In his latest act of digital restoration, Denis Shiryaev has used AI to revive and colorize footage documenting daily life in Paris during the 1890s. The remarkably clear footage lets you see horses and buggies move past Notre Dame; youngsters floating their boats at Luxembourg Gardens; the Eiffel Tour during its first decade of existence; firemen dashing down the city’s grands boulevards; and people hopping onto futuristic moving sidewalks. Quite a delight to see.
Find other recent video restorations in the Relateds below.
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The history of exploration is replete with famous names everyone knows, like Robert Peary, the man most often credited with first reaching the North Pole. Those who work alongside the legends—doing the heavy lifting, saving lives, making essential calculations—tend to be forgotten or marginalized almost immediately in the telling of the story, especially when they don’t fit the profile for the kinds of people allowed to make history.
In Peary’s case, it seems that the most important member of his team—his assistant, African American explorer Matthew Henson—may have actually reached the North Pole first, along with four of the team’s Inuit crew members.
Henson and Perry first met in a Washington, DC clothing store where Henson worked. When they struck up a conversation, Peary learned that Henson had fled Maryland “after his parents were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan,” as Messy Nessy writes. He had then signed on as a cabin boy at 12 and sailed around the world, including the Russian Arctic seas, learning to read and write while aboard ship.
Peary was impressed and “hired him on the spot,” and “from that point forward, Henson went on every expedition Peary embarked on; trekking through the jungles of Nicaragua and, later, covering thousands of miles of ice in dog sleds to the North Pole.” Also on their last expedition were 39 Inuit men, women, and children, including the four Inuit men— Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo, and Oogueah—who accompanied Henson and Peary on the final leg of the 1909 journey, Peary and Henson’s eighth attempt.
As the six men neared the pole, Peary “grew more and more weary, suffering from exhaustion and frozen toes, unable to leave their camp, set up five miles” away. Henson and the others “scouted ahead,” and, according to Henson’s account, actually overshot the pole before doubling back. “I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot,” he later wrote.
Peary eventually caught up and “the sled-bound Admiral allegedly trudged up to plant the American flag in the ice—and yet, the only photograph of the historic moment shows a crew of faces that are distinctly not white.” Either Peary took the photograph as a “way of honoring the crew” or he wasn’t there at all when it was taken. The former doesn’t seem likely given Peary’s eagerness to claim full credit for the feat.
Peary accepted the sole honor from the National Geographic Society and an award from Congress in 1911, while Henson’s “contributions were largely ignored” at the time and “he returned to a very normal life” in relative obscurity, working as a U.S. Customs clerk for 23 years, unable to marshal the resources for further expeditions once Peary retired.
In his writings, Peary characterized Henson according to his usefulness: “This position I have given him primarily because of his adaptability and fitness for the work and secondly on account of his loyalty. He is a better dog driver and can handle a sledge better than any man living, except some of the best Eskimo hunters themselves.” The passage is reminiscent of Lewis and Clark’s descriptions of Sacagawea, who never emerges as a full person with her own motivations.
Sadly, in his 1912 account, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, it seems that Henson internalized the racism that confined him to second-class status. “Another world’s accomplishment was done and finished,” he writes, passively eliding the doer of the deed. He then invokes a trope that appears over and over, from Shakespeare’s Tempest to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “From the beginning of history, wherever the world’s work was done by a white man, he had been accompanied by a colored man. From the building of the pyramids and the journey to the cross, to the discovery of the new world and the discovery of the North Pole.”
The kind of history Henson had learned is obvious—a whitewashing on a world-historical scale. It would take almost 30 years for him to finally receive recognition, though he lived to become the first black member of The Explorers Club in 1937 and “with some irony,” Messy Nessy writes, he “was awarded the Peary Polar Expedition Medal” in 1944. Since then, his name has usually been mentioned with Peary’s in histories of the expedition, but rarely as the first person to reach the pole. Watch two short profiles of Henson’s accomplishments above, and see many more photos from the expedition at Messy Nessy.
Broadly speaking, the “Space Race” of the 1950s and 60s involved two major players, the United States and the Soviet Union. But there were also minor players: take, for instance, the Zambian Space Program, founded and administered by just one man. A Time magazine article published in November 1964 — when the Republic of Zambia was one week old — described Edward Mukuka Nkoloso as a “grade-school science teacher and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy.” Nkoloso had a plan “to beat the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the moon. Already Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, including a 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, ‘the only way humans can walk on the moon.’ ”
Nkoloso and his Quixotic space program seem to have drawn as much attention as the subject of the article, Zambia’s first president Kenneth David Kaunda. Namwali Serpell tells Nkoloso’s story in a piece for The New Yorker: not just the conception and failure of his entry into the Space Race (“the program suffered from a lack of funds,” Serpell writes, “for which Nkoloso blamed ‘those imperialist neocolonialists’ who were, he insisted, ‘scared of Zambia’s space knowledge‘”), but also his background as “a freedom fighter in Kaunda’s United National Independence Party.”
