Enjoy Dazzling & Dizzying 360° Virtual Tours of Los Angeles Landmarks

Remem­ber when arm­chair trav­el meant a book, a mag­a­zine, a hand­ful of post­cards, or the occa­sion­al after-din­ner slideshow of the neigh­bors’ vaca­tion pho­tos?

Those were the days.

The throngs of trav­el “influ­encers”—both pro­fes­sion­al and aspirant—have tak­en much of the fun out of liv­ing through oth­ers’ vis­its to far-flung locales. The focus seems to have shift­ed from imag­in­ing our­selves in their shoes to feel­ing oppressed by their high­ly-staged, heav­i­ly-fil­tered Insta­gram-per­fect exis­tence.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jim New­ber­ry’s daz­zling, dizzy­ing 360° pho­tos of Los Ange­les, like the views of Echo Park, Chi­na­town, East L.A., and Down­town, above, offer arm­chair trav­el­ers trans­porta­tion back to those gid­dy pre-influ­encer days.

(Angeli­nos and oth­er LA-versed vis­i­tors will enjoy swoop­ing through City of Angels land­marks as if rotat­ing on the no-par­al­lax point, too.)

The Chica­go trans­plant admits that it took a while for him to find his Los Ange­les groove:

After being dis­abused of my Mid­west­ern, anti‑L.A. views, I’ve found that the city has much more to offer than I had imag­ined, but the gems of Los Ange­les often don’t reveal them­selves read­i­ly; it takes a bit of leg­work to seek out the best spots, and well worth it. Moun­tains, beach­es, vibrant urban life, tons of muse­ums, gor­geous nature.

While easy-to-use “one-shot” 360 cam­eras exist, New­ber­ry prefers the qual­i­ty afford­ed by using a high-res­o­lu­tion non-360 cam­era with a wide angle lens, mount­ed on a panoram­ic tri­pod head that rotates it in such a way as to pre­vent per­spec­tive errors.

With the equip­ment set up in the cen­ter of the room, he shoots four pho­tos, spaced 90° apart. Anoth­er shot is aimed direct­ly down­ward toward the floor.

Panoram­ic soft­ware helps to stitch the images togeth­er for a “spher­i­cal panora­ma,” giv­ing view­ers an expe­ri­ence that’s the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of swivel­ing their heads in awe.

Newberry’s rov­ing lens turns Lee Lawrie’s Zodi­ac Chan­de­lierDean Cornwell’s Cal­i­for­nia his­to­ry murals, and the dec­o­ra­tive ceil­ing sten­cils of the Cen­tral Pub­lic Library’s Grand Rotun­da into a gor­geous kalei­do­scope.

The Taoist Thien Hau Tem­ple in Chi­na­town is a more recent attrac­tion, found­ed in the 1980s in a for­mer Chris­t­ian church. Com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers raised funds to build the larg­er tem­ple, above, ded­i­cat­ing it in 2006 as a shrine to Mazu, the god­dess of the sea, pro­tec­tor of fish­er­man and sailors.

The Muse­um of Juras­sic Tech­nol­o­gy, a self-described “edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the advance­ment of knowl­edge and the pub­lic appre­ci­a­tion of the Low­er Juras­sic,” served as Newberry’s point of entry, when man­age­ment okayed his request to shoot 360° pho­tos there:

It’s a very spe­cial place—my panoram­ic pho­tos are no match for an in-per­son vis­it. Unlike many oth­er muse­ums these days, the Muse­um of Juras­sic Tech­nol­o­gy does­n’t nor­mal­ly allow pho­tog­ra­phy, and there’s not many pho­tos of the place to be found. 

(In return for per­mis­sion to shoot the museum’s Fau­na of Mir­rors murals, rooftop court­yard, and Tula Tea Room, New­ber­ry agreed to main­tain its mys­te­ri­ous aura by lim­it­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of those pho­tos to his Panoram­ic Eye site. Feast your eyes here.)

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er is look­ing for­ward to work­ing with more muse­ums, cre­at­ing 3‑dimensional doc­u­men­ta­tion of exhibits.

