Featuring a collection of glass plate, nitrate and acetate negatives, the living archive tells “the story of San Francisco, its transition from a stretch of sand dunes to an internationally acclaimed city, it’s rise from the rubble of the devastating earthquake of 1906 and the vital role public transportation played and continues to play in revitalizing the city.” The archive contains nearly 5,000 images, all neatly divided into 14 collections. You can enter the archive and start perusing here.
One of the great polymaths of the 19th century, Lewis Carroll (pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) —mathematician, logician, author, poet, Anglican cleric—took to the new medium of photography with the same alacrity he applied to all of his pursuits. Though he may be described as a hobbyist in the sense that he never pursued the art professionally, he nonetheless “became a master of the medium, boasting a portfolio of roughly 3,000 images and his very own studio.”
So says a recent article by Gannon Burgett on Carroll’s “24-year career as a photographer,” during which he made a number of portraits, including one of then-poet laureate of England Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His subjects also included “landscapes, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, trees and even skeletons.”
Carroll excelled at a developing method called the wet collodion process, which replaced the daguerreotype as the primary means of photographic image-making. This process seems to have been something like painting in oils, requiring a great deal of dexterity and chemical know-how, and similarly subject to decay when done improperly. Carroll particularly valued this method for its difficulty (he described it in detail in some lines added to a poem called “Hiawatha’s Photographing”)—so much so that once a dry developing process came into being, he abandoned the medium altogether, complaining that it became so easy anyone could do it. Carroll’s obsessive focus on process mirrored an obsession with his favorite photographic subjects, young children, including Tennyson’s son Hallam (above). Most famously, Carroll obsessively photographed the young Alice Liddell (top and below as “The Queen of May”), daughter of family friend Henry George Liddell and inspiration for Carroll’s most famous fictional character.
Many of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children can seem downright prurient to our eyes. As Carroll’s biographer Jenny Woolf writes in a 2010 essay for the Smithsonian, “of the approximately 3,000 photographs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children—30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude.”
Some of his portraits—even those in which the model is clothed—might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were… well, rather conventional. Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits—skillfully done—were praised as art studies […]. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself.
Woolf admits that Carroll’s interest, as scholars have speculated for decades, may have been less than innocent, prompting Vladimir Nabokov to propose “a pathetic affinity” between Carroll and the narrator of Lolita. The evidence for Carroll’s possible pedophilia is highly suggestive but hardly conclusive. Burgett summarizes the claims as only speculative at best: “The entire controversy is an almost century-long debate, and one that doesn’t seem to be making any major progress in either direction.” In a Slate review of Woolf’s Lewis Carroll biography, Seth Lerer also acknowledges the controversy, but reads the photographs of Alice, her sisters, and friends as representative of larger trends, as “brilliant testimonies to the taste, the sentiment, and perhaps the sexuality of mid-Victorian England.”
A great part of this Victorian sensibility consists of the “recognition that all life involves role-playing,” hence the recurring photos of the girls in dress-up—as figures from myth and literature and exotic Orientalist characters, such as the photo above of Alice and her sister Lorina as “Chinamen.” “These are the tableaux of Victorian melodrama,” writes Lerer, “images on stage-sets of the imagination.” We see another of Carroll’s favorite photographic subjects, Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin, daughter of a colleague, also given the Orientalist treatment below, posed as an off-duty tea merchant.
Carroll’s carefully staged child photographs are very much like those of other photographers of the period like Mary Cowden Clarke and Julia Margaret Cameron, who also photographed Alice Liddell, even into her adulthood. Cameron’s photographs also included child nudes, to a similar effect as Carroll’s—the depiction of a “state of grace” in which children appear as nymphs, “gypsies” or other such types supposedly belonging to Edenic worlds untouched by adult cares. Given the context Woolf, Lerer and others provide, it’s reasonable to view Carroll’s child photography as consistent with the tastes of the day. (Though no one suggests this as an alibi for Carroll’s possibly troubling proclivities.)
As it stands, the photographs of Alice and other children open a fascinating, if sometimes discomfiting, window on an age that viewed childhood very differently than our own. They also give us a view of Carroll’s strange inner world, one not unlike the unsettling fantasy realm of 20th century folk artist Henry Darger. Unlike Darger, Carroll’s work brought him widespread fame in his lifetime, but like that reclusive figure, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was a shy, introspective man whose imaginative landscape possessed a logic all its own, charged with magic, threat, and longing for lost childhood innocence.
See a galleries of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children here and here, and see this site for more general info on Carroll’s photography.
