How Man Ray Reinvented Himself & Created One of the Most Iconic Works of Surrealist Photography

It would sur­prise none of us to encounter a young artist look­ing to cast off his past and make his mark on the cul­ture in a place like Williams­burg. But in the case of Man Ray, Williams­burg was his past. One must remem­ber that the Brook­lyn of today bears lit­tle resem­blance to the Brook­lyn of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry in which the famed avant-gardist grew up. Back then, he was known as Emmanuel Rad­nitzky, the son of immi­grant gar­ment work­ers. It was after he took up the art life in Man­hat­tan that he met the gal­lerist Alfred Stieglitz, form­ing an asso­ci­a­tion that would begin his trans­for­ma­tion from aspir­ing painter into form-chang­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Inspired by Mar­cel Ducham­p’s Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, No. 2 after see­ing it at the epoch-mak­ing 1913 Armory Show, Ray befriend­ed the artist him­self. Despite its con­sid­er­able lan­guage bar­ri­er, this rela­tion­ship gave him a way into the lib­er­at­ing realms of sur­re­al­ism in gen­er­al and Dada in par­tic­u­lar. “The move­men­t’s refusal to be defined or cod­i­fied gave Ray the ratio­nale to leave his for­mer life and head to Paris, where he could com­plete his rein­ven­tion unfet­tered by his past,” says James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above. It was this relo­ca­tion — almost as dra­mat­ic, in those days, as going from Brook­lyn to Man­hat­tan — that offered him the chance to become a major artis­tic fig­ure.

Soon after set­tling in Mont­par­nasse, Ray “made an acci­den­tal redis­cov­ery of the cam­era-less pho­togram, which he called ‘Rayo­graphs.’ ” This tech­nique, which involved plac­ing objects on pho­to­sen­si­tive paper and then expos­ing the arrange­ment to light, pro­duced images that were “dubbed pure Dada cre­ations” and “played a sig­nif­i­cant role in redefin­ing pho­tog­ra­phy as a medi­um capa­ble of abstrac­tion and con­cep­tu­al depth.” It was in that same part of town that he entered into an artis­tic and roman­tic part­ner­ship with Alice Prin, more wide­ly known as Kiki de Mont­par­nasse — and even more wide­ly known, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, as Le Vio­lon d’In­gres, which in 2022 became the most expen­sive pho­to­graph ever sold.

The $12.4 mil­lion sale price of Le Vio­lon d’In­gres is rather less inter­est­ing than the sto­ry behind it, which involves not just Ray and Kik­i’s life togeth­er, but also a process of tech­ni­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion whose result “per­fect­ly embod­ies the sur­re­al­ist inter­est in chal­leng­ing tra­di­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions and blend­ing every­day objects with the human form.” Tame though it may look in the era of Pho­to­shop (to say noth­ing of AI-gen­er­at­ed imagery), the pic­ture’s con­vinc­ing place­ment of vio­lin-style sound holes on Kik­i’s clas­si­cal­ly pre­sent­ed body sug­gest­ed to its view­ers that pho­tog­ra­phy had non-doc­u­men­tary pos­si­bil­i­ties nev­er before imag­ined — cer­tain­ly not in Williams­burg, any­way.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Man Ray and the Ciné­ma Pur: Watch Four Ground­break­ing Sur­re­al­ist Films From the 1920s

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

The Home Movies of Two Sur­re­al­ists: Look Inside the Lives of Man Ray & René Magritte

Man Ray Cre­ates a “Sur­re­al­ist Chess­board,” Fea­tur­ing Por­traits of Sur­re­al­ist Icons: Dalí, Bre­ton, Picas­so, Magritte, Miró & Oth­ers (1934)

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

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.

How Kodak Invented the Snapshot in the 1800s, Making It Possible for Everyone to Be a Photographer

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.

