The Interior of the Hindenburg Revealed in 1930s Color Photos: Inside the Ill-Fated Airship

in History, Photography | November 10th, 2015

We’ve all seen the Hindenburg. Specifically, we’ve all seen it exploding, an incident captured on film on that fateful day of May 6, 1937 — fateful for those aboard, of course, but also fateful for the passenger airship industry, which never recovered from this worst of all possible press. The contemporary rise of Pan American Airlines didn’t help, either, so now, when we want to go to a faraway land, we’ve usually got to take a jet. I happen to be moving to Korea tomorrow, and to get there I simply don’t have the choice of an airship (Hindenburg- class or otherwise) nor have I ever had that choice. I’ve thus never seen the inside of an airship — until today.

These color images reveal the interior of not just any old 1930s airship but the Hindenburg itself, looking as genteel and well-appointed as you might expect, with accommodations up to and including, somewhere below its hydrogen-filled balloon, a smoking room. It brings to mind Sideshow Bob’s offhand comment on one Simpsons episode lamenting the passage of “the days when aviation was a gentleman’s pursuit, back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.” But then, it also brings to mind another episode in which Bart gets a checkbook printed with flipbook-style images of the famous Hindenburg disaster newsreel footage.

That clip, often dubbed with Herbert Morrison’s “Oh, the humanity!” reportorial narration, has familiarized us with the last large passenger airship’s exterior, but these images of its interior have had less exposure. For more, have a look at Airships.net: a Dirigible and Zeppelin History Site, which offers a wealth of detail on the Hindenburg’s passenger decks, control car, flight instrument, flight controls, crew areas, and keel.

The more you learn about airships, the more intriguing a form of travel they seem — until you learn about all the other disasters that preceded the Hindenburg, anyway. And that aside, given its top speed of 84 miles per hour, it would take a similarly retro airship at least seven times longer to get me to Korea than a jet, so I guess I’ll have to stick with the airlines for now.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Poignant and Unsettling Post-Mortem Family Portraits from the 19th Century

in Life, Photography | November 5th, 2015

The 19th century witnessed the birth of photography. And, before too long, Victorian society found important applications for the new medium — like memorializing the dead. A recent post on a Dutch version of National Geographic notes that “Photographing deceased family members just before their burial was enormously popular in certain Victorian circles in Europe and the United States. Although adults were also photographed, it was mainly children who were commemorated in this way. In a period plagued by unprecedented levels of infant mortality, post-mortem pictures often provided the only tangible memory of the deceased child.”

Though unusual by modern standards, the pictures played an important role in a family’s grieving process and often became one of its cherished possessions — cherished because it was likely the only photo of the deceased child that families had. During the early days of photography, portraits were expensive, which meant that most families didn’t take pictures during the course of everyday life. It was only death that gave them a prompt.

The practice of taking post mortem pictures peaked in the 19th century, right around the time when “snapshot” photography became more prevalent, allowing families to take portraits at a lower cost, when everyone was in the full swing of life. Hence obviating the need for post-mortem photos. You can learn more about this bygone practice by visiting the Burns Archive or getting the book, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.

via Dutch Nat Geo/ Science Dump

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

in Art, Literature, Photography | November 5th, 2015

When photographers specialize in portraits of famous people, they often speak of finding a visual way to reveal their oft-photographed subject’s rarely exposed nature; to bring their depths, in other words, to the surface. Man Ray (1890–1976), the Surrealist photographer and artist, had his own way of doing most everything, and he certainly had his own approach to celebrity portraiture. Take, for example, his 1923 shot of Ernest Hemingway above, taken just a couple years after both the writer and photographer joined the moveable feast of Paris, which Man Ray would call home for most of his career.

That same year and in that same urban bohemia, Man Ray photographed another famed man of letters, the modernist poet Ezra Pound. You can see the somewhat more conventional-looking result of that encounter just above. Below, we have a far less conventional-looking portrait from 1922, which takes as its subject the dancer Bronislava Nijinska, who perhaps only counts as famous to you if you know the history of 20th-century ballet — but I say anyone willing to appear in a portrait looking that frightening has earned all the fame they can get.

