On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” Attendees also got to witness more than 20 famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed—buildings that would become fixtures of the New York City skyline.
A 2006 article in The New York Times notes that the event, now considered “one of the most spectacular parties of the last century,” was covered by WABC radio. A few photographs remain, like the one above. As does a tantalizing short bit of video.
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With his cane, his famous waxed mustache, and his habit of taking unusual animals for walks, Salvador Dalí would appear to have cultivated his own photographability. But taking a picture of the man who stood as a living definition of popular surrealism wasn’t a task to be approached casually — especially not for Philippe Halsman, who did it more than anyone else. Originally from what’s now Latvia, he led a turbulent life that eventually (after a couple of interventions by none other than Albert Einstein, of whom Halsman later made a famous portrait) brought him to the United States. It was in New York, in 1941, that he met Dalí, having been assigned to photograph one of his exhibitions in the city.
Halsman had more opportunities to photograph Dalí, and these jobs turned into decades of collaboration. Its many fruits include a book containing 36 views of the artist’s mustache alone, but also the more ambitious — and much more surreal — image Dalí Atomicus, from 1948. Inspired by the work-in-progress that would become Leda Atomica, a portrait of Dalí’s wife Gala influenced by both mythology and science, the photograph includes not just that painting, but also an arc of water and three flying cats. Or at least they look like they’re flying; in reality, they were thrown into the frame by a team of assistants including Halsman’s wife and his young daughter Irene.
Irene Halsman recalls the experience in the BBC Time Frame video above, including the now-widely known detail that Dalí’s own initial concept for the photo involved blowing up a duck with firecrackers. “Oh, no, no, you can’t do that,” she recalls her father responding. “You’re in America now. You don’t want to be put in jail for animal cruelty.” So flying cats it was, to be visually captured in mid-air along with the contents of a bucket of water. Leda Atomica and a chair were also made to appear as if levitating, and Dalí himself was instructed to jump, in an instance of the photographic practice Halsman called “jumpology” (whose other subjects included Audrey Hepburn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Marilyn Monroe, and Richard Nixon).
Dalí Atomicus was published in Life magazine, to which Halsman was a prolific contributor. The same issue included a few outtakes, which revealed some of what went into the five-to-six-hour-long process of nailing the shot. You can see a few such prints at Artsy, whose labeled faults include “water splashes Dalí instead of cat,” “Dalí jumps too late,” and “secretary gets into picture.” But it wasn’t all just about timing: the picture also required a degree of pre-Photoshop editing to perfect, and the empty canvas behind the jumping Dalí had to be filled in by the rush of the man himself, who opted to fill the non-existent painting with motifs drawn from the limbs of the cats. Now there was an artist who knew how to seize inspiration when it floated by.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It would surprise none of us to encounter a young artist looking to cast off his past and make his mark on the culture in a place like Williamsburg. But in the case of Man Ray, Williamsburg was his past. One must remember that the Brooklyn of today bears little resemblance to the Brooklyn of the early twentieth century in which the famed avant-gardist grew up. Back then, he was known as Emmanuel Radnitzky, the son of immigrant garment workers. It was after he took up the art life in Manhattan that he met the gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, forming an association that would begin his transformation from aspiring painter into form-changing photographer.
Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 after seeing it at the epoch-making 1913 Armory Show, Ray befriended the artist himself. Despite its considerable language barrier, this relationship gave him a way into the liberating realms of surrealism in general and Dada in particular. “The movement’s refusal to be defined or codified gave Ray the rationale to leave his former life and head to Paris, where he could complete his reinvention unfettered by his past,” says James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above. It was this relocation — almost as dramatic, in those days, as going from Brooklyn to Manhattan — that offered him the chance to become a major artistic figure.
Soon after settling in Montparnasse, Ray “made an accidental rediscovery of the camera-less photogram, which he called ‘Rayographs.’ ” This technique, which involved placing objects on photosensitive paper and then exposing the arrangement to light, produced images that were “dubbed pure Dada creations” and “played a significant role in redefining photography as a medium capable of abstraction and conceptual depth.” It was in that same part of town that he entered into an artistic and romantic partnership with Alice Prin, more widely known as Kiki de Montparnasse — and even more widely known, a century later, as Le Violon d’Ingres, which in 2022 became the most expensive photograph ever sold.