Born in 1919 in then-Northern Rhodesia, Nkoloso received a missionary education, got drafted into World War II by the British, took an interest in science during his service, and came home to illegally found his own school. There followed periods as a salesman, a “political agitator,” and a messianic liberator figure, ending with his capture and imprisonment by colonial authorities.
How on Earth could this all have convinced Nkoloso to aim for Mars? Some assume he experienced a psychological break due to torture endured at the hands of Northern Rhodesian police. Some see his ostensible interplanetary ambitions as a cover for the training he was giving his “Afronauts” for guerrilla-style direct political action. Some describe him as a kind of national court jester: Serpell quotes from the memoir of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Arthur Hoppe, author of a series of contemporary pieces on the Zambian Space Program, who “believed it was the Africans who were satirizing our multi-billion-dollar space race against the Russians.” As Serpell points out, “Zambian irony is very subtle,” and as a satirist Nkoloso had “the ironic dédoublement — the ability to split oneself — that Charles Baudelaire saw in the man who trips in the street and is already laughing at himself as he falls.”
Whatever Nkoloso’s purposes, the Zambian Space Program has attracted new attention in the years since documentary footage of its facilities and training procedures found its way to Youtube. This fascinatingly eccentric chapter in the history of man’s heavenward aspirations has become the subject of short documentaries like the one from SideNote at the top of the post, as well as the subject of artworks like the short film Afronauts above. Nkoloso died more than 30 years ago, but he now lives on as an icon of Afrofuturism, a movement (previously featured here on Open Culture) at what Serpell calls “the nexus of black art and technoculture.” No figure embodies Afrofuturism quite so thoroughly as Sun Ra, who transformed himself from the Alabama-born Herman Poole Blount into a peace-preaching alien from Saturn. Though Nkoloso never seems to have met his American contemporary, such an encounter would surely, as a subject for Afrofuturistic art, be truly out of this world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Women in the entertainment business who have taken a stand against racism and state violence and oppression have often found their careers ruined as a result, their albums and performances boycotted, opportunities rescinded. This, according to Nina Simone, is what happened to her after she began her fight for Civil Rights with the ferocious “Mississippi Goddam.” She continued performing in Europe until the 1990s, but her cultural stock in her own country declined after the 60s. She was largely unknown to younger generations until Lauryn Hill and later hip hop artists turned her music into a “secret weapon.”
Maybe the music of Hazel Scott will enjoy a similar revival now that her name has been returned to popular consciousness by Alicia Keys, who paid tribute to Scott at last year’s Grammys. Once the biggest star in jazz, Scott’s career was destroyed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the 1950s when a publication called Red Channels accused her of Communist sympathies. Blacklisted, she moved to Paris and performed exclusively in Europe until the mid-sixties. As with many an artist who suffered this fate during the Cold War, Scott stood accused of anti-Americanism not for any actual support of the Soviets but because she challenged racial segregation and discrimination at home.
Born in Trinidad and raised by her mother in New York City, like Simone, Scott was a classically trained child prodigy (see her play jazz-infused Liszt for World War II soldiers in the video below), whose early, sometimes violent, experiences with racism left lasting scars. She auditioned for Julliard at age 8. “When she finished,” writes Lorissa Rineheart at Narratively, “the auditions director whispered, ‘I am in the presence of a genius.” Julliard founder Frank Damrosch agreed, and she was admitted.
Scott’s mother Alma, herself a jazz musician, “befriended some of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest stars,” and the young Scott grew up surrounded by the leading lights of jazz. When she got her big break at 19, taking over a three-week engagement for Billie Holiday, she immediately joined the ranks of Harlem’s finest.
As it turned out, not only was Scott a brilliant pianist, she also had a hell of a voice: deep and sonorous, comforting yet provocative — the sort of singing style that makes you want to embrace the sublime melancholy that is love and life and whiskey on a midwinter’s night.
She was flown to Hollywood in the early 40s to appear in musicals, but refused to countenance the usual racist stereotypes in film. Relegated to bit parts, she returned to New York. “I had antagonized the head of Columbia Pictures,” she wrote in her journal. “In short, committed suicide.” But she continued her activism, and her career continued to thrive. Finally, “she came to break the color barrier on the small screen” becoming the first black woman to host her own show in 1950. “Three nights a week, Scott played her signature mix of boogie-woogie, classics, and jazz standards to living rooms across America. It was a landmark moment.”