Marcel Duchamp, who appears below, sat for Man Ray in 1921 looking less scary than silly, but as one of the wittiest and most artistically forward-thinking figures of the era, he surely got the joke. These appear in the book Man Ray: Paris — Hollywood — Paris, which collects 500 of the portraits Man Ray left in his archives when he died in 1976, all of “members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater.”

You can sample more such works, which capture as only Man Ray would the natures of such icons as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Lee Miller, at Mondo Blogo. You can also find many more works, in general, by Man Ray on the MoMA’s website.

via Flavorwire

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Hand-Colored 1860s Photographs Reveal the Last Days of Samurai Japan

in History, Photography | November 3rd, 2015

Any fan of samurai movies knows the elaborate lengths some productions can go to in order to recreate the look and feel of old Japan, but globetrotting Italian-British photographer Felice Beato (1832 — 1909) actually managed to capture those days on celluloid first-hand. He arrived in Japan in 1863, at the very twilight of the era of the samurai, a time he documented evocatively with a series of hand-colored photographs of subjects like “kimonos, parasols, baby’s toys, basket sellers, courtesans at rest and a samurai gang ready for action,” as the Guardian lists them in their gallery of Beato’s Japanese work.

“After spending over two hundred years in seclusion, Japan was being forced by the Americans — under a mission led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry — to expand its trade with the west,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, describing the unprecedented moment of Japanese history in which Beato found himself, one that provided the opportunity to photograph not just the last of the samurais but also the courtesans they loved. But all this had its risks: “Travel was dangerous in Japan,” Gallagher adds, “with many of the Shogunate samurai warriors killing westerners,” a fate Beato narrowly avoided at least once.

Having photographed in Constantinople, India, and China before Japan, Beato moved on after it to other parts of Asia, including Korea and Burma, before returning to his native Italy at the very end of his life. But his pictures of Japan remain among the most striking of his entire career, perhaps because of their artistic use of color, perhaps because of a historical time and place that we think we’ve come to know through so many sword-and-suicide epics. Their characters, from the honor-bound samurai to the sly courtesan to the simple merchant, can seem to us a bit theatrical as a result, but Beato’s photographs remind us that they all began as very real people. Who might they inspire to make a film about their real lives?

via The Guardian/Dangerous Minds

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Artist as Artist’s Model: Au Naturel Portraits of Frida Kahlo Taken by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938)

in Art, Museums, Photography | October 30th, 2015

Frida Kahlo’s legacy is definitely informed by her careful husbandry of own image. She understood its currency, and how to leverage it. Even when caught out of uniform or having a seemingly unaware laugh, she stayed true to what in modern parlance would be called her brand.

So it is with gallery owner Julien Levy’s 1938 (technically not-safe-for-work) photographs of the artist, taken the year before he hosted her first solo show, an event that caused Time magazine to rhapsodize that “the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s…wife, Frida Kahlo.”

Rivera’s wife was also Levy’s lover, as these artfully posed, semi-clad photos suggest. They show a less public side of Kahlo, to be sure, but one that’s in keeping with the face she presented to the world.

Frankly, the revelation of her partially loosed hair seems more intimate than her dishabille.

Click here to see the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of Levy’s Kahlo portraits, both with and without rebozo.

To learn a little more about Julien Levy (“a gallery owner who committed his charisma, connections, and personal resources to establishing photography’s importance in the field of modern art”) and the collection bequeathed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, click here.

Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Browse Paintings, Photos, Papers & More in the Archive of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, America’s Original Art Power Couple

in Art, Photography | October 13th, 2015

Does any couple loom larger in the world of twentieth-century American art than Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe? Not if you believe the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. If you go there, you’ll find “thousands of letters and hundreds of photographs in addition to a collection of literary manuscripts, scrapbooks, ephemera, fine art, and realia, primarily dating between 1880 and 1980, which document the lives and careers of the photographer/publisher/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe.” But you can even view some of its material here on the internet, including photos by and of “Stieglitz and his circle of artists and writers” and “a variety of paintings and drawings, letters and ephemera, and medals and awards.”

