Once, the Unit­ed States was known for send­ing forth the world’s most com­plained-about inter­na­tion­al tourists; today, that dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion arguably belongs to Chi­na. But it was­n’t so long ago that the Chi­nese tourist was a prac­ti­cal­ly unheard-of phe­nom­e­non, espe­cial­ly in the West. That’s an impor­tant con­tex­tu­al ele­ment to under­stand when con­sid­er­ing the work of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tseng Kwong Chi, who trav­eled around Amer­i­ca tak­ing pic­tures of him­self at var­i­ous rec­og­niz­able mon­u­ments and land­marks while wear­ing a suit most com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Chair­man Mao. The fig­ure that emerged from this project is the sub­ject of the new Nerd­writer video above.

“He called this char­ac­ter ‘an ambigu­ous ambas­sador,’ and, in a series he called ‘East Meets West,’ posed him — posed him­self — in front of var­i­ous icons of touris­tic Amer­i­ca,” writes Bri­an Dil­lon in a New York­er piece on Tsen­g’s work. “He leaps into the air in front of the Brook­lyn Bridge, stands impas­sive beside Mick­ey Mouse at Dis­ney­land, gazes off into the dis­tance with Nia­gara Falls behind him.”

Inspired by Richard Nixon’s 1972 vis­it to Chi­na and Deng Xiaop­ing’s 1979 vis­it to the U.S., Tseng pro­duced most of these pho­tos in the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies, and even “took the ambigu­ous ambas­sador to Europe, where he appears hero­ic before the Arc de Tri­om­phe, and diminu­tive between two police­men at the Tow­er of Lon­don.”

Born in British Hong Kong, then par­tial­ly raised in Cana­da and edu­cat­ed in Paris, Tseng arrived in New York in 1979, ready to join the down­town scene that includ­ed Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ann Mag­nu­son, Cindy Sher­man, and Kei­th Har­ing. It’s for his doc­u­men­ta­tion of Har­ing’s work, in fact, that he remains most wide­ly known, 35 years after his own AIDS-relat­ed death. But now, as tak­ing pic­tures of one­self in famous places around the world becomes an increas­ing­ly uni­ver­sal prac­tice, “East Meets West” draws more and more atten­tion. Maybe, in an art world where cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty is so fierce­ly declared and defend­ed, the very ambi­gu­i­ty of the ambas­sador por­trayed by Tseng — who, as Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak empha­sizes, “did­n’t want to be known as a Chi­nese artist, or an Asian-Amer­i­can artist, or a gay artist; he just want­ed to be an artist” — has become that much more com­pelling.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Icon­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of Gor­don Parks: An Intro­duc­tion to the Renais­sance Amer­i­can Artist

The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Paint­ings of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Video Essay

How Dorothea Lange Shot Migrant Moth­er Per­haps the Most Icon­ic Pho­to in Amer­i­can His­to­ry

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Activist Graf­fi­ti Art of Kei­th Har­ing: A Video Essay

The Pho­to That Trig­gered China’s Dis­as­trous Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion (1966)

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bill Cun­ning­ham (RIP) on Liv­ing La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

With his cane, his famous waxed mus­tache, and his habit of tak­ing unusu­al ani­mals for walks, Sal­vador Dalí would appear to have cul­ti­vat­ed his own pho­tographa­bil­i­ty. But tak­ing a pic­ture of the man who stood as a liv­ing def­i­n­i­tion of pop­u­lar sur­re­al­ism was­n’t a task to be approached casu­al­ly — espe­cial­ly not for Philippe Hals­man, who did it more than any­one else. Orig­i­nal­ly from what’s now Latvia, he led a tur­bu­lent life that even­tu­al­ly (after a cou­ple of inter­ven­tions by none oth­er than Albert Ein­stein, of whom Hals­man lat­er made a famous por­trait) brought him to the Unit­ed States. It was in New York, in 1941, that he met Dalí, hav­ing been assigned to pho­to­graph one of his exhi­bi­tions in the city.

