Some of the earliest photographic portraits taken in America were recently discovered in an unheated shed on Long Island. The historically significant find contains photographs from some of the first experiments with the daguerreotype process.
A set of more than 300 photos from the NASA Apollo missions collected by historian J.L. Pickering are set to be auctioned and feature vintage photos and film strips, many of which are considered to be extremely rare.
The only photo captured of Neil Armstrong on the moon is up for auction along with approximately 2,400 vintage original photographs showcasing NASA's golden age of space exploration, many never seen by the public. It is the most comprehensive private collection of NASA photographs ever presented at auction.
The Civil War wasn't the first war to be photographed, but the leaps and bounds that photographic technology had taken leading up to the war in 1861 enabled American photographers at the time to come out en masse when news of the attack on Fort Sumter came.
Many photos came out of the war, showing everything from the horrifically scarred back of an escaped slave, to the bravado of young confederate soldiers. In the video above, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Photography and the American Civil War" exhibit Jeff L. Rosenheim walks us through some of those photos, explaining the role each one played in documenting four years of bloodshed.
Photographic history doesn't get much classier than this: above we have what may very well be the first ever photograph of someone giving the finger. In a team picture of the Boston Beaneaters, pitcher Charles Radbourn was caught flipping the New York Giants the bird in the top left hand corner of the photo.