably NSFW, but they're small, so unless you're really paranoid, I wouldn't be too concerned about it). (via things magazine)
posted on Jan 28, 2004 - View this thread

Dazzling, full-color shots of people long since dead, landscapes long since paved, and an empire long since overthrown.
A pre-WW I process for creating color image projections meets Photoshop®
posted on Jan 16, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Nov 12, 2003 - View this thread

Anima: A fascinating archive of the ways early photography was used to give the illusion of motion, as well as information on the evolution of optical toys and early cinema.
posted on Nov 8, 2003 - View this thread

Harlem 1900-1940, a site full of pictures and history. The scope of this portfolio is Harlem from the years 1900-1940. Various elements of the history of the urban experience in Harlem's early days as the Cultural Capital of African Americans are represented here by graphic and photographic images from the Schomburg Center collection.
posted on Sep 8, 2003 - View this thread

Benedicte Wrensted: An Idaho Photographer in Focus.
posted on Sep 1, 2003 - View this thread

Austin Postcard. Photographs, postcards, history and ephemera related to Austin, Texas.
posted on Aug 29, 2003 - View this thread

The pictures that reveal UK's hidden history For the first time the complex and sometimes harrowing history of immigration to the UK is being told, through rarely seen photographs, official documents, maps and personal papers. And it's all online.
posted on Jul 30, 2003 - View this thread

Images of the Southwest. The American southwest, that is. The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 - 'an event specific to Arizona that influenced the labor movement throughout the United States'; early cartography of the southwest; a rural school newspaper; mission churches; folk arts - Easter eggs, murals and so on; War Relocation Authority camps (some photos ; and more.
posted on Jul 14, 2003 - View this thread

US National Archives & Records Administration Exhibit Hall. Some good American history pieces - the Emancipation Proclamation, government drawings, 20th century photographs, the New Deal and the arts, panoramic photography, 1970s Chicago, World War 2 posters, gifts to presidents, and more.
posted on Jul 3, 2003 - View this thread

Images of Afghanistan, 1976-78. A good range.
posted on Jun 10, 2003 - View this thread

The World Heritage Tour is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a documentary image bank with panoramic pictures for all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites [warning: frames]. Examples include the tomb of Sety I, discovered in 1817 and permanently closed to the public in 1991 and the baroque churches of the Phillipines. [more inside]
posted on Jun 10, 2003 - View this thread

The California Museum of Photography has several interesting exhibits currently online. The images taken in Iraq (ca. 1956) and Afghanistan (ca. 1933) are timely and timeless. Read the essay on the vernacular church exhibit for a wonderful and brief exposure to the language of art photography.
posted on May 6, 2003 - View this thread

Palmer Cox created the famous Brownie characters in 1883, and a successful series of children's books detailing their adventures. These are the characters that George Eastman chose for promoting the Brownie line of Kodak cameras.
posted on Apr 29, 2003 - View this thread

90 Days in Cambodia as a travel writer and election observer.
Related :- Cambodia in Modern History: Beauty and Darkness focuses on the Khmer Rouge period, and also has a nice section on Cambodian art.
posted on Mar 23, 2003 - View this thread

Something nice. In a refreshingly simple and visually appealing presentation, "Places" explores the synergy between artists and the locations that inspire them. From a virtual landscape created from the surface of an agate, to a 1787 map of Mecca included in the Dala'il al-Khayrat ("Guides to Good Things"), to an 1885 photograph of a single moment captured in the reflection of a gazing ball, these eight fascinating examples seem to suggest that places are nothing so much as what our own observation reveals of them at any given time.
posted on Mar 22, 2003 - View this thread

A Great Day in Harlem. Jazz history through one photograph.
posted on Mar 2, 2003 - View this thread

Striking, panoramic photo collages of the ruins of U.S. and Canadian concentration camps used to isolate Japanese-Americans during WWII. Masumi Hayashi's rich site also features documents, personal stories and Shockwave interview clips, a discussion board and data on each camp. And, yes, this post was inspired by U.S. Congressman Howard Coble's recent comment.
posted on Feb 6, 2003 - View this thread

"I'm not alive. I'm not myself. I'm tired of playing the role of somebody else. I want to be myself".
Kamagasaki, Japan in the 1950s: photographs by Inoue Seiryu, and Kamagasaki now: Photos and text by Shannon Higgins, with first-hand accounts and translations.[more]
posted on Jan 21, 2003 - View this thread

The Computer Photography of Arthur Lavine. Got a reel-to-reel fetish? Does the phrase "hand assembled ferrite core memory" make you swoon? Take a look at some old-school nerds at work for Chase Manhattan, back in the days when computers were big and expensive, and a Macintosh was a raincoat. It's an exhibit at San Diego's Computer Museum of America, which is chock full of goodies. Check out the slide show exhibit too.
posted on Nov 8, 2002 - View this thread

Life Is A Magazine, Chum... Come to the Magazine! A lot of us grew up with Life Magazine and there's a certain nostalgic/narcissistic pleasure in looking at the cover of the week you (if you're over 30, that is) or your parents were born in. Their wacky and classic covers are also worth checking out, even though there are some inevitable repeats. Oh - and never forgetting their astonishing classic photographs, of course.
posted on Aug 9, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Mar 12, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Jan 4, 2002 - View this thread

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 on May 7, 2001 - View this thread

American Hollow - The Bowling family has lived in the same rural hollow in Kentucky for seven generations. The Washington Post tells their story using the Bowlings' own words (including audio clips) and photographs with a Web site you might expect from PBS. Urban Americans (and others, too) might be surprised to learn that there are many, many families in the U.S. who still live like the Bowlings.

"It's 1998 and we just last year put running water in the house, into my kitchen sink. We did it ourselves. We bought line, hooked into Iree's well, dug up a ditch and ran it to the house. But I still need a bathroom and a septic tank. I got a rinse tub that we take a bath in. I'd rather have a bathtub, but meanwhile I can make do."
posted on Apr 27, 2001 - View this thread

Newseum Exhibits Pulitzer Prize Photographs The Shockwave version of this provides audio clips of the photographers (I believe) talking about the photos. Although you have to actually visit the Newseum to see the entire collection, it's a nice preview.
posted on Jan 2, 2001 - View this thread

The Pornography of Racist Violence: NYT Columnist Margo Jefferson reviews "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America", and says the book is a "record of what we can call civil war crimes." She goes on to say:

"The images are also what the historian Leon F. Litwack calls, in his introduction, race pornography: they were often made into picture postcards that were mailed, with curt, gleeful or venomous messages to friends and foes with nary a peep from the United States postal authorities."

posted on Dec 26, 2000 - View this thread

Without Sanctuary - postcards & photographs of lynching in America. Shocking and sad.
posted on May 1, 2000 - View this thread