The online archive does, of course, contain some paintings from O’Keeffe, such as House I Live in 1937 at the top of the post or, more in line with her famously floral focus, Pink Roses just below. But you’ll also find behind-the-work personal artifacts like the 1929 image of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe together at Lake George, New York just above. You can browse through all the material available with this list, or you can filter it down to the items pertaining specifically to O’Keeffe or those pertaining specifically to Stieglitz, though in life the two had an “instant mental and physical attraction” that kept them on some level inseparable during the course of their forty-year relationship.

They even enjoyed a kind of artistic togetherness during the long-distance stretches of that relationship, when O’Keeffe “discovered her love for the landscape of the American Southwest and spent increasing amounts of time living and working there.”

And while many of us already know about her favorite subjects and the ways in which she realized them on canvas, fewer of us know about the efforts Stieglitz took to make photography into not just a legitimate but respected art form. To get a sense of what that took, start with Stieglitz’s autochromes (below), some of the earliest ventures made by an American artist into the realm of color photography. Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, each in there own medium, made us see things differently. How many art-world power couples can say the same?

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

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

Whitney Museum Puts Online 21,000 Works of American Art, By 3,000 Artists

Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

1902 French Trading Cards Imagine “Women of the Future”

in History, Photography | October 7th, 2015

The lag time between our imagining of social equality and its arrival can be significantly long indeed, or it least it can seem so, given the limitations of human mortality. 113 years may not be an especially long time for a tree, say, or even a very healthy Galapagos tortoise, but if you or I had been alive in 1902, chances are we’d never know that in 2015 the president of Europe’s most powerful nation is a woman, as are two major presidential candidates in the United States. Given the amount of inequality we still see worldwide, this may not always feel like a triumph. In 1902, it might have seemed like “nothing but fantasy.”

And yet even then, it was certainly possible to foresee women occupying all the roles that men did, through the lenses, writes Laura Hudson at Boing Boing, of “fantasy and science fiction,” which “can often help us open our minds behind the limitations of the world we live in and imagine a better one instead.” In 1902, artist Albert Bergeret was commissioned to create the trading cards you see here—just a small selection of twenty total photographs called “Les Femmes de l’Avenir”—Women of the Future. Only one theme among many in a series of different sets of cards, this “retrofuturistic attempt to expand the role of women in society” showed us a “small and fashionable world” where “women were given a more equal role in society, not to mention spectacular hats.”

That may be so, but just as we can never accurately see the future, we can also never reach consensus on the meaning of the past. The Daily Mail’s Maysa Rawi agrees with Hudson about the “pin-up quality to many of the images,” which show “an awful lot of arm.” And yet Rawi disparages the entire set as “meant to capture men’s fantasies rather than be part of any feminist movement.” I’ll admit, I don’t see the cards this way at all, nor do I think the categories are mutually exclusive. Pin-up girls have also represented social power, albeit mainly sexual power. Scantily-clad female superheroes like Wonder Woman, though crafted to appeal to the fantasies of teenage boys, are also powerful because… well, they have superpowers.

Perhaps that’s one way to look at Bergeret’s cards. He is not mocking his subjects, nor hyper-sexualizing them, but presenting, as each card indicates, advanced futuristic beings who didn’t yet exist in his time. The Daily Mail captions several of the photos with factoids about women’s advances in French history. In some cases, Bergeret did not have to extrapolate far. Women could practice law in 1900; women served in the army during the French Revolution, but did not fight. Colleges had been open to women since 1879. A few women worked as doctors and journalists in Bergeret’s time. Marie Curie, you’ll recall, had discovered polonium, coined the term “radioactivity,” and would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Queen Victoria had ruled over half the world.

