About a month ago, we shared the news that the George Eastman House had become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project — essentially making their archive of over 400,000 photos and negatives available for your browsing pleasure online.
Along those same lines, another collection of over 20,000 “rare and significant materials” is being brought to the World Wide Web. Launched earlier today, the Balboa Park Commons is an online archive that brings together over 20,000 digitized materials from seven different San Diego museums. Read more…
Opened in 1949, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York is the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography. It’s world renowned for its collection of more than 400,000 photos and negatives dating back to when the medium was first invented.
If you would like to check out some of the museum’s photos but can’t make the trip out to Rochester, there’s now a sleek new way for you to browse the imagery. The museum announced this week that it has become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project. Read more…
Los Angeles-based musician Paz Dylan recently pulled a pretty funny prank on the Grammy Museum in LA. He made a series of informational wall display pieces featuring strange descriptions and photographs of himself eating tacos, and then hung them up on the walls of the museum next to the real pieces. That’s pretty clever, but get this: no one noticed, and the pieces stayed up for a month.
The photograph above is a piece he made for the “Wall of Fame.” Read more…
Although Adobe Photoshop’s introduction in 1990 spawned the term “Photoshopping”, the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.” The show will feature 200 ‘shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive. Read more…
A 22-year-old Houston artist named Uriel Landeros made news this past week after walking into Houston’s Menil Collection museum and vandalizing a priceless 1929 Picasso painting titled Woman in a Red Armchair. A fellow museum patron captured cell phone footage of Landeros spray painting the word “conquista” onto the painting using a stencil. The painting was rushed to the museum’s conservation lab for an emergency restoration, and Landeros was just arrested and charged with two third-degree felonies. Read more…
Back in the days before every photo was tagged and shared with family, friends and strangers alike, a photograph was a rare, prized possession. In the Civil War era it wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to carry a small tintype of a family member into battle, and if they died, sadly so did all of the information about that photo. That’s why the Museum of the Confederacy needs your help.
They’ve had eight of these unidentified tintypes in their possession for over 60 years, but now, using the power of the internet, they’re hoping they might be able to identify the photos’ subjects and shed some proper light on these people’s history. If you think you might be able to help, head to the museum’s website to take a look at all eight pictures and maybe, just maybe, help them identify one.
Typically, augmented reality falls somewhere between technological breakthrough and really cool thing to show your friends; but in the Science Museum in London’s Making of the Modern World exhibit, augmented reality also takes up the mantle of education.
Using the $3 Science Stories app, visitors to the museum can point their iOS or Android devices at markers set in front of particular exhibits, and prompt a 3-dimensional James May (one of the hosts of BBC’s Top Gear) to appear and explain the particulars of the display. Read more…
The George Eastman House in Rochester, NY is the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography. A couple years ago, curator Todd Gustavson wrote a book on the history of photography featuring the museum’s gigantic collection of historical cameras. This behind-the-scenes video with Gustavson gives a glimpse into the drool-worthy warehouse and a brief tour of some legendary cameras.
Kaufmann’s Posographe is an intricate pocket-sized mechanical calculator invented back in the 1920s. Measuring 13x8cm and filled with tiny scribblings, the device allowed photographers to approximate the exposure values they needed by simply sliding around six small pointers. Read more…
Leica and Sony aren’t the only camera companies that slice their cameras and lenses down the middle to give the world a peek at their guts — Canon does it too. On the first floor of one of its headquarter buildings in Japan is a small museum that has a cross-sectioned Canon 1Ds DSLR and 400mm f/4 DO IS USM lens on display. Back in the day, the camera had a price of $5,500 and the lens cost $8,900, meaning Canon sliced nearly $15,000 of gear in half for this display. Read more…