His inter­est in the ephemer­al has also spurred him to cre­ate vir­tu­al tours of local land­marks on the verge of being torn down. Entries in the ongo­ing Lost Land­marks series include Los Feliz’s Good Luck Bar (RIP), Tom Bergin’s Pub (above, spared at the last minute when the Los Ange­les Con­ser­van­cy declared it an His­toric-Cul­tur­al Mon­u­ment), and the Alpine Vil­lage, cur­rent­ly for sale in neigh­bor­ing Tor­rance.

Begin your explo­rations of Jim Newberry’s Panoram­ic Eye 360° vir­tu­al tours of Los Ange­les, includ­ing the Grif­fith Park Obser­va­to­rythe St. Sophia Cathe­dral, and the Every­thing Is Ter­ri­ble! store here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

Take a 360 Degree Tour of Minia­ture Mod­els of Famous Land­marks: From the Taj Mahal to The Great Wall of Chi­na

Five Cul­tur­al Tours of Los Ange­les

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of sev­en books, includ­ing No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Lateand the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope

When you pic­ture the giant for­ma­tions of gasses and space dust that make up a neb­u­la, maybe you see the deli­cious­ly gar­ish CGI of Guardians of the Galaxy. The look of the Mar­vel uni­verse is, of course, inspired by eye-pop­ping images of neb­u­lae tak­en by the Hub­ble tele­scope, images that have appeared rou­tine­ly for the past three decades in the pages of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, Dis­cov­er, and your favorite screen savers.

Whether you’re into sci-fi super­hero flicks or not, you’ve sure­ly stared in awe and dis­be­lief at these pho­tographs: ghost­ly, glow­ing, resem­bling the illus­tra­tions of out­er space by cer­tain pulp sci-fi illus­tra­tors twen­ty years before the Hub­ble was launched into orbit in 1990. If these images seem too painter­ly to be real, it’s because they are, as the Vox video above explains, to a great degree, prod­ucts of pho­to­graph­ic art and imag­i­na­tion.

The Hub­ble tele­scope only takes images in black and white. The images are then col­orized by sci­en­tists. Their work is not pure fan­ta­sy. A process called “broad­band fil­ter­ing” allows them to rea­son­ably esti­mate a range of col­ors in the black and white pho­to. Some imag­i­na­tive license must be tak­en “to show us por­tions of the image that would nev­er have been vis­i­ble to our eyes in the first place,” notes PetaPix­el. “For exam­ple: turn­ing cer­tain gasses into vis­i­ble col­or in a pho­to­graph.”

In an impres­sive few min­utes, the Vox explain­er digs deep into the sci­ence of optics to explain how and why we see col­or as com­bi­na­tions of three wave­lengths. The sci­ence has been “the guid­ing prin­ci­ple in col­or­ing black and white images” since the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry. We learn above how broad­band filtering—the pho­to­graph­ic tech­nique bring­ing us full-col­or galac­tic fever dreams—originated in the ear­li­est exper­i­ments in col­or pho­tog­ra­phy.

In fact, the very first col­or pho­to­graph ever tak­en, by physi­cist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, used a very ear­ly ver­sion of the tech­nique Hub­ble sci­en­tists now use to col­orize images of space, com­bin­ing three black and white pho­tos of the same object, tak­en through three dif­fer­ent-col­ored fil­ters. Giv­en the advances in imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy over the past 100+ years, why doesn’t the pow­er­ful space tele­scope just take col­or pic­tures?

It would com­pro­mise the Hubble’s pri­ma­ry pur­pose, to mea­sure the inten­si­ty of light reflect­ing off objects in space, a mea­sure­ment best tak­en in black and white. But the sci­en­tif­ic instru­ment can still be used as cos­mic paint­brush, cre­at­ing jaw-drop­ping images that them­selves serve a sci­en­tif­ic pur­pose. If you were dis­ap­point­ed to learn that the pho­tog­ra­phy fuel­ing our our space imag­i­na­tion has been doc­tored, watch this video and see if a sense of won­der isn’t restored.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ty of Space Pho­tog­ra­phy

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Why a Cat Always Lands on Its Feet: How a French Scientist Used Photography to Solve the Problem in 1894

In the era of the CATS trail­er and #cat­sofin­sta­gram, it’s easy to for­get that sci­en­tif­ic research is what orig­i­nal­ly con­vinced our feline friends to allow their images to be cap­tured and dis­sem­i­nat­ed.