But French women would have to wait several more decades to enter most of the professions represented. No matter how sexy—and in some cases ridiculous—some of the costumes in these photos, Bergeret shot the models with poise, style, and dignity. Perhaps he and many in his audience could easily imagine female generals, mayors, firewomen, soldiers, etc. Yet one particular card stands out. It portrays a self-satisfied, Bohemian model labeled “rapin”—which a reader below informs us is “an argot word for (bad) painter.”

via Boing Boing

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

8,400 Stunning High-Res Photos From the Apollo Moon Missions Are Now Online

in Photography, Science | October 5th, 2015

The Apollo program, launched in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, flew its first manned mission in 1968, and the following summer, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin met the program’s mandate, making their historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing. In the ensuing few years, several more spacecraft and crews either orbited or landed on the Moon, and for a brief moment, popular magazines and newspapers regularly featured photographs of those expeditions on their covers and front pages. Looking every bit the authentic vintage Hasselblad photos they are, the images you see here were taken by Apollo astronauts on their various missions and sent home in rolls of hundreds of similar pictures.

These astronauts snapped photos inside and outside the spacecraft, in orbit and on the moon’s surface, and in 2004 NASA began digitizing the resulting cache of film. Luckily for the public, devoted space enthusiast and archivist, Kipp Teague—an IT director at Lynchburg College in Virginia—has posted a huge number of these photos (8,400 to be exact) on his Project Apollo Archive Flickr account.

Teague initially began acquiring the photos in collaboration with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, “a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.” Understandably, so many people expressed interest in the photographs that Teague reformatted them in higher resolution and gave them their own home on the web. The Planetary Society informs us, “every photo taken on the lunar surface by astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras is included in the collection.”

While Teague and Jones’ other sites use photos that have been processed to increase their clarity, lighting, and color, the photos on Project Apollo Archive remain in their original state. “Browsing the entire set,” writes the Planetary Society, “takes on the feeling of looking through an old family photo album.” Indeed, especially if you grew up in the late-sixties/early-seventies at the height of the space program’s popularity.

A good many of the photos are rather procedural shots of craters and clouds, especially those from earlier missions. But quite a few frame the breathtaking vistas, technical details, and awestruck, if exhausted, faces you see here. So many photos were taken and uploaded in succession that clicking rapidly through a photostream can produce an almost flipbook effect. You can browse the archive by album, each one representing a reel from different Apollo missions—including that famous 11th (top, and below)—though Teague has yet to post high resolution images from Apollo 8 and 13.

It seemed after Apollo’s demise in the mid-seventies that photographs like these documented a lost age of NASA exploration, and that the once-great government agency would cede its innovative role to private companies like Elon Musk’s Space X, who have been much less forthcoming about releasing media to the public, making proprietary claims over their space photography in particular. But thanks in part to Space X and the cooperation of Canadian, European, Russian, and Japanese space programs, NASA’s International Space Station has raised the agency’s public profile considerably in the past several years. Though still painfully underfunded, NASA’s cool again.

Even more profile-raising is the Mars Rover program, whose recent finding of water has refueled speculations about life on the Red Planet. As films like the recent, astronaut-approved The Martian and a raft of others show, our collective imagination has long bent toward human exploration of Mars. Establishing a base on Mars, after all, is Space X’s stated mission. Looking at these stunning vintage photos of the Apollo Lunar missions makes me long to see what the first astronauts to walk on Mars send back. We probably won’t have to wait long once they’re up there. We’ll likely get Instagram uploads, maybe even some with fake vintage Hasselblad filters. It won’t be quite the same; few current events can compete with nostalgia. But I like to think we can look forward in the near future to a renaissance of manned—and woman-ed—space exploration.

See many hundreds more Apollo Lunar Mission photos at Project Apollo Archive and follow the archive on Facebook for updates.

via The Planetary Society

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Interior of the Hindenburg Revealed in 1930s Color Photos: Inside the Ill-Fated Airship

Poignant and Unsettling Post-Mortem Family Portraits from the 19th Century

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

Hand-Colored 1860s Photographs Reveal the Last Days of Samurai Japan

The Artist as Artist’s Model: Au Naturel Portraits of Frida Kahlo Taken by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938)

Browse Paintings, Photos, Papers & More in the Archive of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, America’s Original Art Power Couple

1902 French Trading Cards Imagine “Women of the Future”

8,400 Stunning High-Res Photos From the Apollo Moon Missions Are Now Online

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