From the The Finnish Defence Forces comes the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, a collection of 160,000 photographs taken during World War II when Finland fought to free itself from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Preserved in their original state, the pictures “portray life on the home front, ruins from bombings, the war industry and events that happened behind the front lines.” As you can imagine, some of the photos can be disturbing.
On a brighter note, let me add this. You can download each and every photo, and use them for educational purposes. The archive only asks that you give proper attribution by mentioning “SA-kuva” as the source. And, indeed, “SA-kuva” should be given credit for the image above.
A group of top American libraries and academic institutions launched a new centralized research resource today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), making millions of resources (books, images, audiovisual resources, etc.) available in digital format. First hatched as an idea at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the DPLA is now realizing its vision of being “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”
The Digital Public Library of America rolls out today as a beta site with some kinks to work out. Some links to materials don’t work at the other end. And right now the offering is built around a modest number of online exhibitions that have been digitized by cultural institutions throughout the country, according to Robert Darnton, a driving force behind the DPLA. When you visit the site, a dynamic map and timeline will help you navigate the collections by year, decade or place. It will lead you to exhibitions, for example, about the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal, Boston’s storied sports temples, and Prohibition in the US. Around this core, the DPLA will grow until it truly serves as the digital public library of America.
Five years ago Polaroid announced that they would no longer make analog instamatic film. At that moment, if one listened carefully, one could almost hear some of the 20th century’s most famous artists wail in despair, even from the grave. Ansel Adams loved Polaroid and shot some of his famous Yosemite images in that format first.
But a technique with that kind of following doesn’t die off easily. Two ardent Polaroid fans—ardent enough to actually attend the closure of a Polaroid factory in the Netherlands—met and came up with a plan to save the factory and Polaroid instant film. They called their plan the Impossible Project. They leased one of the Dutch factory buildings and eventually fired up the machines again, turning out new instant film.
Lucky for us. Artists like David Hockney have long made beautiful use of Polaroid instant photos to construct cubist collages. One of the best at this is the Italian photographer Maurizio Galimberti who creates terrific celebrity portraits using a Polaroid.
These days any yahoo with a cell phone and access to the Internet fancies him or herself a Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ruth Orkin or Helen Levitt, but true street photography involves more than just being in the right place at the right time. Brandon Stanton, the self-taught creator of the wildly popular Humans of New York blog, has the dedication as well as the eye and the technical mastery. His curiosity and compassion are abundant, but what really sets his work apart is its 21st century immediacy.
Daily, Stanton wanders the streets of New York, approaches strangers and asks if he can take some pictures. A few hours later, those photos light up Facebook, with captions drawn from the brief collaboration between subject and photographer. In short order, each post garners hundreds of likes and comments. Nasty feedback is a rarity. Stanton’s fans seem content to follow his lead, finding much to celebrate in straightforward poses of parents with children, festively attired seniors, and proud oddballs.
Certain interactions beg longer narratives, which Stanton relates in the “Stories” section of his website. These pieces offer character insights, and often document how the photograph came to be.
His gift for empathy is best exemplified in his portrait of Black Wolf, The Dragonmaster. I’ve run into this dude everywhere from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade to Central Park, but confess that I found his visual presentation off putting. Unlike me, Stanton looked until he found something universal in the deliberate freakishness.
…we all need to feel important. Not New York important, necessarily, but important. We all need to know that there’s a place in this world that only we can fill. Some people need bigger places than others, but everyone needs a place—a hole in the universe that only they can fill. This need is so deep and food-like and so human that we will do anything to fill it. We’ll go crazy to feel important. A protective, evolutionary sort of crazy. When the body has no food, it will break down muscle to feed itself. When the ego has no food, it will break down the mind to feed itself. If we have no place in this world, we’ll withdraw from this world, and inhabit one where we have a place.
Stanton’s lens provides the import, yielding images so arresting, they stop us in our tracks. Appreciate his collection of extraordinary humans, then challenge yourself to notice such specimens in the wild on a daily basis.
Stanley Kubrick (looking like a creepy Rowan Atkinson above) came of age as a chess-hustling photographer in the jazz-saturated New York City of the 1940s. He began taking pictures at the age of thirteen, when his father bought him a Graflex camera. During his teenage years, Kubrick flirted with a career as a jazz drummer but abandoned the pursuit, instead joining LookMagazine as its youngest staff photographer right out of high school in 1945. His regard for jazz music and culture did not abate, however, as you can see from photographs like Jazz Nights below.
Kubrick worked for Look until 1950 (when he left to begin making films); he captured a wide variety of New York scenes, but often returned to jazz clubs and showgirls, two favorite subjects. I’ve often wondered why Kubrick’s hometown plays so small a role in his films. Unlike also NYC-bred Martin Scorsese, Kubrick seemed eager to get as far away as he could from the city of his youth, but the filmmaker’s love of forties-era jazz never left him. According to longtime assistant, Tony Frewin, “Stanley was a great swing-era jazz fan,” particularly of Benny Goodman.
