A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World

in Biology, K-12, Photography, Science, Technology | March 30th, 2018

Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breath­less with the antic­i­pa­tion of catch­ing Poké­mon on your phone screen?

If so, you might enjoy bag­ging some of the Pokeverse’s real world coun­ter­parts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new pho­to-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion app. It does for the nat­ur­al world what Shaz­am does for music.

Aim your phone’s cam­era at a non­de­script leaf or the grasshop­per-ish-look­ing crea­ture who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get bet­ter acquaint­ed.

Reg­is­tered users can pin their finds to their per­son­al col­lec­tions, pro­vid­ed the app’s recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces a match.

(Sev­er­al ear­ly adopters sug­gest it’s still a few house­plants shy of true func­tion­al­i­ty…)

Seek’s pro­tec­tive stance with regard to pri­va­cy set­tings is well suit­ed to junior spec­i­men col­lec­tors, as are the vir­tu­al badges with which it rewards ener­getic upload­ers.

While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is build­ing a pho­to library, com­posed in part of user sub­mis­sions.

(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)

(Dit­to your Por­to­bel­lo Mush­room burg­er…)

Down­load Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.

via Earth­er/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Google Launches Three New Artificial Intelligence Experiments That Could Be Godsends for Artists, Museums & Designers

in Art, Photography, Technology | March 9th, 2018

You’ll recall, a few months ago, when Google made it pos­si­ble for all of your Face­book friends to find their dop­pel­gängers in art his­to­ry. As so often with that par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny, the fun dis­trac­tion came as the tip of a research-and-devel­op­ment-inten­sive ice­berg, and they’ve revealed the next lay­er in the form of three arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-dri­ven exper­i­ments that allow us to nav­i­gate and find con­nec­tions among huge swaths of visu­al cul­ture with unprece­dent­ed ease.

Google’s new Art Palette, as explained in the video at the top of the post, allows you to search for works of art held in “col­lec­tions from over 1500 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions,” not just by artist or move­ment or theme but by col­or palette.

You can spec­i­fy a col­or set, take a pic­ture with your phone’s cam­era to use the col­ors around you, or even go with a ran­dom set of five col­ors to take you to new artis­tic realms entire­ly.

Admit­ted­ly, scrolling through the hun­dreds of chro­mat­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar works of art from all through­out his­to­ry and across the world can at first feel a lit­tle uncan­ny, like walk­ing into one of those hous­es whose occu­pant has shelved their books by col­or. But a vari­ety of promis­ing uses will imme­di­ate­ly come to mind, espe­cial­ly for those pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the aes­thet­ic fields. Famous­ly col­or-lov­ing, art-inspired fash­ion design­er Paul Smith, for instance, appears in anoth­er pro­mo­tion­al video describ­ing how he’d use Art Palette: he’d “start off with the col­ors that I’ve select­ed for that sea­son, and then through the app look at those col­ors and see what gets thrown up.”

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, Google’s Art Rec­og­niz­er, the sec­ond of these exper­i­ments, uses machine learn­ing to find par­tic­u­lar works of art as they’ve var­i­ous­ly appeared over decades and decades of exhi­bi­tion. “We had recent­ly launched 30,000 instal­la­tion images online, all the way back to 1929,” says MoMA Dig­i­tal Media Direc­tor Shan­non Dar­rough in the video above. But since “those images did­n’t con­tain any infor­ma­tion about the actu­al works in them,” it pre­sent­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use machine learn­ing to train a sys­tem to rec­og­nize the works on dis­play in the images, which, in the words of Google Arts and Cul­ture Lab’s Freya Mur­ray, “turned a repos­i­to­ry of images into a search­able archive.”