And it was not to last. That same year, Scott voluntary appeared before HUAC to answer the supposed charges against her, remaining calm in the face of hours of questioning and reading an eloquent prepared statement. “It has never been my practice to choose the popular course,” she said. “When others lie as naturally as they breathe, I become frustrated and angry.” She concluded “with one request—and that is that your committee protect those Americans who have honestly, wholesomely, and unselfishly tried to perfect this country and make the guarantees in our Constitution live. The actors, musicians, artists, composers, and all of the men and women of the arts are eager and anxious to help, to serve. Our country needs us more today than ever before. We should not be written off by the vicious slanders of little and petty men.”
Weeks later, her show was canceled “and concert bookings became few and far between,” writes her biographer Karen Chilton at Smithsonian. “The government’s suspicions were enough to cause irreparable damage to her career,” and damn her to obscurity when she deserves a place next to contemporary greats like Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and others. “After a decade of living abroad, she would return to an American music scene that no longer valued what she had to offer.” Learn much more about Hazel Scott in the short documentary video, “What Ever Happened to Hazel Scott,” at the top, and in Chilton’s book Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC.
Who’s your favorite abstract artist? Some of us, if we like early abstraction, might name a painter like Wassily Kandinsky, some a composer like Arnold Schoenberg, some a poet like Guillaume Apollinaire, and some, even, a photographer like Alfred Stieglitz. When we answer a question like this, we tend to consider each artist, and each artist’s body of work, in isolation. But when we talk about artistic movements, especially one overarching and influential as abstraction, all names, all paintings, all compositions, all poems, all photographs — all works of any kind — are interconnected. Just as abstract artists managed to make visible, audible, and legible concepts and feelings never before realized in art, the Museum of Modern Art’s interactive social-network map of abstract art puts all those connections on display for us to see.
“Abstraction may be modernism’s greatest innovation,” says the web site of Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925, the MoMA exhibit for which the map (downloadable as a PDF poster here) was originally designed. “Today it is so central to our conception of artmaking that the time when an abstract artwork was unimaginable has become hard to imagine.”
But when abstract art emerged, it seemed to do so quite suddenly: beginning in 1911, Kandinsky and other artists, including Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka, and Francis Picabia, “exhibited works that marked the beginning of something radically new: they dispensed with recognizable subject matter.” You can view the Inventing Abstraction diagram with Léger at the center, which reveals his connections to such figures as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Pablo Picasso. Reconfigured with Delaunay at the center, links emerge to the likes of Blaise Cendrars, Edgard Varèse, and Paul Klee.
But no abstract artist seems to have been as well-connected as Kandinsky, who “became a central force in the development and promotion of abstraction through his intrepid efforts as a painter, theorist, publisher, exhibition organizer, teacher, and as a generous host to the dozens of artists and writers who trekked, often from great distances, to meet him.” So says the bio alongside Kandinsky’s page on the diagram, which depicts him as the node connecting figures, influential in their own right, like Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Hans Richter. Kandinsky’s “message about abstraction’s potential transcended distinctions between mediums, and his impact was felt from New York to Moscow.” But only a community of artists spanning at least that range of the globe, each in his or her own way looking to create a new world, could bring abstract art into being. More than a century later, we can safely call it here to stay.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
No matter how well you remember your physics classes, you most likely don’t remember learning any stories in them. Theories and equations, yes, but not stories — yet each of those theories and equations has a story behind it, as does the entire scientific enterprise of physics they constitute. The video above from the BBC’s Dara Ó Briain’sScience Club provides an overview of the latter story in an animated four minutes, making it ideal for youngsters just starting to learn about physics. It will also do the job for those of us not-so-youngsters circling back to get a better grasp of physics, its discoveries and driving questions.
“The story of physics is, for the most part, a tale of ever-increasing confidence,” says Ó Briain, a comedian as well as a television host and writer on various subjects. This version of the story begins with rolling balls and falling objects, observed with a new rigor by such 17th-century Italians as Galileo Galilei. Galileo’s work became “the rock on which modern physics is founded,” and those who first built upon that rock included Isaac Newton, who started by noticing how apples fall and ended up with a theory of gravity. Newton’s work would later predict the existence of Neptune; James Clerk Maxwell, working in the 19th century, made discoveries about electromagnetism that would later give us radio and television.
For quite a while, physics seemed to go from strength to strength. But as the 20th century began, “the latest discoveries didn’t build on the old ones. Things like x‑rays and radioactivity were just plain weird, and in a bad way.” But in 1905, onto the scene came a 26-year-old Albert Einstein, who “tore up the script by” claiming that “light is a kind of wave but also comes in packets, or particles.” That same year he published an equation you’ll certainly remember from your school days: E = mc2, which holds “that mass and energy are equivalent.” Einstein proposed that, if “someone watches a spaceship flying very fast, what they would see is the ship’s clocks running slower than their own watch — and the ship will actually shrink in size. But for the astronauts inside, all would be normal.”