Bringing Tsarist Russia to Life: Vivid Color Images from 1905–1915

His­to­ry escapes us. Events that changed the world for­ev­er, or should have, slide out of col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. If we’re point­ing fin­gers, we might point at edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems that fail to edu­cate, or at huge his­tor­i­cal blind spots in mass media. Maybe anoth­er rea­son the recent past fades like old pho­tographs may have to do with old pho­tographs.

The present leaps out at us from our ubiq­ui­tous screens in vivid, high-res­o­lu­tion col­or. We are riv­et­ed to the spec­ta­cles of the moment. Per­haps if we could see his­to­ry in color—or at least the small but sig­nif­i­cant sliv­er of it that has been photographed—we might have some­what bet­ter his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ries. It’s only spec­u­la­tion, who knows? But look­ing at the images here makes me think so.

Although we can date col­or pho­tog­ra­phy back as ear­ly as 1861, when physi­cist James Clerk Maxwell made an exper­i­men­tal print with col­or fil­ters, the process didn’t real­ly come into its own until the turn of the cen­tu­ry. (It wouldn’t be until much lat­er in the 20th cen­tu­ry that mass-pro­duc­ing col­or pho­tographs became fea­si­ble.) One ear­ly mas­ter of the art, Russ­ian chemist and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, used Maxwell’s fil­ter process and oth­er meth­ods to cre­ate the images you see here, dat­ing from between 1905 and 1915.

You can see hun­dreds more such images—over 2000, in fact—at the Library of Con­gress’ col­lec­tion, dig­i­tal­ly recre­at­ed from col­or glass neg­a­tives for your brows­ing and down­load­ing plea­sure or his­tor­i­cal research. “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a pho­to­graph from the past and felt its sub­jects come alive so vivid­ly,” writes Messy Nessy, “as if they’ve almost blinked at me, as if it were just yes­ter­day.”

Clear­ly the cloth­ing, archi­tec­ture, and oth­er mark­ers of the past give away the age of these pic­tures, as does their fad­ed qual­i­ty. But imag­ine this lat­ter evi­dence of time passed as an Instra­gram fil­ter and you might feel like you could have been there, on the farms, church­es, water­ways, gar­dens, forests, city streets, and draw­ing rooms of Impe­r­i­al Rus­sia dur­ing the doomed last years of the Romanovs.

Sev­er­al hun­dred of the pho­tos in the archive aren’t in col­or. Prokudin-Gorskii, notes the LoC, “under­took most of his ambi­tious col­or doc­u­men­tary project from 1909 to 1915.” Even while trav­el­ing around pho­tograph­ing the coun­try­side, he made just as many mono­chrome images. Because of our cul­tur­al con­di­tion­ing and the way we see the world now we are bound to inter­pret black-and-white and sepia-toned prints as more dis­tant and estranged.

Prokudin-Gorskii took his most famous pho­to, a col­or image of Leo Tol­stoy which we’ve fea­tured here before, in 1908. It grant­ed him an audi­ence with the Tsar, who after­ward gave him “a spe­cial­ly equipped rail­road-car dark­room,” Messy Nessy notes, and “two per­mits that grant­ed him access to restrict­ed areas.” After the Rev­o­lu­tion, he fled to Paris, where he died in 1944, just one month after the city’s lib­er­a­tion.

His sur­viv­ing pho­tos, plates, and neg­a­tives had been stored in the base­ment of his Parisian apart­ment build­ing until a Library of Con­gress researcher found and pur­chased them in 1948. His work in col­or, a nov­el­ty at the time, now strikes us in its ordi­nar­i­ness; an aid “for any­one who has ever found it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs.” Still, we might won­der, “what will they think of our pho­tographs in a hun­dred years’ time?”

I sus­pect a hun­dred years from now, or maybe even 20 or 30, peo­ple will mar­vel at our quaint, prim­i­tive two-dimen­sion­al vision, while strolling around in vir­tu­al 3D recre­ations, maybe chat­ting casu­al­ly with holo­graph­ic, AI-endowed his­tor­i­cal peo­ple. Maybe that tech­nol­o­gy will make it hard­er for the future to for­get us, or maybe it will make it eas­i­er to mis­re­mem­ber.