The for­mi­da­ble pho­to­graph­ic hold­ings of Life mag­a­zine, which doc­u­ment­ed human affairs with char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly vivid pho­to­jour­nal­ism for a big chunk of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, made for a sim­i­lar­ly entic­ing trove of machine-learn­able mate­r­i­al. “Life mag­a­zine is one of the most icon­ic pub­li­ca­tions in his­to­ry,” says Mur­ray in the video above. “Life Tags is an exper­i­ment that orga­nizes Life mag­a­zine’s archives into an inter­ac­tive ency­clo­pe­dia,” let­ting you browse by every tag from “Austin-Healey” to “Elec­tron­ics” to “Live­stock” to “Wrestling” and many more besides. Google’s invest­ment in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has made the his­to­ry of Life search­able. How much longer, one won­ders, before it makes the his­to­ry of life search­able?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s Free App Ana­lyzes Your Self­ie and Then Finds Your Dop­pel­ganger in Muse­um Por­traits

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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Photographer Puts Her Archive of Photos Documenting the 1970s New York Punk Scene on Instagram: Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Lydia Lunch, Tom Verlaine, and Even Jean Michel Basquiat

in Music, Photography | February 1st, 2018

Just when you think the fabled down­town New York 70s punk scene cen­tered around CBG­Bs has no more secrets to offer, anoth­er home­grown doc­u­men­tar­i­an appears to show us pho­tographs (on Insta­gram) we’ve nev­er seen and tell some pret­ty nifty sto­ries to go along with them. Julia Gor­ton came to New York from her native Delaware in 1976 and used a Polaroid cam­era to cap­ture her first­hand encoun­ters with leg­ends like Deb­bie Har­ry, Pat­ti Smith, David Byrne, Tom Ver­laine, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch (below), “a nat­ur­al for the glam­orous black-and-white pho­tos I liked to make,” she says, and a “a real part­ner” in Gorton’s enter­prise and her most-pho­tographed sub­ject.

In Christi­na Cacouris’ inter­view with Gor­ton at Garage, we learn that the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “end­ed up meet­ing Tom’s mom [Tele­vi­sion singer and gui­tarist Tom Ver­laine] at the flea mar­ket in Wilm­ing­ton [Delaware]. She was a proud mom who played her son’s sin­gle on a cas­sette play­er in the back of her sta­tion wag­on while she sold things on a fold­ing table.”

Exact­ly this kind of inti­ma­cy and fam­i­ly atmos­phere per­vades Gorton’s work in the punk clubs, down­town streets, and record stores. Like most of the per­form­ers onstage, Gor­ton was a rel­a­tive ama­teur, learn­ing her craft along­side the musi­cians and artists she pho­tographed. “You didn’t need to be per­fect before you start­ed,” she says.

Although she found her lack of tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty frus­trat­ing, in hind­sight, Gor­ton says, “images that I per­ceived at the time as fail­ures actu­al­ly rep­re­sent the true char­ac­ter of the time peri­od more hon­est­ly and pow­er­ful­ly than the images I thought were ‘suc­cess­ful.’” In many cas­es, how­ev­er, it has tak­en 21st cen­tu­ry dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy to unearth some of her most reveal­ing shots.

The cost of film pro­hib­it­ed her from tak­ing mul­ti­ple expo­sures, and the dark­ness of CBG­Bs left many prints too murky. Using Pho­to­shop, Gor­ton has been able to revis­it many of these seem­ing­ly failed attempts, like the moody por­trait above of Tom Ver­laine. “I was able to scan and final­ly pull him out of the shad­ows of decades past,” she mus­es.

Along with the glam­our of her por­traits, Gorton’s can­did shots of the peri­od cap­ture down­town leg­ends in rare moments and pos­es. (Check out John Cale above at CBG­Bs, for exam­ple, or Jean Michel Basquiat, then known as SAMO, danc­ing on the right, below.) Shot while she was a stu­dent at the Par­sons School of Design, Gorton’s pho­tos of the punk, New Wave, and No Wave scene were the begin­ning of her long career as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, illus­tra­tor, and graph­ic design­er.

On her Insta­gram feed, 70s and 80s images mix in with her cur­rent projects, and the jux­ta­po­si­tion of con­tem­po­rary musi­cians and artists with their coun­ter­parts from 40 years ago gives a sense of the long con­ti­nu­ity reflect­ed in Gorton’s engage­ment with street art and under­ground rock cul­ture. Explore her pho­to col­lec­tion here.