In other words, “time and space can change: they are relative depending on who’s observing.” Einstein called this “special relativity,” and he also had a theory of “general relativity.” That showed “how balls and apples weren’t the only thing subject to gravity: light, time, and space were also affected. Gravity slows down time and it warps space.” No matter how dimly we understand physics itself, we all know the major players in its story: Galileo and Newton made important early discoveries, but it was Einstein who “shattered traditional physics” and revealed just how much we still have to learn about physical reality. Still today, physicists labor to reconcile Einstein’s discoveries with all other known facts of that reality. As frustrating as that task often proves, the kids who take an interest of their own in physics after watching the video will surely be heartened to know that the story of physics goes on.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. —Lewis Wickes Hine, “Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift” (1909)
Long before Brandon Stanton’s wildly popular Humans of New York project tapped into the public’s capacity for compassion by combining photos of his subjects with some telling narrative about their lives, educator and sociologist Lewis Wickes Hine was using his camera as a tool to pressure the public into demanding an end to child labor in the United States.
In a time when the US Federal Census reported that one in five children under the age of 16—over 1.75 million—was gainfully employed, Hines traversed the country under the auspices of the National Child Labor Committee, gathering information and making portraits of the underage workers.
His images, made between 1911 and 1916, introduced viewers to young boys breaking up coal in Pennsylvania mines, tiny Louisiana oyster shuckers and Maine sardine cutters, child pickers in Kentucky tobacco fields and Massachusetts cranberry bogs, and newsboys in a number of cities.
Their employers actively recruited kids from poor families, wagering that they would perform repetitive, often dangerous tasks for a pittance, with little chance of unionizing.
Hine was a scrupulous documentarian, labeling each photo with crucial information gleaned from conversations with the child pictured therein: name, age, location, occupation, wages, and—horrifically—any workplace injuries.
As the Vox Darkroom segment, above, explains, Hine’s formal compositions lent additional power to his images of smudged child workers posing in their places of employment. Shallow depth of field to ensure that the viewer’s eyes would not become absorbed in the background, but rather engage with those of his subject.
But it was the accompanying narratives, which he referred to variously as “picture stories” or “photo-interpretations,” that he credited with really getting through to the hearts and minds of an indifferent public.
The text prevented viewers from easily brushing the children off as anonymous, scruffy urchins.
Here for instance is “Manuel, the young shrimp-picker, five years old, and a mountain of child-labor oyster shells behind him. He worked last year. Understands not a word of English. Dunbar, Lopez, Dukate Company. Location: Biloxi, Mississippi.”
“Laura Petty, a 6 year old berry picker on Jenkins farm, Rock Creek near Baltimore, Md. ‘I’m just beginnin.’ Picked two boxes yesterday. (2 cents a box).”
“Angelo Ross, 142 Panama Street, Hughestown Borough, a youngster who has been working in Breaker #9 Pennsylvania Co. for four months, said he was 13 years old, but very doubtful. He has a brother, Tony, probably under 14 working. Location: Pittston, Pennsylvania.”
Hine correctly figured that the combination of photo and biographical information was a “lever for the social uplift.”
Once the pictures were published in Progressive magazines, state legislatures came under immense pressure to impose minimum age requirements in the workplace, effectively ending child labor, and returning many former workers to school.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC this March, when her company, Theater of the Apes, presents the world premiere of Tony Award winner Greg Kotis’ new low-budget, guitar-driven musical, I AM NOBODY. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
But we can take heart that one store of common wealth has majorly expanded recently, and will continue to grow each year since January 1, 2019—Public Domain Day—when hundreds of thousands of works from 1923 became freely available, the first time that happened in 21 years. This year saw the release of thousands more works into the public domain from 1924, and so it will continue ad infinitum.
And now—as if that weren’t enough to keep us busy learning about, sharing, adapting, and repurposing the past into the future—the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million images into the public domain, making them searchable, shareable, and downloadable through the museum’s Open Access platform.
This huge release of “high resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections,” notes Smithsonian Magazine, “is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting.”
There are those who would say that these images always belonged to the public as the holdings of a publicly-funded institution sometimes called “the nation’s attic.” It’s a fair point, but shouldn’t take away from the excitement of the news. “Smithsonian” as a conveniently singular moniker actually names “19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo,” an enormous collection of art and historic artifacts.
That’s quite a lot to sift through, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, the site’s highlights will direct you to one fascinating image after another, from Mohammad Ali’s 1973 headgear to the historic Elizabethan portrait of Pocahontas, to the collection box of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society owned by William Lloyd Garrison’s family, to Walt Whitman in 1891, as photographed by the painter Thomas Eakins, to just about anything else you might imagine.
Enter the Smithsonian’s Open Access archive here and browse and search its millions of newly-public domain images, a massive collection that may help expand the definition of common knowledge.
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