Underneath Manhattan’s West Side Highway, between 135th and 12th avenue, photographer Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography discovered something pretty cool: at least 100 old disconnected payphones stacked unceremoniously and rusting away. Read more…
Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. As the economy slowed, the Danish American photographer found himself among the many other immigrants in the area whose daily life consisted of joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide. So when he finally found work as a police reporter in 1877, he made it his mission to reveal the crime and poverty of New York City’s East Side slum district to the world.
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About a year ago, I was sitting around narcissistically Google-ing myself when I came across the photo above of “Robert C. Paetz + Mother”. It was dated 1923 and was being sold for $12 by a man named Paul in Northern California.
I quickly did the math and figured it was my 93-year-old grandfather and my great-grandmother, Matilda (who eventually lived until 102 when I was 16).
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Have you ever wondered why the professional photography industry is dominated by cameras that carry on the design tradition that was started by classic film SLRs?
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A few days ago, we told you about an app called Koloid that allowed iOS users to capture some of the look and feel of wet collodion photography using their iPhone. The $1 app let you not only take photos, but ‘develop’ them as well by tilting your phone to run chemicals over them.
The new app Tintype doesn’t go quite that far, but when it comes to authenticity, creator Michael Newton has made sure that his app brought the most accurate looking tintype processing possible to the iOS world. Read more…
What you see above is an ultra-high resolution aerial photograph of San Francisco as it looked in 1938. The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection put the image together using 164 large format black-and-white photos of SF that were shot in 1938. When viewed through a zoomable image viewer, the composite photo is pretty much a 1938 version of Google Earth’s satellite view.
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When the Chinese military moved into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989 to forcibly remove pro-democracy protestors, an anonymous man famously decided to place himself in front of the long column of Chinese tanks that were rumbling into the area. Photos and videos of the incident were immediately published and broadcast around the world. AP photographer Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century.
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Next time a significant other bugs you about how much you spend on photo gear, remind them how much worse it could be if you were into vintage kit.
Such as the 1931 Leica IIIa shown above, owned by the great Alfred Eisenstaedt and used to shoot everything from his iconic V-J Day image of a sailor kissing a girl in Times Square to a portrait session with President Bill Clinton. The camera sold at Vienna auction house last weekend for 114,000 Euros, equivalent to $147,117.
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In 1951, a diesel-powered US Navy submarine called the U.S.S. Catfish passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and did a short tour of San Francisco Bay. While there, the crew decided to snap some photographs of San Francisco… through its periscope.
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