“He had some reservations about modern jazz. I think if he had to disappear to a desert island, it’d be a lot of swing records he’d take, the music of his childhood: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Harry James.”
Frewin is quoted in this Atlantic piece about a film Kubrick almost made but didn’t: an exploration of jazz in Europe under the Third Reich. The project began when Kubrick encountered a book in 1985, Swing Under the Nazis, written by another jazz enthusiast, Mike Zwerin, who left music for journalism and spent years collecting stories of jazz preservationists in Germany and formerly occupied Europe. One of those stories—of Nazi officer Dietrich Schulz-Koehn—struck Kubrick as Strangelove-ian and noir-ish. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter reporting back from various jazz scenes in Europe under the pen name, “Dr. Jazz,” the title Kubrick chose for the film project. As Frewin claims:
“Stanley thought there was a kind of noir side to this material…. Perhaps an approach like Dr. Mabuse would have suited the story. Stanley said, ‘If only he were alive, we could have found a role for Peter Lorre.’ ”
Zwerin’s book—and presumably Kubrick’s ideas for a fictionalized take—traced clandestine connections between Nazi Germany, Paris, and the United States, between black and Jewish musicians and Nazi music-lovers. We’ll have to imagine the odd angles and warped perspectives Kubrick would have found in those stories; his fascination with Nazis led him to drop Dr. Jazz for a different project, Aryan Papers, another unmade film with its own intriguing backstory.
What’s surprising about Everest Base Camp is the color. It’s a flinty, gray place littered with shards of Himalayan sandstone and shale. Here and there appears a vivid green pool of alpine water. And then there’s the red, blue and green prayer flags hung by Himalayans to blow blessings in the wind.
Google Street View’s latest project, the World’s Highest Peaks, takes us to Everest and two other mountains included in the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on each of the seven continents.
Teams of mountaineers toted digital cameras on treks to the top of each mountain and integrated their images into Google maps so we can trek along with them from the comfort of our laptops, iPhones or Android devices. Like Google Street View’s Ocean gallery, the mountain images bring us to places we may never see with our own eyes.
It’s easy to imagine the dry, cold climate at Camp Colera, where hikers wait for the weather to permit a climb of Aconagua, the highest mountain in the Andes. The views of Tanzania from Arrow Glacier are breathtaking. Hikers camp here before making the treacherous ascent to Uhuru—the “rooftop of Africa” and the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
One of the things Google does really well is create galleries of images that are the kind we might take ourselves, not filtered-lens professional shots that belong on calendars. We see mountaineers resting and hanging out at the frosty Casa de Piedra, on the way up to Aconagua, hikers picnicking at Lemosho Glades as they switch from jeep to foot on the climb up Kilimanjaro, and the weird, abandoned diesel barrels that serve as shelter for folks climbing Mount Elbrus in Russia.
As usual, Google lets us in on the process of collecting all these images with a fun blog written by the photographers.
In March 1988, the BBC’s Arena turned its lens toward photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The television documentary series had already spent well over a decade cultivating a reputation for covering everything—Superman, Philip K. Dick, the fallen Soviet empire, the Ford Cortina—but some viewers must still have felt a bit startled by the choice of such a controversial artist, let alone by how mild and non-threatening he ultimately seems. Mapplethorpe had made his name both in portraiture, especially of musicians, and in highly charged erotic imagery. This latter current in his work, did not, of course, please everybody. By the time the Arena profile aired, Mapplethorpe, suffering from AIDS, would have only one year of life remaining, with the worst of the high-profile battles over his artistic value and/or “obscenity” still to come.
Though wary of extinguishing the mystery of his photographs by saying too much about them, Mapplethorpe does reveal what sounds like an important element of his motivation, especially in the face of the obscenity charges: “I wanted to retain the forbidden feeling of pornography and make an art statement, to make something uniquely my own.” We see the man at work, and we hear a good deal more from him in an on-camera interview. Novelist Edmund White appears to provide context and commentary, as do several of the people Mapplethorpe photographed, both those who sought fame and those who otherwise avoided it. Covering Mapplethorpe’s life as much as it does his work, the broadcast naturally includes a conversation with Patti Smith, noted rocker and perhaps the photographer’s closest friend. For ideal supplementary reading, have a look at Smith’s Mapplethorpe-centric memoir Just Kids, about which we’ve postedbefore.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present FOUND, a new site that features a curated collection of photography from the National Geographic archives. Launched as part of NatGeo’s 125th anniversary celebration (hopefully we’re around in another 119 years too!), FOUND showcases “photographs that reveal cultures and moments of the past.” Many of these rare photos have never been published. We picked an immediate favorite from the collection: Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel kissing within a tetrahedral kite, one of his many inventions, in October 1903. You can start perusing the photo archive here.
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