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Watch an Episode of TV-CBGB, the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Sit­com Ever Aired on Cable TV (1981)

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of CBGB, the Ear­ly Home of Punk and New Wave

Pat­ti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Record­ed Con­certs, Joined by Sem­i­nal Punk Band Tele­vi­sion (1975)

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

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Wim Wenders Explains How Polaroid Photos Ignite His Creative Process and Help Him Capture a Deeper Kind of Truth

in Film, Photography | January 31st, 2018

Wim Wen­ders began his pro­lif­ic fea­ture film­mak­ing career in 1970, and near­ly half a cen­tu­ry lat­er — hav­ing direct­ed such cinephile favorites as Alice in the Cities, The Amer­i­can Friend, Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire along the way — he shows no signs of slow­ing down. Known for his col­lab­o­ra­tion with cin­e­matog­ra­phers, and with Rob­by Müller in par­tic­u­lar, Wen­ders has worked in every­thing from black-and-white 16-mil­lime­ter film, when he first start­ed out, to dig­i­tal 3D, which he’s spent recent years putting to a vari­ety of cin­e­mat­ic ends. But we can trace all of his visions back, in one way or anoth­er, to the hum­ble Polaroid instant cam­era.

“Every movie starts with a cer­tain idea,” says Wen­ders in the short “Pho­tog­ra­phers in Focus” video above, and the Polaroid was just a col­lec­tion of con­stant ideas.” The auteur speaks over images of some of the Polaroids he’s tak­en through­out his life, relat­ing his his­to­ry with the medi­um.

“My very first Polaroid cam­era was a very sim­ple one. Mid-six­ties. I was 20, and I used Polaroid cam­eras exclu­sive­ly until I was about 35 or so. Most of them I gave away, because when you took Polaroids, peo­ple were always greedy and want­ed them because it was an object, it was a sin­gu­lar thing.”

Wen­ders describes his Polaroids as “very insight­ful into the process of my first six, sev­en movies, all the movies I did through the sev­en­ties,” the era in which he mas­tered the form of the road movie first in his native Ger­many, then in the much-mythol­o­gized Unit­ed States. He not only shot Polaroids in prepa­ra­tion, but dur­ing pro­duc­tion, snap­ping them casu­al­ly, much as one would on a gen­uine road trip. “Polaroids were nev­er so exact about the fram­ing. You did­n’t real­ly care about that. It was about the imme­di­a­cy of it. It’s almost a sub­con­scious act, and then it became some­thing real. That makes it such a win­dow into your soul as well.” Polaroid pho­tographs, as Wen­ders sees them, cap­ture a deep­er kind of truth. It’s no sur­prise, then, even in age of the 3D dig­i­tal cam­era, to see them mak­ing a come­back.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wim Wen­ders Reveals His Rules of Cin­e­ma Per­fec­tion

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Watch Lau­rence Olivi­er, Liv Ull­mann and Christo­pher Plummer’s Clas­sic Polaroid Ads

Gun Nut William S. Bur­roughs & Gonzo Illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man Make Polaroid Por­traits Togeth­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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Virginia Woolf’s Personal Photo Album Digitized & Put Online by Harvard: See Candid Snapshots of Woolf, Her Family, and Friends from the Bloomsbury Group

in Literature, Photography | January 29th, 2018

Some writ­ers are rest­less by nature, roam­ing like Ernest Hem­ing­way or Hen­ry Miller, set­tling nowhere and every­where. Oth­ers are home­bod­ies, like William Faulkn­er and Vir­ginia Woolf. Their fic­tion reflects their desire to nest in place. Strolling the grounds of Faulkner’s Rowan Oak one swel­ter­ing sum­mer, I swear I saw the author round a cor­ner of the house, lost in thought and wear­ing rid­ing clothes. Vis­i­tors to Vir­ginia Woolf’s home in the vil­lage of Rod­mell in East Sus­sex have sure­ly had sim­i­lar visions.

Woolf’s home con­tains her writ­ing life with­in the lush gar­den grounds and cot­tage walls of the 17th cen­tu­ry Monk’s House—Vir­ginia and Leonard’s retreat, then per­ma­nent home, from 1919 until her sui­cide by drown­ing in the near­by Riv­er Ouse in 1941.