Hals­man had more oppor­tu­ni­ties to pho­to­graph Dalí, and these jobs turned into decades of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Its many fruits include a book con­tain­ing 36 views of the artist’s mus­tache alone, but also the more ambi­tious — and much more sur­re­al — image Dalí Atom­i­cus, from 1948. Inspired by the work-in-progress that would become Leda Atom­i­ca, a por­trait of Dalí’s wife Gala influ­enced by both mythol­o­gy and sci­ence, the pho­to­graph includes not just that paint­ing, but also an arc of water and three fly­ing cats. Or at least they look like they’re fly­ing; in real­i­ty, they were thrown into the frame by a team of assis­tants includ­ing Hals­man­’s wife and his young daugh­ter Irene.

Irene Hals­man recalls the expe­ri­ence in the BBC Time Frame video above, includ­ing the now-wide­ly known detail that Dalí’s own ini­tial con­cept for the pho­to involved blow­ing up a duck with fire­crack­ers. “Oh, no, no, you can’t do that,” she recalls her father respond­ing. “You’re in Amer­i­ca now. You don’t want to be put in jail for ani­mal cru­el­ty.” So fly­ing cats it was, to be visu­al­ly cap­tured in mid-air along with the con­tents of a buck­et of water. Leda Atom­i­ca and a chair were also made to appear as if lev­i­tat­ing, and Dalí him­self was instruct­ed to jump, in an instance of the pho­to­graph­ic prac­tice Hals­man called “jumpol­o­gy” (whose oth­er sub­jects includ­ed Audrey Hep­burn, J. Robert Oppen­heimer, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, and Richard Nixon).

Image via Library of Con­gress

Dalí Atom­i­cus was pub­lished in Life mag­a­zine, to which Hals­man was a pro­lif­ic con­trib­u­tor. The same issue includ­ed a few out­takes, which revealed some of what went into the five-to-six-hour-long process of nail­ing the shot. You can see a few such prints at Art­sy, whose labeled faults include “water splash­es Dalí instead of cat,” “Dalí jumps too late,” and “sec­re­tary gets into pic­ture.” But it was­n’t all just about tim­ing: the pic­ture also required a degree of pre-Pho­to­shop edit­ing to per­fect, and the emp­ty can­vas behind the jump­ing Dalí had to be filled in by the rush of the man him­self, who opt­ed to fill the non-exis­tent paint­ing with motifs drawn from the limbs of the cats. Now there was an artist who knew how to seize inspi­ra­tion when it float­ed by.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Art (1986)

Sal­vador Dalí Takes His Anteater for a Stroll in Paris, 1969

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed Christ­mas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hall­mark (1960)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

We still occa­sion­al­ly speak of “Kodak moments,” mak­ing con­scious or uncon­scious ref­er­ence to the slo­gan of the East­man Kodak Com­pa­ny in the nine­teen-eight­ies. Even by that time, Kodak had already been a going con­cern for near­ly a cen­tu­ry, fur­nish­ing pho­tog­ra­phers around the world with the film they need­ed to cap­ture images. Its very first slo­gan, unveiled in 1888, was “You Press the But­ton, We Do the Rest,” and it her­ald­ed the arrival of a new era: one in which, thanks to the com­pa­ny’s No. 1 box cam­era (loaded with the new medi­um of roll film), pho­tographs could be “tak­en by peo­ple with lit­tle or no pre­vi­ous knowl­edge of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

So says Vox’s Cole­man Lown­des in the new video above, which explains how this inven­tion changed the nature of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. Peo­ple began using Kodak cam­eras “to doc­u­ment their trav­els and their dai­ly lives at home”; they “took por­traits of each oth­er, but also can­did street scenes.” Such was the nov­el­ty of tak­ing a pic­ture so quick­ly and eas­i­ly — and well out­side a stu­dio — that it demand­ed a new word, or rather, the adop­tion of a word from anoth­er domain: snap­shot, which up until then had referred to “a quick shot with a gun, with­out aim, at a fast-mov­ing tar­get.” Before Kodak, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er sim­ply had no way to cap­ture the moment.