An anony­mous white French pussy took one for the team in 1894, when scientist/inventor Éti­enne-Jules Marey dropped it from an unspec­i­fied height in the Bois de Boulogne, film­ing its descent at 12 frames per sec­ond.

Ulti­mate­ly, this brave and like­ly unsus­pect­ing spec­i­men fur­thered the cause of space explo­ration, though it took over 50 years for NASA-backed researchers T.R. Kane and M.P. Sch­er to pub­lish their find­ings in a paper titled “A Dynam­i­cal Expla­na­tion of the Falling Cat Phe­nom­e­non.”

As the Vox Dark­room episode above makes clear, Marey’s obses­sion was lofti­er than a fond­ness for Stu­pid Pet Tricks and the mis­chie­vous impulse to drop things off of tall build­ings that moti­vat­ed TV host David Let­ter­man once upon a time.

Marey’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the mechan­ics of organ­ic loco­mo­tion extend­ed to hors­es and humans. It prompt­ed him to invent pho­to­graph­ic tech­niques that pre­fig­ured cin­e­matog­ra­phy, and, more dark­ly, to sub­ject oth­er, less-cat­like crea­tures to dead­falls from sim­i­lar heights.

(Chil­dren and ani­mal rights activists, con­sid­er this your trig­ger warn­ing.)

The white cat sur­vived its ordeal by arch­ing its back mid-air, effec­tive­ly split­ting its body in two to har­ness the iner­tia of its body weight, much like a fig­ure skater con­trol­ling the veloc­i­ty of her spin by the posi­tion of her arms.

Why waste a sin­gle one of your nine lives? Physics is your friend, espe­cial­ly when falling from a great height.

See one of Marey’s pio­neer­ing falling cat chronopho­tographs below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thomas Edison’s Box­ing Cats (1894), or Where the LOL­Cats All Began

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Explo­sive Cats Imag­ined in a Strange, 16th Cen­tu­ry Mil­i­tary Man­u­al

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Mont Saint-Michel Beautifully Viewed from a Drone

This short film was an award win­ner at the 2015 Drone Film fes­ti­val held in Cabourg, France. Enjoy the ride.

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Behold Color Photographs Taken During the Aftermath of San Francisco’s Devastating 1906 Earthquake

If a city has been around long enough, it will more than like­ly have suf­fered some sort of cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly destruc­tive event: the Great Fire of Lon­don in 1666, the Great Chica­go Fire of 1871, the Great Kan­tō earth­quake that dev­as­tat­ed Tokyo in 1923. Most of their names, come to think of it, include the word “great,” though not every source refers to San Fran­cis­co’s 1906 earth­quake that way. Not, of course, to min­i­mize its destruc­tive­ness: with a force that would mea­sure 7.8 on the Richter scale, the earth­quake ulti­mate­ly destroyed 80 per­cent of the city — about 25,000 build­ings, with lost prop­er­ty equiv­a­lent to $11.2 bil­lion in today’s dol­lars — and killed 3,000 peo­ple.

Six months after the dis­as­ter, an inven­tor named Fred­er­ick Eugene Ives arrived to doc­u­ment the still-fresh after­math of the dis­as­ter. He had in hand some­thing called a brr, a 3D col­or cam­era he designed him­self. Its “sys­tem of mir­rors and fil­ters behind each lens split and fil­tered the light to cre­ate one pair of slides for each pri­ma­ry col­or of light (red, green, blue).

The slides were bound togeth­er in a spe­cial order with cloth tapes into a pack­age known as a KrĹ‘m­gram,” view­able only with a KrĹ‘m­scĹ‘p, “the appa­ra­tus used to rebuild the image allow­ing the view­er to see in three-dimen­sion­al col­or.”

Antho­ny Brooks dis­cov­ered Ives’ KrĹ‘m­grams of San Fran­cis­co in ruins only in 2009, reports the Tele­graph. Most of its pic­tures were tak­en from a hotel rooftop, and “although hand-col­ored pho­tographs of the quake’s destruc­tion have sur­faced before, Ives’ work is prob­a­bly the only true col­or doc­u­men­tary evi­dence.” Such images would have aston­ished any con­tem­po­rary view­er, not just for the dev­as­ta­tion they showed but the life­like col­or and depth with which they ren­dered it. And yet the Pho­tochro­mo­scope sys­tem nev­er caught on, Brooks writes: “The KrĹ‘m­scĹ‘p view­ers were expen­sive ($50 in 1907 or about $1000 today adjust­ing for infla­tion), required strong sun­light or arc light for view­ing, and were tech­ni­cal­ly com­plex to use, despite Ives’ asser­tions to the con­trary.”