Even in death she belonged to the house; Leonard buried her ash­es beneath an elm in the Monk’s House gar­den. Although Leonard was the gar­den­er, “there are very few entries” in Virginia’s diary “which do not men­tion the gar­den.”

But there are many oth­er ways to meet the author of Mrs. Dal­loway and Jacob’s Room than trav­el­ing to her writer’s lodge, a tidy, tiny house on the Monk’s House grounds that served as her office. Like an avid Instragrammer—or like my moth­er and prob­a­bly yours—Woolf kept care­ful record of her life in pho­to albums, which now reside at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The Monk’s House albums, num­bered 1–6, con­tain images of Woolf, her fam­i­ly, and her many friends, includ­ing such famous mem­bers of the Blooms­bury group as E.M. Forster (above, top), John May­nard Keynes, and Lyt­ton Stra­chey (below, with Woolf and W.B. Yeats, and play­ing chess with sis­ter Mar­jorie). Har­vard has dig­i­tized one album, Monk’s House 4, dat­ed 1939 on the cov­er. You can view its scanned pages at their library site.

There are vaca­tion pho­tos and fam­i­ly pho­tos; land­scapes and pho­tos of pets; clip­pings from news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines; and, of course, the gar­den. The albums span the peri­od 1890 to 1947 (includ­ing addi­tions by Leonard after Virginia’s death). Many of the pho­tos are labeled, many are not. Many of the albums’ pages are left blank. The pho­tographs are arranged in no par­tic­u­lar order. The net effect is that of a life rec­ol­lect­ed in preg­nant images laced with lacu­nae, a psy­cho­log­i­cal theme of so much of Woolf’s writ­ing. Woolf, writes Mag­gie Humm, “believed that pho­tographs could help her to sur­vive those iden­ti­ty-destroy­ing moments of her own life—her inco­her­ent ill­ness­es.”

But pho­tog­ra­phy was also a means for cul­ti­vat­ing rela­tion­ships. Woolf “skill­ful­ly trans­formed friends and moments into art­ful tableaux, and she was sur­round­ed by female friends and fam­i­ly who were also ener­getic pho­tog­ra­phers,” includ­ing her sis­ter, Lady Otto­line Mor­rell, her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, and her great aunt Julia Mar­garet Cameron. She “fre­quent­ly invit­ed friends to share her reflec­tions. The let­ters and diaries describe a con­stant exchange of pho­tographs, in which the pho­tographs become a meet­ing-place, a con­ver­sa­tion, aide-mémoires, and some­times mech­a­nisms of sur­vival and entice­ment.”

Unlike Monk’s House, a world built and shared with her hus­band, Woolf’s albums rep­re­sent her own per­son­al net­work of rela­tion­ships. They serve as memo­ri­als and med­i­ta­tions after the deaths of those close to her. “Pho­tographs of friends were impor­tant memen­to mori,” such as the por­trait of poet Julian Bell, above, her nephew, who was killed in the Span­ish Civ­il War. The pho­tos doc­u­ment gath­er­ings and impor­tant life events among her social cir­cle. They per­form all the tasks of ordi­nary pho­to albums, and more—showing us the “chain of per­cep­tions” of which per­son­al iden­ti­ty is made in Woolf’s mod­ernist vision, with rep­e­ti­tions and sequences cen­tered around famil­iar objects like her favorite chair.

For fans, avid read­ers, crit­ics, and lit­er­ary his­to­ri­ans, the pho­tographs pro­vide a visu­al record of a life we come to know so well through the let­ters, diaries, and romans à clef. Writ­ing to her sis­ter, Woolf once described paint­ing a por­trait “using dozens of snap­shots in the paint.” Vis­it her pho­to album here at the Har­vard Library site, and flip through the pages of her life in snap­shots.

via @HarvardTheatre

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Vir­ginia Woolf

In the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Her Voice, Vir­ginia Woolf Explains Why Writ­ing Isn’t a “Craft” (1937)

The Steamy Love Let­ters of Vir­ginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925–1929)

Why Should We Read Vir­ginia Woolf? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

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

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Google’s Free App Analyzes Your Selfie and Then Finds Your Doppelganger in Museum Portraits

in Art, Google, Museums, Photography, Technology, Web/Tech | January 12th, 2018

Hav­ing the abil­i­ty to vir­tu­al­ly explore the his­to­ry, back sto­ries, and cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance of art­works from over a thou­sand muse­ums gen­er­ates nowhere near the excite­ment as a fea­ture allow­ing users to upload self­ies in hopes of locat­ing an Insta­gram-wor­thy dop­pel­gänger some­where in this vast dig­i­tal col­lec­tion.