Enter the Library of Con­gress Prokudin-Gorskii archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (May 1896)

The His­to­ry of Rus­sia in 70,000 Pho­tos: New Pho­to Archive Presents Russ­ian His­to­ry from 1860 to 1999

Down­load 437 Issues of Sovi­et Pho­to Mag­a­zine, the Sovi­et Union’s His­toric Pho­tog­ra­phy Jour­nal (1926–1991)

The Only Col­or Pic­ture of Tol­stoy, Tak­en by Pho­tog­ra­phy Pio­neer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1908)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to Hitler’s Bathtub

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 that jour­ney recount­ed by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video 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.

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Calling Him “the Most Beautiful Work of All”

If you go to hear Pat­ti Smith in con­cert, you expect her to sing “Beneath the South­ern Cross,” “Because the Night,” and almost cer­tain­ly “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er,” the hit sin­gle from Dream of Life. Like her 1975 debut Hors­es, that album had a cov­er pho­to by Robert Map­plethor­pe, whom Smith describes as “the artist of my life” in Just Kids, her mem­oir of their long and com­plex rela­tion­ship. A high­ly per­son­al work, that book also includes the text of the brief but pow­er­ful good­bye let­ter she wrote to Map­plethor­pe, who died of AIDS in 1989. If you go to hear Smith read a let­ter aloud, there’s a decent chance it’ll be that one.

“Often as I lie awake I won­der if you are also lying awake,” Smith wrote to Map­plethor­pe, then in his final hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and already unable to receive any fur­ther com­mu­ni­ca­tion. “Are you in pain, or feel­ing alone? You drew me from the dark­est peri­od of my young life, shar­ing with me the sacred mys­tery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and nev­er com­pose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowl­edge I derived in our pre­cious time togeth­er. Your work, com­ing from a flu­id source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of hold­ing hands with God. Remem­ber, through every­thing, you have always held that hand. Grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let it go.”

Smith speaks these words in the Let­ters Live video at the top of the post, shot just a few weeks ago in The Town Hall in Man­hat­tan. “Of all your work, you are still your most beau­ti­ful,” she reads, “the most beau­ti­ful work of all,” and it’s clear that, 35 years after Map­plethor­pe’s death, she still believes it. That may come across even more clear­ly than in Smith’s ear­li­er read­ing of the let­ter fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture back in 2012. As the years pass, Robert Map­plethor­pe remains frozen in time as a cul­tur­al­ly trans­gres­sive young artist, but Pat­ti Smith lives on, still play­ing the rock songs that made her name in the sev­en­ties while in her sev­en­ties. And unlike many cul­tur­al fig­ures at her lev­el of fame, she’s remained whol­ly her­self all the while — no doubt thanks to inspi­ra­tion from her old friend.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith Remem­bers Robert Map­plethor­pe

Vin­tage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Pat­ti Smith & Robert Map­plethor­pe Liv­ing at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970)

Pat­ti Smith’s Award-Win­ning Mem­oir Just Kids Now Avail­able in a New Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion

Pat­ti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Let­ter De Pro­fundis: See the Full Three-Hour Per­for­mance

Pat­ti Smith Doc­u­men­tary Dream of Life Beau­ti­ful­ly Cap­tures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

The Life and Con­tro­ver­sial Work of Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Map­plethor­pe Pro­filed in 1988 Doc­u­men­tary

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.

How Photos Were Transmitted by Wire in 1937: The Innovative Technology of a Century Ago

When did you last send some­one a pho­to? That ques­tion may sound odd, owing to the sheer com­mon­ness of the act in ques­tion; in the twen­ty-twen­ties, we take pho­tographs and share them world­wide with­out giv­ing it a sec­ond thought. But in the nine­teen-thir­ties, almost every­one who sent a pho­to did so through the mail, if they did it at all. Not that there weren’t more effi­cient means of trans­mis­sion, at least to pro­fes­sion­als in the cut­ting-edge news­pa­per indus­try: as dra­ma­tized in the short 1937 doc­u­men­tary above, the visu­al accom­pa­ni­ment to a suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant scoop could also be sent in mere min­utes through the mir­a­cle of wire.