But even though few prob­a­bly saw these pic­tures in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, Ives was hard­ly for­got­ten in the realm of pho­tog­ra­phy. The recip­i­ent of sev­er­al major sci­en­tif­ic and engi­neer­ing awards in his life­time, he left behind such more wide­ly adopt­ed inven­tions as one of the sev­er­al vari­eties of “halftone process” that allowed pho­tographs to be repro­duced in news­pa­pers — just as news­pa­pers around the coun­try did after the earth­quake struck, com­bin­ing them with head­lines like “WATER FRONT BURNS ALMOST TO THE FERRY,” “3,000 PEOPLE ARE HOMELESS,” and “SAN FRANCISCO ANNIHILATED.” But H.G. Wells, who was on a vis­it to the Unit­ed States at the time, sensed more of a san­guin­i­ty in the Amer­i­cans around him: “There is no doubt any­where that San Fran­cis­co can be rebuilt, larg­er, bet­ter, and soon.”

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dra­mat­ic Footage of San Fran­cis­co Right Before & After the Mas­sive­ly Dev­as­tat­ing Earth­quake of 1906

Rome Comes to Life in Pho­tochrom Col­or Pho­tos Tak­en in 1890: The Colos­se­um, Tre­vi Foun­tain & More

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Behold the Very First Col­or Pho­to­graph (1861): Tak­en by Scot­tish Physi­cist (and Poet!) James Clerk Maxwell

Voltaire & the Lis­bon Earth­quake of 1755

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Romanovs’ Last Spectacular Ball Brought to Life in Color Photographs (1903)

In 1903, the Romanovs, Russia’s last and longest-reign­ing roy­al fam­i­ly, held a lav­ish cos­tume ball. It was to be their final blowout, and per­haps also the “last great roy­al ball” in Europe, writes the Vin­tage News. The par­ty took place at the Win­ter Palace in St. Peters­burg, 14 years before Czar Nicholas II’s abdi­ca­tion, on the 290th anniver­sary of Romanov rule. The Czar invit­ed 390 guests and the ball ranged over two days of fes­tiv­i­ties, with elab­o­rate 17th-cen­tu­ry boyar cos­tumes, includ­ing “38 orig­i­nal roy­al items of the 17th cen­tu­ry from the armory in Moscow.”

“The first day fea­tured feast­ing and danc­ing,” notes Rus­sia Beyond, “and a masked ball was held on the sec­ond. Every­thing was cap­tured in a pho­to album that con­tin­ues to inspire artists to this day.” The entire Romanov fam­i­ly gath­ered for a pho­to­graph on the stair­case of the Her­mitage the­ater, the last time they would all be pho­tographed togeth­er.

It is like see­ing two dif­fer­ent dead worlds super­im­posed on each other—the Romanovs’ play­act­ing their begin­ning while stand­ing on the thresh­old of their last days.

With the irony of hind­sight, we will always look upon these poised aris­to­crats as doomed to vio­lent death and exile. In a mor­bid turn of mind, I can’t help think­ing of the baroque goth­ic of “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe’s sto­ry about a doomed aris­toc­ra­cy who seal them­selves inside a cos­tume ball while a con­ta­gion rav­ages the world out­side: “The exter­nal world could take care of itself,” Poe’s nar­ra­tor says. “In the mean­time it was fol­ly to grieve or to think. The prince had pro­vid­ed all the appli­ances of plea­sure…. It was a volup­tuous scene, that mas­quer­ade.”

Maybe in our imag­i­na­tion, the Romanovs and their friends seem haunt­ed by the weight of suf­fer­ing out­side their palace walls, in both their coun­try and around Europe as the old order fell apart. Or per­haps they just look haunt­ed the way every­one does in pho­tographs from over 100 years ago. Does the col­oriz­ing of these pho­tos by Russ­ian artist Klimbim—who has done sim­i­lar work with images of WW2 sol­diers and por­traits of Russ­ian poets and writ­ers—make them less ghost­ly?