On the oth­er hand, if this low-brow inno­va­tion leads great hordes of mil­len­ni­als and iGen-ers to cross the thresh­olds of muse­ums in over 70 coun­tries, who are we to crit­i­cize?

So what if their pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion is snap­ping anoth­er self­ie with their Flem­ish Renais­sance twin? As long as one or two devel­op a pas­sion for art, or a par­tic­u­lar muse­um, artist, or peri­od, we’re good.

Alas, some dis­grun­tled users (prob­a­bly Gen X‑ers and Baby Boomers) are giv­ing the Google Arts & Cul­ture app (iPhone-Android) one-star reviews, based on their inabil­i­ty to find the only fea­ture for which they down­loaded it.

Allow us to walk you through.

After installing the app (iPhone-Android) on your phone or tablet, scroll down the home­page to the ques­tion “Is your por­trait in a muse­um?”

The sam­pling of art­works fram­ing this ques­tion sug­gest that the answer may be yes, regard­less of your race, though one need not be a Gueril­la Girl to won­der if Cau­casian users are draw­ing their match­es from a far larg­er pool than users of col­or…

Click “get start­ed.” (You’ll have to allow the app to access your device’s cam­era.)

Take a self­ie. (I sup­pose you could hedge your bets by switch­ing the cam­era to front-fac­ing ori­en­ta­tion and aim­ing it at a pleas­ing pre-exist­ing head­shot.)

The app will imme­di­ate­ly ana­lyze the self­ie, and with­in sec­onds, boom! Say hel­lo to your five clos­est match­es.

In the name of sci­ence, I sub­ject­ed myself to this process, grin­ning as if I was sit­ting for my fourth grade school pic­ture. I and received the fol­low­ing results, none of them high­er than 47%:

Vic­to­rio C. Edades’ Moth­er and Daugh­ter (flat­ter­ing­ly, I was pegged as the daugh­ter, though at 52, the resem­blance to the moth­er is a far truer match.)

Gus­tave Courbet’s Jo, la Belle Irlandaise (Say what? She’s got long red hair and skin like Snow White!)

Hen­ry Inman’s por­trait of Pres­i­dent Mar­tin Van Buren’s daugh­ter-in-law and defac­to White House host­ess, Angel­i­ca Sin­gle­ton Van Buren (Well, she looks ….con­ge­nial. I do enjoy par­ties…)

 and Sir Antho­ny van Dyck’s post-mortem paint­ing of Vene­tia, Lady Dig­by, on her Deathbed (Um…)

Hop­ing that a dif­fer­ent pose might yield a high­er match I chan­neled artist Nina Katchadouri­an, and adopt­ed a more painter­ly pose, unsmil­ing, head cocked, one hand lyri­cal­ly rest­ing on my breast­bone… for good mea­sure, I moved away from the win­dow. This time I got:

Joseph Stella’s Boy with a Bag­pipe (Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea with regard to my self-image?)

Cipri­ano Efsio Oppo Por­trait of Isabel­la (See above.)

Adolph Tidemand’s Por­trait of Guro Sil­vers­dat­ter Tra­ven­dal (Is this uni­verse telling me it’s Babush­ka Time?)

Johannes Chris­tiann Janson’s A Woman Cut­ting Bread (aka Renounce All Van­i­ty Time?)

and Anders Zorn’s Madon­na (This is where the mean cheer­leader leaps out of the bath­room stall and calls me the horse from Guer­ni­ca, right?)

Mer­ci­ful­ly, none of these results topped the 50% mark, nor did any of the exper­i­ments I con­duct­ed using self­ies of my teenage son (whose 4th clos­est match had a long white beard).

Per­haps there are still a few bugs to work out?