The $12.4 million sale price of Le Violon d’Ingres is rather less interesting than the story behind it, which involves not just Ray and Kiki’s life together, but also a process of technical experimentation whose result “perfectly embodies the surrealist interest in challenging traditional representations and blending everyday objects with the human form.” Tame though it may look in the era of Photoshop (to say nothing of AI-generated imagery), the picture’s convincing placement of violin-style sound holes on Kiki’s classically presented body suggested to its viewers that photography had non-documentary possibilities never before imagined — certainly not in Williamsburg, anyway.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We still occasionally speak of “Kodak moments,” making conscious or unconscious reference to the slogan of the Eastman Kodak Company in the nineteen-eighties. Even by that time, Kodak had already been a going concern for nearly a century, furnishing photographers around the world with the film they needed to capture images. Its very first slogan, unveiled in 1888, was “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,” and it heralded the arrival of a new era: one in which, thanks to the company’s No. 1 box camera (loaded with the new medium of roll film), photographs could be “taken by people with little or no previous knowledge of photography.”
So says Vox’s Coleman Lowndes in the new video above, which explains how this invention changed the nature of photography itself. People began using Kodak cameras “to document their travels and their daily lives at home”; they “took portraits of each other, but also candid street scenes.” Such was the novelty of taking a picture so quickly and easily — and well outside a studio — that it demanded a new word, or rather, the adoption of a word from another domain: snapshot, which up until then had referred to “a quick shot with a gun, without aim, at a fast-moving target.” Before Kodak, a photographer simply had no way to capture the moment.
But it was only with the introduction of the inexpensive Brownie, “a simple box camera made of cardboard encased in faux leather,” that everyone — even a child — could become a photographer. “Take a Kodak with You,” suggested another of the company’s slogans in the early twentieth century, and millions took heed. Its position as both a corporate and cultural institution wasn’t seriously threatened until the end of that century, when Japan’s Fujifilm “had begun to eat away at the American photo giant’s market share,” and then digital photography destroyed wide swaths of the film business at a stroke.
Ironically, the first digital camera was invented in 1975 by a Kodak engineer, “but the company, which from the beginning had built itself on selling and processing film rather than manufacturing cameras, didn’t make the change soon enough.” After finally entering bankruptcy in 2012, Kodak reorganized to “focus on digital printing services rather than film development,” which has by now become “a somewhat niche market of dedicated hobbyists.” Also doing its part to keep the company afloat is its line of logo-emblazoned apparel, which holds out a retro appeal all across the world — even to youngsters quick enough on the draw with their camera phones that every moment might as well be a Kodak moment.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
History escapes us. Events that changed the world forever, or should have, slide out of collective memory. If we’re pointing fingers, we might point at educational systems that fail to educate, or at huge historical blind spots in mass media. Maybe another reason the recent past fades like old photographs may have to do with old photographs.
The present leaps out at us from our ubiquitous screens in vivid, high-resolution color. We are riveted to the spectacles of the moment. Perhaps if we could see history in color—or at least the small but significant sliver of it that has been photographed—we might have somewhat better historical memories. It’s only speculation, who knows? But looking at the images here makes me think so.
Although we can date color photography back as early as 1861, when physicist James Clerk Maxwell made an experimental print with color filters, the process didn’t really come into its own until the turn of the century. (It wouldn’t be until much later in the 20th century that mass-producing color photographs became feasible.) One early master of the art, Russian chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, used Maxwell’s filter process and other methods to create the images you see here, dating from between 1905 and 1915.
You can see hundreds more such images—over 2000, in fact—at the Library of Congress’ collection, digitally recreated from color glass negatives for your browsing and downloading pleasure or historical research. “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a photograph from the past and felt its subjects come alive so vividly,” writes Messy Nessy, “as if they’ve almost blinked at me, as if it were just yesterday.”
Clearly the clothing, architecture, and other markers of the past give away the age of these pictures, as does their faded quality. But imagine this latter evidence of time passed as an Instragram filter and you might feel like you could have been there, on the farms, churches, waterways, gardens, forests, city streets, and drawing rooms of Imperial Russia during the doomed last years of the Romanovs.
Several hundred of the photos in the archive aren’t in color. Prokudin-Gorskii, notes the LoC, “undertook most of his ambitious color documentary project from 1909 to 1915.” Even while traveling around photographing the countryside, he made just as many monochrome images. Because of our cultural conditioning and the way we see the world now we are bound to interpret black-and-white and sepia-toned prints as more distant and estranged.
Prokudin-Gorskii took his most famous photo, a color image of Leo Tolstoy which we’ve featured here before, in 1908. It granted him an audience with the Tsar, who afterward gave him “a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom,” Messy Nessy notes, and “two permits that granted him access to restricted areas.” After the Revolution, he fled to Paris, where he died in 1944, just one month after the city’s liberation.
His surviving photos, plates, and negatives had been stored in the basement of his Parisian apartment building until a Library of Congress researcher found and purchased them in 1948. His work in color, a novelty at the time, now strikes us in its ordinariness; an aid “for anyone who has ever found it difficult to connect with historical photographs.” Still, we might wonder, “what will they think of our photographs in a hundred years’ time?”