It puts flesh on the pale mono­chro­mat­ic faces, gives the lav­ish cos­tum­ing and fur­ni­ture tex­ture and dimen­sion. Some of the images almost look like art nou­veau illus­tra­tions (and resem­ble those of some of the finest illus­tra­tors of Poe’s work) and the work of con­tem­po­rary painters like Gus­tav Klimt. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that unease lingers in the eyes of some subjects—Empress Alexan­dra Fedorov­na among them—a cer­tain vague and trou­bled appre­hen­sion.

In their book A Life­long Pas­sion, authors Andrei May­lu­nas and Sergei Miro­nenko quote the Grand Duke Alexan­der Mikhailovitch who remem­bered the event as “the last spec­tac­u­lar ball in the his­to­ry of the empire.” The Grand Duke also recalled that “a new and hos­tile Rus­sia glared though the large win­dows of the palace… while we danced, the work­ers were strik­ing and the clouds in the Far East were hang­ing dan­ger­ous­ly low.” As Rus­sia Beyond notes, soon after this cel­e­bra­tion, “The glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis marked the begin­ning of the end for the Russ­ian Empire, and the court ceased to hold balls.”

In 1904, the Rus­so-Japan­ese War began, a war Rus­sia was to lose the fol­low­ing year. Then the aristocracy’s pow­er was fur­ther weak­ened by the Rev­o­lu­tion of 1905, which Lenin would lat­er call the “Great Dress Rehearsal” for the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary takeover of 1917. While the aris­toc­ra­cy cos­tumed itself in the trap­pings of past glo­ry, armies amassed to force their reck­on­ing with the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Who knows what thoughts went through the mind of the tzar, tza­ri­na, and their heirs dur­ing those two days, and the minds of the almost 400 noble­men and women dressed in cos­tumes spe­cial­ly designed by artist Sergey Solomko, who drew from the work of sev­er­al his­to­ri­ans to make accu­rate 17th-cen­tu­ry recre­ations, while Peter Carl Fabergé chose the jew­el­ry, includ­ing, writes the Vin­tage News, the tzarina’s “pearls topped by a dia­mond and emer­ald-stud­ded crown” and an “enor­mous emer­ald” on her bro­cad­ed dress?

If the Romanovs had any inkling their almost 300-year dynasty was com­ing to its end and would take all of the Russ­ian aris­toc­ra­cy with it, they were, at least, deter­mined to go out with the high­est style; the fam­i­ly with “almost cer­tain­ly… the most abso­lutist pow­ers” would spare no expense to live in their past, no mat­ter what the future held for them. See the orig­i­nal, black and white pho­tos, includ­ing that last fam­i­ly por­trait, at His­to­ry Dai­ly and Rus­sia Beyond, and see sev­er­al more col­orized images at the Vin­tage News.

via The Vin­tage News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

Tsarist Rus­sia Comes to Life in Vivid Col­or Pho­tographs Tak­en Cir­ca 1905–1915

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

How Obses­sive Artists Col­orize Old Pho­tographs & Restore the True Col­ors of the Past

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Arab Photography Archive Puts 22,000 Historic Images Online: Get a Rare Glimpse into Life and Art in the Arab World

The his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy, as most of us know it, has expand­ed by sev­er­al thou­sand images and sev­er­al more coun­tries, thanks to the launch last month of the Arab Image Foundation’s online archive of pho­tog­ra­phy “from the Mid­dle East, North Africa, and the Arab dias­po­ra dat­ing from the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry,” as the Get­ty’s pho­tog­ra­phy blog The Iris reports.

The Beirut-based non-prof­it AIF has since dig­i­tized 22,000 images from its phys­i­cal col­lec­tion of 500,000+ pho­tographs, col­lect­ed since 1997, notes the Foun­da­tion, in “research mis­sions and projects in Lebanon, Syr­ia, Pales­tine, Jor­dan, Egypt, Moroc­co, Iraq, Iran, Mex­i­co, Argenti­na and Sene­gal.” AIF hopes to even­tu­al­ly upload 55,000 scanned images, but fund­ing issues have made the project a chal­lenge.