Suffering from tuberculosis, André Villers spent eight long years at a sanatorium in the French Riviera town of Vallauris, starting in 1947. There, while recovering, he learned photography, refined his craft, and later shot portraits of Europe’s great artists — Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, to name a few. Villers met Picasso in 1953 and stayed at his side for close to a decade, writes The Age, “quietly observing and shooting the man at work and at play.” In the image above, we find Picasso most certainly at play. Apparently Pablo threw on some random clothes one day, and said “Look at me, I am Popeye!” That scene is recorded for posterity with the great image above. Click to view it in a larger format.
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Last summer we told you that the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content Program by taking 4600 high-resolution images from the Getty collections, putting them into the public domain, and making them freely available in digital format. We also made it clear — there would be more to come.
Yesterday, the Getty made good on that promise, adding another 77,000 images to the Open Content archive. Of those images, 72,000 come from the Foto Arte Minore collection, a rich gallery of photographs of Italian art and architecture, taken by the photographer and scholar Max Hutzel (1911–1988).
All images in the Getty Open Content program — now 87,000 in total — can be downloaded and used without charge or permission, regardless of whether you’re a scholar, artist, art lover or entrepreneur. The Getty only asks that you give them attribution.
You can start exploring the complete collection by visiting the Getty Search Gateway. Images can also be accessed via the Museum’s Collection webpages. Be sure to look for the “download” link near the images.
For more information on the Open Content program, please visit this page. For more open content from museums, see the links below.
What do we have here? Painter Paul Gauguin playing a harmonium at the Paris studio of Alphonse Mucha, a Czech Art Nouveau painter, in or around 1895. How this came about — how Gauguin decided to strip off his pants and shoes and start playing that pump organ — we’ll probably never know. But we’re certainly glad that this light moment was saved for posterity.
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In late 2012, an exhibition called Shoot! Existential Photography was held in London. And it traced the history of an unusual attraction that started appearing in European fairgrounds after World War I — the photographic shooting gallery. It worked something like this: A contestant paid a little money, and tried to hit the center of a target with a gun. If he or she hit the target, a camera took a photo, and instead of winning a little toy, the contestant received a snapshot of him or herself shooting the gun. According to the exhibition, this side-show “fascinated many artists and intellectuals in its heyday, including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Man Ray and Lee Miller.” You can see a gallery of photos here. But above, we have a picture of de Beauvoir and Sartre at the shooting gallery together. Taken at the Porte d’Orléans fairground in Paris in June, 1929 — the same year the young philosophers met — this photograph is, according to the blog Avec Beauvoir, the couple’s first picture together. Do note that de Beauvoir apparently hit the target with her eyes closed. You can click the image to see it in a larger format.
On the History in Color Facebook page, artist Dana Keller presents a series of colorized historical photographs, helping to “remove that barrier between the past and our modern eyes, drawing us a little bit closer to the reality in which the photo was taken.” In the example above, we see impressionist painterClaude Monet standing next to paintings from his famous Water Lilies series. Given what he did with color in his paintings, it seems only fitting that we should see the man himself in color.
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Founded in 1997, Getty Images has made a business out of licensing stock photography to web sites. But, in recent years, the company has struggled, facing stiffer competition from other companies .… and from online piracy. Quoted in the British Journal of Photography, Craig Peters, a Senior VP at Getty Images, observes that Getty is “really starting to see the extent of online infringement. In essence, everybody today is a publisher thanks to social media and self-publishing platforms. And it’s incredibly easy to find content online and simply right-click to utilise it.” All of this becomes a problem, for Getty, when cash-strapped “self publishers, who typically don’t know anything about copyright and licensing,” start right clicking and using the company’s images without attribution or payment.
Fighting a losing battle against infringers, Getty Images surprised consumers and competitors yesterday when it announced that it would make 35 million images free for publishers to use, with a few strings attached. Publishers, broadly defined, are now allowed to add certain Getty images to their sites, on the condition that they use embed code provided by the company. That embed code (find instructions here) will ensure that “there will be attribution around that image,” that “images will link back to [Getty’s] site and directly to the image’s details page,” and that Getty will receive information on how the images are being used and viewed.
Not every Getty image can be embedded — only 35,000,000 of the 80,000,000 images in Getty’s archive. And, to be sure, many of those 35 million Getty images are stock photos that will leave you uninspired. But if you’re willing to sift patiently through the collection, you can find some gems, like the shots featured above of some great jazz legends — Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and John Coltrane.
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