Sculpted busts give us an idea of what ancient Roman emperors looked like, but what if they had posed for photo portraits? That's what designer/cinematographer Daniel Voshart explores using AI and Photoshop in his Roman Emperor Project.
Portrait photos from over a century ago rarely show subjects smiling, but this 19th century photo is an exception, and it's been going viral online for that reason.
The Smithsonian just made a public domain contribution that it's calling "unprecedented in both depth and breadth." In one fell swoop, the institution is adding over 2.8 million images to an online platform called Open Access, where you can browse and download images for free.
Back in the Tsarist era, a fad for posing in fake boats, planes, and automobiles resulted in some of Russia’s quaintest portraits.
Paris Musées, a group of 14 public museums in Paris, has made a splash by releasing high-res digital images for over 100,000 artworks through a new online portal. All the works were released to the public domain (CC0, or "No Rights Reserved"), and they include 62,599 historic photos by some of the most famous French photographers such as Eugene Atget.
Photography has never been faster to made and share than in our modern "insta" era, but over half a century ago, it was American scientist Edwin Land and his company Polaroid that helped the industry take a giant step forward in speed and ease. PBS NewsHour just aired this 5-minute segment that looks at Polaroid's history and influence.
A largely forgotten bit of photographic history might be of interest: the civil war between realism and pictorialism.
There are plenty of well-known firsts in the history of photography, but the question of what the oldest animal photo is has thus far been an unsettled one. But a newly-surfaced photo of cows may possibly be the oldest animal photograph discovered thus far.
To mark the 159th anniversary of the first aerial photo in the United States, CBS Sunday Morning aired this 2-minute Almanac segment about the landmark photo by photographer James Wallace Black and how aerial photography has developed since then.
A set of historical photographs of the Amazon captured by German photographer Albert Frisch over 150 years ago have sold at Sotheby's auction house for $81,250. The images offer a rare, fascinating glimpse at what life was like in Brazil's Upper Amazon.
I'm Martin from the All About Street Photography channel, and today I would like to talk about a photo taken by legendary war photographer Robert Capa -- a photo that is both very famous and also somewhat controversial.
Digital cameras can see in color in near darkness these days, but decades ago, there were very different solutions for capturing usable photos at night. One example is the photoflash bomb, a special type of bomb that was designed specifically to explode in midair and illuminate the world below for aerial photos.
What's up, photography fans? It's Martin here from All About Street Photography, and today I want to talk about the story behind the famous photo Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Town Hall) by French photographer Robert Doisneau.
A new exhibition in Los Angeles will feature crime scene photos captured by police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department from between 1925 and the 1970s.
This month, Hasselblad is celebrating the 50th anniversary of becoming "the first camera on the moon." And in addition to sharing some beautiful photos taken of and with the iconic Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) and Hasselblad Electric Camera (HEC) used on the moon, they also shared a bit of fascinating history: their original moon landing press release from 1969.
Photographs have the power to bring issues to the forefront of public consciousness and spark change in society. Here's a 6.5-minute video by Vox that tells the story of how photographer Lewis Wickes Hine helped end child labor in the United States.
In my work travels, I recently met someone who gave me an interesting gift. Several years back he had been driving down a back road in Virginia and came across an old, abandoned farmhouse. He stopped and peeked in to see if anyone was using the place (you can’t be too careful about what you run across that looks abandoned these days), and saw only cobwebs.
Back in 1970, artist David Young purchased a box of old news photos at a Philadelphia thrift store. After moving to Seattle, Young put the box in his kitchen cabinet and forgot about it for years. It turns out that box contains unseen 1930s crime photos by the famed New York City photographer Weegee.
YouTuber Guy Jones created this 20-minute video that offers a brief history of street photography. It's a slideshow of 182 photos -- one photo for every year between 1838 and 2019.
The modern orotone can be created in a number of ways, the most popular using a coating of liquid emulsion on a glass plate with a gelatine base. This method produces some excellent results with a minimum of effort.
Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, was one of the infamous dictator's primary propagandists, and tens of thousands of the photographer's photos exist on glass plate negatives. Now a large number of those rare photos are being revealed with a new level of clarity through a digitization effort by the National Archives.
During the Vietnam War in 1969, Beatles' singer John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged a now-famous "Bed-In for Peace" at the Hilton Amsterdam. Govert De Roos was a 15-year-old photographer at the time who desperately wanted to cover the event, and he managed to sneak in by making his own fake press pass.
Before Instagram, selfie sticks, disposable cameras, Polaroids, and box brownies, there were carte de visites -- small photographic albumen prints, mounted on card, which were wildly popular during the Victorian era.
I want to give you a brief overview of an investigation that began almost five years ago, led by me but involving the efforts of photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, photo historian Rob McElroy, and ex-infantryman and amateur military historian Charles Herrick.
Before the self timer and remote shutter release appeared in the world of cameras, photographers had a much trickier time getting themselves into group photos if they didn't have an assistant to help expose the shot. But a vintage photo has surfaced showing one photographer's clever solution to this problem.
Dorothea Lange's 1936 photo Migrant Mother is an iconic photo of the Great Depression. The Nerdwriter made this fantastic 6-minute video that tells the behind-the-scenes "story of how Dorothea Lange created perhaps the most iconic photograph in American history."
U.S.-trained Afghans photographed the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. These rare color photos bring the U.S.S.R.'s "hidden war" to light.
If you're a fan of old and unusual cameras, the new KGB Spy Museum in New York City is something you may want to put on your list of museums to visit. Located in Manhattan, the space features a huge collection of spy cameras created during the Soviet era among 3,500 exhibits.
Back in 1865, if you wanted to be a photographer, you needed to be patient, determined, and a bit crazy (not all that different from today, though for different reasons). As an artist and photographer, exploring new methods and mediums is an important part of the journey.
Want to see what life in the streets of Paris was like over a century ago in the late 1890s? Film restorer Guy Jones collected old footage shot between 1896 and 1900, slowed it down to a natural speed, and added sound for ambiance. This beautiful 6-minute experience is what resulted.
Want to see how the city of San Francisco has transformed over the past century? Here's a neat set of then-and-now photos showing old shots of The City by the Bay next to modern pictures shot in the same locations.
The New York Times has teamed up with Google Cloud for digitizing five to seven million old photos in its archive. Google's AI will also be tasked with unearthing "untold stories" in the massive trove of historical images.
Check out this monster of a camera. It was the world's largest camera back in 1900, built for the specific purpose of shooting the largest photo in the world of the "handsomest train in the world."
A while back, I had another roundtable discussion at the Film Photographers Association. This time the subject was Still Life Photography. It is a genre we all take for granted and include in it a great variety of photographs. I would like to explore the origins of still life in painting, how it came to photography, and eventually expanded in coverage and scope.
In 1921, the satirical magazine The Judge published this two-panel comic about how you look in photos. It's strikingly similar to the "Expectation vs. Reality" memes that circulate the Web today, and the comic is one of the earliest recorded memes.
In the 1950s, early color photography was widely scorned. Now it’s the default. What happened?
Back in 1911, the Swedish film production company Svenska Biografteatern visited New York City during a trip to America and shot footage of various street scenes. The film has survived through the years in mint condition, and YouTuber Guy Jones created this fascinating 8-minute edit after slowing down the footage to a natural rate and adding in ambient sounds.
How's this for a lucky photo find: a 19th-century tintype photo purchased from eBay for just $10 has been identified as an extremely rare portrait of the infamous outlaw Jesse James... worth an estimated $2 million+.
She was Leningrad's lost photographer. Russian photographer Masha Ivashintsova (1942-2000) photographed constantly but never showed her work to anyone. In late 2017, a relative stumbled on boxes of negatives and undeveloped film gathering dust in an attic. Published here, some for the first time, are some of the 30,000 images from the remarkable discovery.
Diane Arbus was honored with an obituary by the New York Times today, 46 years after the renowned American portrait photographer died. It was one of 15 obituaries published today as part of a project titled Overlooked.