“Trav­el­ing almost as fast as the tele­phone sto­ry, wired pho­tos now go across the con­ti­nent with the speed of light,” declares the nar­ra­tor in breath­less news­reel-announc­er style. “It’s not a mat­ter of send­ing the whole pic­ture at once, but of sep­a­rat­ing the pic­ture into fine lines, send­ing those lines over a wire, and assem­bling them at the oth­er end.”

Illus­trat­ing this process is a clever mechan­i­cal prop involv­ing two spin­dles on a hand crank, and a length of rope print­ed with the image of a car that unwinds from one spin­dle onto the oth­er. To ensure the view­er’s com­plete under­stand­ing, ani­mat­ed dia­grams also reveal the inner work­ings of the actu­al scan­ning, send­ing, and receiv­ing appa­ra­tus.

This process may now seem impos­si­bly cum­ber­some, but at the time it rep­re­sent­ed a leap for­ward for mass visu­al media. In the decades after the Sec­ond World War, the same basic prin­ci­ple — that of dis­as­sem­bling an image into lines at one point in order to reassem­ble it at anoth­er — would be employed in the homes and offices of ordi­nary Amer­i­cans by devices such as the tele­vi­sion set and fax machine. We know, as the view­ers of 1937 did­n’t, just how those ana­log tech­nolo­gies would change the char­ac­ter of life and work in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. As for what their dig­i­tal descen­dants will do to the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, as they con­tin­ue to break down all exis­tence into not lines but bits, we’ve only just begun to find out.

via Kids Should See This

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Watch a Local TV Sta­tion Switch From Black & White to Col­or for First Time (1967)

Cre­ative Uses of the Fax Machine: From Iggy Pop’s Bile to Stephen Hawking’s Snark

The His­to­ry of Amer­i­can News­pa­pers Has Been Dig­i­tized: Explore 114 Years of Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er, “the Bible of the News­pa­per Indus­try”

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Oldest Known Photographs of India (1863–1870)

After about a cen­tu­ry of indi­rect com­pa­ny rule, India became a full-fledged British colony in 1858. The con­se­quences of this polit­i­cal devel­op­ment remain a mat­ter of heat­ed debate today, but one thing is cer­tain: it made India into a nat­ur­al des­ti­na­tion for enter­pris­ing Britons. Take the aspir­ing cler­gy­man turned Not­ting­ham bank employ­ee Samuel Bourne, who made his name as an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with his pic­tures of the Lake Dis­trict in the late eigh­teen-fifties. When those works met with a good recep­tion at the Lon­don Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of 1862, Bourne real­ized that he’d found his true méti­er; soon there­after, he quit the bank and set sail for Cal­cut­ta to prac­tice it.

It was in the city of Shim­la that Bourne estab­lished a prop­er pho­to stu­dio, first with his fel­low pho­tog­ra­ph­er William Howard, then with anoth­er named Charles Shep­herd. (Bourne & Shep­herd, as it was even­tu­al­ly named, remained in busi­ness until 2016.) Bourne trav­eled exten­sive­ly in India, tak­ing the pic­tures you can see col­lect­ed in the video above, but it was his “three suc­ces­sive pho­to­graph­ic expe­di­tions to the Himalayas” that secured his place in the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy.

In the last of these, “Bourne enlist­ed a team of eighty porters who drove a live food sup­ply of sheep and goats and car­ried box­es of chem­i­cals, glass plates, and a portable dark­room tent,” says the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. When he crossed the Manirung Pass “at an ele­va­tion of 18,600 feet, Bourne suc­ceed­ed in tak­ing three views before the sky cloud­ed over, set­ting a record for pho­tog­ra­phy at high alti­tudes.”

Though he spent only six years in India, Bourne man­aged to take 2,200 high-qual­i­ty pic­tures in that time, some of the old­est — and indeed, some of the finest — pho­tographs of India and its near­by region known today.