I suspect a hundred years from now, or maybe even 20 or 30, people will marvel at our quaint, primitive two-dimensional vision, while strolling around in virtual 3D recreations, maybe chatting casually with holographic, AI-endowed historical people. Maybe that technology will make it harder for the future to forget us, or maybe it will make it easier to misremember.
In late-twenties Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safety by none other than the magnate Condé Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing company. Not long thereafter, Miller, who’d been studying at the Art Students League of New York, appeared on the cover of Vogue. It’s tempting to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descriptor fits uneasily with the arc of her seventy years, during the last few decades of which she could never quite recover from having witnessed first-hand the liberation of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau — sights she shared with the American public as a war photographer.
Miller took pictures of not just the concentration camps, but also events like the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous picture, bathing in Hitler’s tub on the very same day that the Führer later shot himself in his bunker.
Behind the camera in that instance was Life correspondent David E. Scherman, one of the notable men in Miller’s life. Others included the artist-writer Roland Penrose, the businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, and, before all of them, the surrealist photographer Man Ray, each of whom corresponded to a phase of the professional journey that took her from fashion model to fearless photojournalist.
You can see and hear Lee Miller’s journey in the video from the Victoria & Albert Museum at the top of the post. Just above is a British Pathé newsreel that shows Miller at home with Penrose in 1946, the year between the end of the war and the birth of their son Antony Penrose, who re-discovered and re-publicized his mother’s photography after her death in 1977. However belated her public recognition, it’s still surprising that a life like Miller’s, the events of which stretch even Hollywood plausibility, only became a movie last year. Lee still awaits wide release, but much has been written about the passion of star Kate Winslet that got it made. She’ll undoubtedly impress as Miller — but neither, rumor has it, is Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg’s David E. Scherman a performance to be missed.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you go to hear Patti Smith in concert, you expect her to sing “Beneath the Southern Cross,” “Because the Night,” and almost certainly “People Have the Power,” the hit single from Dream of Life. Like her 1975 debut Horses, that album had a cover photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, whom Smith describes as “the artist of my life” in Just Kids, her memoir of their long and complex relationship. A highly personal work, that book also includes the text of the brief but powerful goodbye letter she wrote to Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. If you go to hear Smith read a letter aloud, there’s a decent chance it’ll be that one.
“Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake,” Smith wrote to Mapplethorpe, then in his final hospitalization and already unable to receive any further communication. “Are you in pain, or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand. Grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let it go.”
Smith speaks these words in the Letters Live video at the top of the post, shot just a few weeks ago in The Town Hall in Manhattan. “Of all your work, you are still your most beautiful,” she reads, “the most beautiful work of all,” and it’s clear that, 35 years after Mapplethorpe’s death, she still believes it. That may come across even more clearly than in Smith’s earlier reading of the letter featured here on Open Culture back in 2012. As the years pass, Robert Mapplethorpe remains frozen in time as a culturally transgressive young artist, but Patti Smith lives on, still playing the rock songs that made her name in the seventies while in her seventies. And unlike many cultural figures at her level of fame, she’s remained wholly herself all the while — no doubt thanks to inspiration from her old friend.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When did you last send someone a photo? That question may sound odd, owing to the sheer commonness of the act in question; in the twenty-twenties, we take photographs and share them worldwide without giving it a second thought. But in the nineteen-thirties, almost everyone who sent a photo did so through the mail, if they did it at all. Not that there weren’t more efficient means of transmission, at least to professionals in the cutting-edge newspaper industry: as dramatized in the short 1937 documentary above, the visual accompaniment to a sufficiently important scoop could also be sent in mere minutes through the miracle of wire.
“Traveling almost as fast as the telephone story, wired photos now go across the continent with the speed of light,” declares the narrator in breathless newsreel-announcer style. “It’s not a matter of sending the whole picture at once, but of separating the picture into fine lines, sending those lines over a wire, and assembling them at the other end.”
Illustrating this process is a clever mechanical prop involving two spindles on a hand crank, and a length of rope printed with the image of a car that unwinds from one spindle onto the other. To ensure the viewer’s complete understanding, animated diagrams also reveal the inner workings of the actual scanning, sending, and receiving apparatus.
This process may now seem impossibly cumbersome, but at the time it represented a leap forward for mass visual media. In the decades after the Second World War, the same basic principle — that of disassembling an image into lines at one point in order to reassemble it at another — would be employed in the homes and offices of ordinary Americans by devices such as the television set and fax machine. We know, as the viewers of 1937 didn’t, just how those analog technologies would change the character of life and work in the twentieth century. As for what their digital descendants will do to the twenty-first century, as they continue to break down all existence into not lines but bits, we’ve only just begun to find out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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