But it was only with the intro­duc­tion of the inex­pen­sive Brown­ie, “a sim­ple box cam­era made of card­board encased in faux leather,” that every­one — even a child — could become a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. “Take a Kodak with You,” sug­gest­ed anoth­er of the com­pa­ny’s slo­gans in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, and mil­lions took heed. Its posi­tion as both a cor­po­rate and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion was­n’t seri­ous­ly threat­ened until the end of that cen­tu­ry, when Japan’s Fuji­film “had begun to eat away at the Amer­i­can pho­to giant’s mar­ket share,” and then dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy destroyed wide swaths of the film busi­ness at a stroke.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the first dig­i­tal cam­era was invent­ed in 1975 by a Kodak engi­neer, “but the com­pa­ny, which from the begin­ning had built itself on sell­ing and pro­cess­ing film rather than man­u­fac­tur­ing cam­eras, did­n’t make the change soon enough.” After final­ly enter­ing bank­rupt­cy in 2012, Kodak reor­ga­nized to “focus on dig­i­tal print­ing ser­vices rather than film devel­op­ment,” which has by now become “a some­what niche mar­ket of ded­i­cat­ed hob­by­ists.” Also doing its part to keep the com­pa­ny afloat is its line of logo-embla­zoned appar­el, which holds out a retro appeal all across the world — even to young­sters quick enough on the draw with their cam­era phones that every moment might as well be a Kodak moment.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

How Film Was Made in 1958: A Kodak Nos­tal­gia Moment

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

The Very Con­cise Sui­cide Note by Kodak Founder George East­man: “My Work is Done. Why Wait?” (1932)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice for Aspir­ing Pho­tog­ra­phers: Skip the Fan­cy Equip­ment & Just Shoot

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In late-twen­ties Man­hat­tan, a nine­teen-year-old woman named Eliz­a­beth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safe­ty by none oth­er than the mag­nate Condé Nast, founder of the epony­mous pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny. Not long there­after, Miller, who’d been study­ing at the Art Stu­dents League of New York, appeared on the cov­er of Vogue. It’s tempt­ing to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descrip­tor fits uneasi­ly with the arc of her sev­en­ty years, dur­ing the last few decades of which she could nev­er quite recov­er from hav­ing wit­nessed first-hand the lib­er­a­tion of the con­cen­tra­tion camps at Buchen­wald and Dachau — sights she shared with the Amer­i­can pub­lic as a war pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Miller took pic­tures of not just the con­cen­tra­tion camps, but also events like the Lon­don Blitz and the lib­er­a­tion of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous pic­ture, bathing in Hitler’s tub on the very same day that the Führer lat­er shot him­self in his bunker.

Behind the cam­era in that instance was Life cor­re­spon­dent David E. Scher­man, one of the notable men in Miller’s life. Oth­ers includ­ed the artist-writer Roland Pen­rose, the busi­ness­man Aziz Eloui Bey, and, before all of them, the sur­re­al­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Man Ray, each of whom cor­re­spond­ed to a phase of the pro­fes­sion­al jour­ney that took her from fash­ion mod­el to fear­less pho­to­jour­nal­ist.

You can see and hear Lee Miller’s jour­ney in the video from the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um at the top of the post. Just above is a British Pathé news­reel that shows Miller at home with Pen­rose in 1946, the year between the end of the war and the birth of their son Antony Pen­rose, who re-dis­cov­ered and re-pub­li­cized his moth­er’s pho­tog­ra­phy after her death in 1977. How­ev­er belat­ed her pub­lic recog­ni­tion, it’s still sur­pris­ing that a life like Miller’s, the events of which stretch even Hol­ly­wood plau­si­bil­i­ty, only became a movie last year. Lee still awaits wide release, but much has been writ­ten about the pas­sion of star Kate Winslet that got it made. She’ll undoubt­ed­ly impress as Miller — but nei­ther, rumor has it, is Sat­ur­day Night Live alum­nus Andy Sam­berg’s David E. Scher­man a per­for­mance to be missed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The For­got­ten Women of Sur­re­al­ism: A Mag­i­cal, Short Ani­mat­ed Film

Man Ray’s Por­traits of Ernest Hem­ing­way, Ezra Pound, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­er 1920s Icons

Why the U.S. Pho­tographed Its Own World War II Con­cen­tra­tion Camps (and Com­mis­sioned Pho­tographs by Dorothea Lange)

Meet Tsuneko Sasamo­to, Japan’s First Female Pho­to­jour­nal­ist and Now, at 107, Japan’s Old­est Liv­ing Pho­to­jour­nal­ist

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.