If you’re tempt­ed to give Google Arts and Culture’s exper­i­men­tal por­trait fea­ture a go, please let us know how it worked out by post­ing a com­ment below. Maybe we’re twins, I mean, triplets!

If such folderol is beneath you, please avail your­self of the app’s orig­i­nal fea­tures:

  • Zoom Views — Expe­ri­ence every detail of the world’s great­est trea­sures
  • Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty — Grab your Google Card­board view­er and immerse your­self in arts and cul­ture
  • Browse by time and col­or — Explore art­works by fil­ter­ing them by col­or or time peri­od
  • Vir­tu­al tours — Step inside the most famous muse­ums in the world and vis­it icon­ic land­marks
  • Per­son­al col­lec­tion — Save your favorite art­works and share your col­lec­tions with friends
  • Near­by — Find muse­ums and cul­tur­al events around you
  • Exhibits — Take guid­ed tours curat­ed by experts
  • Dai­ly digest — Learn some­thing new every time you open the app
  • Art Rec­og­niz­er — Learn more about art­works at select muse­ums by point­ing your device cam­era at them, even when offline
  • Noti­fi­ca­tions — sub­scribe to receive updates on the top arts & cul­ture sto­ries

Down­load Google Arts and Cul­ture or update to Ver­sion 6.0.17 here (for Mac) or here (for Android).

Note: We’re get­ting reports that the app does­n’t seem to be avail­able in every geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion. If it’s not avail­able where you live, we apol­o­gize in advance.

via Good House­keep­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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19-Year-Old Student Uses Early Spy Camera to Take Candid Street Photos (Circa 1895)

in Photography | January 12th, 2018

We are gen­er­al­ly accus­tomed to think­ing of 19th cen­tu­ry pho­tog­ra­phy as quite sta­t­ic and rigid, and for much of its ear­ly his­to­ry, tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions ensured that it was. Por­trai­ture espe­cial­ly pre­sent­ed a chal­lenge to ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phers, since it involved sub­jects who want­ed, or need­ed, to move, while long expo­sure times called for max­i­mum still­ness. Thus, we have the stiff, unsmil­ing pos­es of peo­ple try­ing to make like trees and stay plant­ed in place.

One strik­ing excep­tion, from 1843, shows us a jovial group­ing of three men in the first known pic­ture of mer­ry-mak­ing at the pub. Though staged, and includ­ing one of the duo of pho­tog­ra­phers respon­si­ble for the por­trait, the image has all the vital­i­ty of an off-the-cuff snap­shot. We might be sur­prised to learn that it would only be a few decades lat­er, before the turn of the cen­tu­ry, when tru­ly can­did shots of peo­ple in action could be made with rel­a­tive ease.

Not only were many of these pho­tos can­did, but many were also secre­tive, the prod­uct of the C.P. Stirn Con­cealed Vest Spy Cam­era. The images here come from one such cam­era hid­den in the but­ton­hole of Carl Størmer, a Nor­we­gian math­e­mati­cian and physi­cist who was at the time a 19-year-old stu­dent at the Roy­al Fred­er­ick Uni­ver­si­ty. Størmer strolled the streets of Oslo, greet­ing passers­by and, unbe­knownst to them, tak­ing the por­traits you see here, which show us peo­ple from the peri­od in relaxed, active pos­es, going about their dai­ly lives, “often smil­ing,” writes This is Colos­sal, “and per­haps caught off guard from the young stu­dent angling for the shot.”

The Con­cealed Vest Cam­era was invent­ed by Robert D. Gray, notes Cam­er­a­pe­dia. In 1886, C.P. Stirn bought the rights to the device, and his broth­er Rudolf man­u­fac­tured them in Berlin. The cam­era came in two sizes, “one for mak­ing four 6cm wide round expo­sures… the oth­er with a small­er lens fun­nel, for mak­ing six 4cm wide round expo­sures.” Mar­ket­ed by Stirn & Lyon in New York, the cam­eras sold by the tens of thou­sands (as the ad above informs us).