Nonethe­less, the trove of pho­tos and neg­a­tives already made avail­able not only sig­nif­i­cant­ly expands our view of photography’s reach and scope, but also our view of the Arab world—recording lost tra­di­tions, mod­ernisms, and an array of cul­tur­al prac­tices and atti­tudes that may sur­prise us, and that have since been sup­pressed in many of these same soci­eties.

“From same-sex kiss­es and men in drag,” writes India Stoughton for the BBC, “to nude por­traits and chil­dren pos­ing with assault rifles, the Arab Image Foun­da­tion is replete with star­tling and sen­sa­tion­al­ist pho­tographs.”  There are many pho­tographs of flam­boy­ant stage per­form­ers and celebri­ties. And there are many more con­ven­tion­al col­lec­tions, such as the fam­i­ly por­traits of Pales­tini­ans liv­ing in Jerusalem, Nablus, Ramal­lah, and Jaf­fa before 1948.

Amidst the hun­dreds of stiff por­traits and awk­ward fam­i­ly pho­tos, the archive fea­tures can­did street shots and “many images of his­toric events and fig­ures.” It also doc­u­ments “water­shed moments that have been over­looked by his­to­ry.” Pin-up pho­tog­ra­phy and pic­tures of male body­builders in Egypt; sur­re­al­ist exper­i­ments with dou­ble expo­sures in 1924 by Lebanese pho­tog­ra­ph­er Marie al-Khazen, “one of the first female pho­tog­ra­phers in the Mid­dle East,” writes Stoughton.

Al-Khazen’s “avant-garde com­po­si­tions and habit of pho­tograph­ing her­self and oth­er women enjoy­ing tra­di­tion­al­ly male pas­times, such as smok­ing, dri­ving and hunt­ing, made her a fas­ci­nat­ing and uncon­ven­tion­al fig­ure.” The same adjec­tives apply to many of the pho­tog­ra­phers in this archive, whose work often shocks and sur­pris­es, but just as often com­mu­ni­cates in more sub­tle ways the tex­ture of every­day life for peo­ple in the Mid­dle East and North Africa over the course of the late-19th to mid-20th cen­turies.

These images cap­ture the dai­ly lives of over­looked peo­ple groups, like the Bedouin hunters of Syr­ia, as well as the lives of reg­u­lar peo­ple before con­ser­v­a­tive regimes swept into pow­er around the region and wiped away traces of mod­ern­iza­tion and the per­son­al, reli­gious, cre­ative, and sex­u­al free­doms we see rep­re­sent­ed. Now this pho­to­graph­ic his­to­ry joins sev­er­al oth­er com­pre­hen­sive online libraries of his­toric pho­tog­ra­phy, such as Euro­peana Pho­tog­ra­phy, the George East­man Muse­um, the Sovi­et Union’s pre­mier pho­to mag­a­zine, and many more.

While not as exten­sive as some of these oth­er col­lec­tions, the AIF’s dig­i­tal project is no less essen­tial for the light it sheds on a past, and a medi­um, that con­tin­ues to prove itself resis­tant to stereo­types. Enter the Arab Image Foun­da­tion’s dig­i­tal archive here, and learn more about how these pho­tographs have been dig­i­tal­ly pre­served at The Iris.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

Thou­sands of Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Down­load 437 Issues of Sovi­et Pho­to Mag­a­zine, the Sovi­et Union’s His­toric Pho­tog­ra­phy Jour­nal (1926–1991)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Meet Gerda Taro, the First Female Photojournalist to Die on the Front Lines

Ger­da Taro by Anony­mous, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We may know a few names of his­toric women pho­tog­ra­phers, like Julia Mar­garet Cameron, Dorothea Lange, or Diane Arbus, but the sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence of women in pho­tog­ra­phy from its very begin­nings doesn’t get much atten­tion in the usu­al nar­ra­tive, despite the fact that “by 1900,” as pho­tog­ra­ph­er Dawn Oost­er­hoff writes, cen­sus records in Britain and the U.S. showed that “there were more than 7000 pro­fes­sion­al women pho­tog­ra­phers,” a num­ber that only grew as decades passed.

As pho­to­graph­ic equip­ment became small­er, lighter, and more portable, pho­tog­ra­phers moved out into more chal­leng­ing and dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. Among them were women who “fought tra­di­tion and were among the pio­neer pho­to­jour­nal­ists,” work­ing along­side men on the front lines of war zones around the world.

