In 2009, Swedish artist Johanna Mårtensson read an article that described how well the Earth would do if humans simply ceased to exist. Within a few centuries, most buildings would be collapsed or collapsing as animals, plants and bacteria re-established the social order in cities once ruled by the curious primate Homo sapien.

The article got her creative juices flowing, and ultimately led to a photo installation called “Decor:” a city built by Mårtensson entirely out of bread, and left to decompose as she took daily photos over the course of 6 months. Read more…

The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it’s also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.
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design mind has an interesting post titled “Aged to Perfection” that explores the issue of whether or not consumer gadgets age gracefully as time and use wear them down. They specifically compare a 3-year-old iPhone with a 7-year-old Canon compact film camera:

The camera’s emulated metallic finish is only surface-deep and its wear tends to emphasizes awkward artifacts of the injection molding process used to create it. At this point the Canon camera’s shell looks like garbage while the iPhone’s is starting to resemble something more like an heirloom pocket watch.

They also make the point that a product’s original “new” look normally only lasts a brief amount of time, while the user is forced to live with the “aged” look as the product decays. It would be interesting to see how modern cameras compare in terms of their “aged” look rather than what they look like out of the box. Have your cameras aged well?

Aged to Perfection (via Wired)

Image credit: Photographs by Remy Labesque of design mind