Størmer’s own cam­era was the small­er ver­sion, as we learn from his com­ments to the St. Hal­l­vard Jour­nal in 1942: “I strolled down Carl Johan, found me a vic­tim, greet­ed, got a gen­tle smile and pulled. Six images at a time and then I went home to switch [the] plate.” The future sci­en­tist, soon to be known for his work on num­ber the­o­ry and his sta­tus as an author­i­ty on polar auro­ra, took around 500 such secret pho­tographs. (See 484 of them at the Nor­we­gian Folke­mu­se­um site.) He even man­aged to get a shot of Hen­rik Ibsen, just above.

The Stirn Vest Cam­era joins a num­ber of oth­er ear­ly clan­des­tine imag­ing devices, includ­ing a tele­scop­ic watch cam­era made in 1886 and book cam­era from 1888. Spy cam­eras were refined over the years, becom­ing essen­tial to espi­onage dur­ing two World Wars and the ensu­ing con­test for glob­al suprema­cy dur­ing the Cold War. But Størmer’s pho­to­graph­ic inter­ests became more ger­mane to his sci­en­tif­ic work. “Togeth­er with O.A. Krognes,” writes the Nor­we­gian North­ern Lights site Nordlys, he “built the first auro­ral cam­eras” and took “more than 40,000 pic­tures” of the phe­nom­e­na (learn more about such work here).

Størmer’s North­ern Lights pho­tos are much hard­er to find online than the charm­ing but­ton­hole cam­era por­traits from his stu­dent days. But just above, see an image from eBay pur­port­ing to show the sci­en­tist and pho­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­ast bun­dled up behind a cam­era, pho­tograph­ing the auro­ra.

via Bored Pan­da/This is Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

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

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

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5,000+ Photographs by Minor White, One of the 20th Century’s Most Important Photographers, Now Digitized and Available Online

in Photography | January 2nd, 2018

Barn + Corn (Vicin­i­ty of Dans­ville, New York), 1955. From The Minor White Archive, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Art.

When the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Minor White died in 1976, after a pro­lif­ic career and an epic jour­ney of a life, he left his archives to Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. But it took about forty years before that insti­tu­tion could make the col­lec­tion tru­ly avail­able to the world in the form of the Minor White Archive online. He became “one of the most impor­tant pho­to­graph­ic artists of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry” and “a key fig­ure in shap­ing a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern Amer­i­can pho­to­graph­ic style,” as the archive’s “About” page puts it, by cap­tur­ing the images of humans, land­scapes urban and rur­al, and even abstract sub­jects, all the while pur­su­ing new and ever more per­son­al ways to cap­ture them.

In his end­less search for inspi­ra­tions with which to refine his pho­to­graph­ic prac­tice, White seemed to turn down no poten­tial source. Not only did he put in time with such colos­sal pre­de­ces­sors in Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­phy as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward West­on, and Ansel Adams (who taught him, among oth­er things, his reli­able “visu­al­iza­tion” tech­nique), he also drew deeply from less con­ven­tion­al wells: the I Ching, Zen med­i­ta­tion, mythol­o­gy, astrol­o­gy, Gestalt psy­chol­o­gy, and the mys­tic phi­los­o­phy of G. I. Gur­d­ji­eff (who also had an influ­ence on the com­ic per­sona of Bill Mur­ray).

“To some in the 1960s and ‘70s,” remem­bers one­time asso­ciate John Weiss, “Minor White was a deity. Every word was an invo­ca­tion. To oth­ers he was a self-pro­mot­er, a fraud, talk­ing non­sense.”

Chi­na­town 1953. From The Minor White Archive, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Art.

Either way, White was above all a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Prince­ton’s dig­i­tal archive fea­tures more than 5,000 of his pho­tographs (and oth­er mate­ri­als like proof cards, con­tact sheets, and even jour­nals) free to view online.  It offers “a com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of White’s career,” as Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon writes, “from his ear­ly cap­tures of Port­land, Ore­gon in 1938 to his lat­est work in 1974 of por­traits and land­scapes tak­en around the US.” Have a look through the archive, start­ing at its search page and, once there, either enter­ing search terms or brows­ing by sub­ject or loca­tion, and you’ll see why, when it comes to Amer­i­can pho­to­graph­ic art, Minor was very much major.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Fran­cis Stewart’s Cen­sored Pho­tographs of a WWII Japan­ese Intern­ment Camp

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

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

200,000 Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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