War pho­tog­ra­phers like Lee Miller—former Vogue mod­el, Man Ray muse, and Sur­re­al­ist artist—showed a side of war most peo­ple didn’t see, one in which women war­riors, med­ical per­son­nel, sup­port staff, and work­ers, played sig­nif­i­cant roles and bore wit­ness to mass suf­fer­ing and acts of hero­ism.

Image via Flickr Cre­ative Com­mons

 

Before Miller cap­tured the dev­as­ta­tion at the Euro­pean front, the hor­rors of Dachau, and Hitler’s bath­tub, anoth­er female war pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Ger­da Taro, doc­u­ment­ed the front lines of the Span­ish Civ­il War. “One of the world’s first and great­est war pho­tog­ra­phers,” writes Giles Trent at The Guardian, Taro “died while pho­tograph­ing a chaot­ic retreat after the Bat­tle of Brunete, short­ly after Franco’s troops had one a major vic­to­ry,” just days away from her 27th birth­day. She was the first female pho­to­jour­nal­ist to be killed in action on the front­line and a major star in France at the time of her death.

Woman Train­ing for a Repub­li­can Mili­tia, by Ger­da Taro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“On 1 August 1937,” notes a Mag­num Pho­tos bio, “thou­sands of peo­ple lined the streets of Paris to mourn the death” of Taro. The “26-year-old Jew­ish émi­gré from Leipzig… was eulo­gized as a coura­geous reporter who had sac­ri­ficed her life to bear wit­ness to the suf­fer­ing of civil­ians and troops…. The media pro­claimed her a left-wing hero­ine, a mar­tyr of the anti-fas­cist cause and a role mod­el for young women every­where.” Taro had fled to France in in 1933, after being arrest­ed by the Nazis for dis­trib­ut­ing anti-fas­cist leaflets in Ger­many. She was deter­mined to con­tin­ue the fight in her new coun­try.

Repub­li­can Sol­diers at the Navac­er­ra­da Pass, by Ger­da Taro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Taro met anoth­er Jew­ish émi­gré, well-known Hun­gar­i­an pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Capa, just get­ting his start at the time. The two became part­ners and lovers, arriv­ing in Barcelona in 1936, “two-and-a-half weeks after the out­break of the war.” Like Miller, Taro was drawn to women on the bat­tle­field. In one of her first assign­ments, she doc­u­ment­ed mili­ti­a­women of the Uni­fied Social­ist Par­ty of Cat­alo­nia train­ing on a beach. “Moti­vat­ed by a desire to raise aware­ness of the plight of Span­ish civil­ians and the sol­diers fight­ing for lib­er­ty,” her clear sym­pa­thies give her work depth and imme­di­a­cy.

Repub­li­can Dina­miteros, in the Cara­banchel Neigh­bor­hood of Madrid, by Ger­da Taro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Taro’s pho­tographs “were wide­ly repro­duced in the French left­ist press,” points out the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy. She “incor­po­rat­ed the dynam­ic cam­era angles of New Vision pho­tog­ra­phy as well as a phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al close­ness to her sub­ject.” After she was crushed by a tank in 1937, many of her pho­tographs were incor­rect­ly cred­it­ed to Capa, and she sank into obscu­ri­ty. She has achieved renewed recog­ni­tion in recent years, espe­cial­ly after a trove of 4,500 neg­a­tives con­tain­ing work by her and Capa was dis­cov­ered in Mex­i­co City.

Although she had been warned away from the front, Taro “got into this con­vic­tion that she had to bear wit­ness,” says biog­ra­ph­er Jane Rogoys­ka, “The troops loved her and she kept push­ing.” She paid with her life, died a hero, and was for­got­ten until recent­ly. Her lega­cy is cel­e­brat­ed in Rogoyska’s book, a nov­el about her and Capa by Susana Fortes, an Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion, film projects in the works, and a Google Doo­dle last August on her birth­day. Learn more about Taro’s life and see many more of her cap­ti­vat­ing images, at Mag­num Pho­tos.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

1,600 Rare Col­or Pho­tographs Depict Life in the U.S Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion & World War II

Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy in Her First Online Course

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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