In addi­tion to views of the Himalayas, he cap­tured no few archi­tec­tur­al won­ders: the Taj Mahal and the Ram­nathi tem­ple, of course, but also Raj-era cre­ations like what was then known as the Gov­ern­ment House in Cal­cut­ta (see below).

Colo­nial rule has been over for near­ly eighty years now, and in that time India has grown rich­er in every sense, not least visu­al­ly. It hard­ly takes an eye as keen as Bourne’s to rec­og­nize in it one of the world’s great civ­i­liza­tions, but a Bourne of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry prob­a­bly needs some­thing more than a cam­era phone to do it jus­tice.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

Some of the Old­est Pho­tos You Will Ever See: Dis­cov­er Pho­tographs of Greece, Egypt, Turkey & Oth­er Mediter­ranean Lands (1840s)

The Old­est Known Pho­tographs of Rome (1841–1871)

The Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Pho­tos of Iran: Pho­tos from 1850s-60s Cap­ture Every­thing from Grand Palaces to the Ruins of Perse­po­lis

Behold the Pho­tographs of John Thom­son, the First West­ern Pho­tog­ra­ph­er to Trav­el Wide­ly Through Chi­na (1870s)

Around the World in 1896: 40 Min­utes of Real Footage Lets You Vis­it Paris, New York, Venice, Rome, Budapest & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

130+ Photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece Fallingwater

We’ve fea­tured a vari­ety of build­ings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright here on Open Cul­ture, from his per­son­al home and stu­dio Tal­iesin and the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo, to a gas sta­tion and a dog­house. But if any sin­gle struc­ture explains his endur­ing rep­u­ta­tion as a genius of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture, and per­haps the genius of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture, it must be the house called Falling­wa­ter.

Designed in 1935 for Pitts­burgh depart­ment-store mag­nate Edgar J. Kauf­mann and his wife Lil­iane, it sits atop an active water­fall — not below it as Kauf­mann had orig­i­nal­ly request­ed, to name just one of the dis­agree­ments that arose between client and archi­tect through­out the process.

In the event, Wright had his way as far as the posi­tion­ing of the house on the site, as with much else about the project — and so much the bet­ter for its stature in the his­to­ry of archi­tec­ture, which has only risen since com­ple­tion 85 years ago.

Inspired by the Kauf­man­n’s love of the out­doors, as well as his own appre­ci­a­tion for Japan­ese archi­tec­ture, Wright employed tech­niques to inte­grate Falling­wa­ter’s spaces with one anoth­er, as well as with the sur­round­ing nature. Time mag­a­zine wast­ed no time, as it were, declar­ing the result Wright’s “most beau­ti­ful job”; more recent­ly, it’s received high praise from no less a mas­ter Japan­ese archi­tect than Tadao Ando.

When he vis­it­ed Falling­wa­ter, Ando expe­ri­enced first-hand a use of space sim­i­lar to that which he knew from the built envi­ron­ment of his home­land, and also how the house lets in the sounds of nature. Though such a pil­grim­age can great­ly expand one’s appre­ci­a­tion of the house, rare is the view­er who fails to be enrap­tured by pic­tures alone.

Near­ly as astute in the realm of pub­lic­i­ty as in that of archi­tec­ture, Wright would have known that Falling­wa­ter had to pho­to­graph well, a qual­i­ty vivid­ly on dis­play in this archive of 137 high-res­o­lu­tion images at the Library of Con­gress. From it, you can down­load col­or and black-and-white pho­tos of the house­’s exte­ri­or and inte­ri­or as well as its plans, which — so the sto­ry goes — Wright orig­i­nal­ly drew up in just two hours after months of inac­tion. Falling­wa­ter thus stands as not just con­crete proof of once-brazen archi­tec­tur­al notions, but also vin­di­ca­tion for pro­cras­ti­na­tors every­where.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Tour of Falling­wa­ter, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Cre­ations

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

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