The photographic story of Sebastião Salgado doesn’t begin when he was handed a camera as a child. It, like a few others we’ve shared, begins much later in life (after a PhD in economics) when photography, as Salgado puts it, “made a total invasion into [his] life.” Read more…
Eight years ago, it was discovered that some of the earliest daguerreotypes ever taken were fading away before our very eyes. Given the historical significance of these photographs, watching them deteriorate over time was unacceptable. So, in an attempt to save them, George Eastman House has enlisted the help of the University of Rochester. Read more…
It’s nearly impossible to find a photograph in China taken before 1970 — most images were destroyed or removed to other countries during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
A professor at Bristol University in the UK is running a project in search of these lost images, the BBC reports:
Such photographs are exceptionally rare in China. The turbulent history of the 20th Century meant that many archives were destroyed by war, invasion and revolution. Mao Zedong’s government regarded the past as a “black” time, to be erased in favour of the New China. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s finished the job.
“If you were at all savvy,” says (Professor Robert) Bickers, “you realised early on that you had to destroy your own private family records, before the Red Guards came and found evidence of your bourgeois, counter-revolutionary past, when you might have drunk coffee in a café bar, à la mode.”
Bill Gates’ image licensing company Corbis has collection of more than 100 million photographs, including some of history’s most iconic images. CBS was recently given a rare peek inside the company’s photo preservation facility at Iron Mountain — a maximum security cold storage facility in a mine deep underground.
