130,000 Photographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Available Online, Courtesy of Stanford University

in Art, Photography | October 15th, 2018

(Image cred­it: © The Andy Warhol Foun­da­tion for the Visu­al Arts, Inc.)

It’s tak­en for grant­ed that every brand or ris­ing star must estab­lish and main­tain a con­stant pres­ence on var­i­ous social net­works. Indeed, the social media star—an enti­ty famous sole­ly for col­lect­ing fol­low­ers and post­ing glam­orous pho­tos with themed commentary—may seem like a phe­nom­e­non that could only exist in the inter­net age, though writ­ers like J.G. Bal­lard saw such things com­ing decades ago.

But before obses­sive pho­tog­ra­phy sat­u­rat­ed the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment, Andy Warhol grasped the medium’s cen­tral impor­tance in the doc­u­men­ta­tion of every­day life. It just so hap­pened that his every­day life was filled with celebri­ty actors, mod­els, artists, and musi­cians.

Warhol, writes James D. Ellis at Light Stalk­ing, “was the pro­to-hip­ster,” a rest­less moth always on the hunt for a flame. “Much like our con­tem­po­rary cul­ture, Warhol found it dif­fi­cult to sit and do noth­ing. He had to leave his house or Fac­to­ry and expe­ri­ence his imme­di­ate sur­round­ings.”

(Image cred­it: © The Andy Warhol Foun­da­tion for the Visu­al Arts, Inc.)

And he had to pho­to­graph every one of those expe­ri­ences. Warhol used his Polaroids and 35mm the way we use iPhones. A court case in the ear­ly nineties once took up the ques­tion of whether Warhol’s pho­tographs could be con­sid­ered fine art, but the artist him­self, writes Pati­na Lee at Wide­walls, “was obvi­ous­ly unde­cid­ed about their val­ue and mean­ing,” say­ing “A pic­ture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pic­tures. It’s a visu­al diary.”

Warhol, Lee writes, “took his cam­era with him wher­ev­er he went, doc­u­ment­ing prac­ti­cal­ly every­thing, the high­est high class and the low­est trash (lit­er­al­ly, he took pho­tos of trash cans and of what they con­tained)…. This inclu­sive­ness is what made his pho­to­graph­ic under­tak­ings bor­der between art and mere obses­sive col­lect­ing, or as peo­ple like to cyn­i­cal­ly notice, con­sum­ing the life around him.” His con­sump­tion, and pho­tographs of trash, comes to us as trea­sure, an exten­sive record of Warhol’s New York in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies.

(Image cred­it: © The Andy Warhol Foun­da­tion for the Visu­al Arts, Inc.)

Stan­ford University’s Can­tor Arts Cen­ter and Stan­ford Libraries have col­lab­o­rat­ed to make their Warhol pho­to archives avail­able to the pub­lic—pho­tos snapped “at dis­cos, din­ner par­ties, flea mar­kets, and wrestling match­es. Friends, boyfriends, busi­ness asso­ciates, socialites, celebri­ties, and passers­by.” This “trove of 3,600 con­tact sheets fea­tur­ing 130,000 pho­to­graph­ic expo­sures” doc­u­ments Warhol’s dai­ly life from 1976 until his death in 1987 and includes can­did pho­tos of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tru­man Capote, Bian­ca Jag­ger, Jim­my Carter, Martha Gra­ham, Kei­th Har­ing, Deb­bie Har­ry, Grace Jones, Jack­ie Kennedy, Liza Minel­li, Dol­ly Par­ton, Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor, and more.

The archive, writes San­dra Fed­er for Stan­ford News, “is the most com­plete col­lec­tion of the artist’s black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy ever made avail­able to the pub­lic.” It was acquired by the Can­tor in 2014 from the Andy Warhol Foun­da­tion for the Visu­al Arts. Giv­en that these are all con­tact sheets, nav­i­gat­ing the col­lect­ing can be a lit­tle bewil­der­ing. The Can­tor has pro­vid­ed a num­ber of tools to help. Click on Con­tact Sheets here to explore all 3,600+ con­tact sheets. Click Neg­a­tives to see indi­vid­ual frames, like those of Kei­th Har­ing, Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat at the top, Lou Reed fur­ther up, and Annie Lei­bovitz above. Or start brows­ing through pic­tures orga­nized by theme here.

(Image cred­it: © The Andy Warhol Foun­da­tion for the Visu­al Arts, Inc.)

Dig deep, and you’ll find the odd­est things, like Andy Warhol run­ning in Cen­tral Park for char­i­ty with Grace Jones and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Gor­don Parks. What­ev­er Andy did, who­ev­er he hap­pened to do it with—and a stranger cast of char­ac­ters you will not find—it’s all in this huge pho­to archive some­where.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Min­utes

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Roy Licht­en­stein and Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fy Their Pop Art in Vin­tage 1966 Film

Watch Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests of Three Female Mus­es: Nico, Edie Sedg­wick & Mary Woronov

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

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In 1900, a Photographer Had to Create an Enormous 1,400-Pound Camera to Take a Picture of an Entire Train

in Photography | September 24th, 2018

Cam­eras are small, and get­ting small­er all the time. This devel­op­ment has helped us all doc­u­ment our lives, shar­ing the sights we see with an ease dif­fi­cult to imag­ine even twen­ty years ago. 120 years ago, pho­tog­ra­phy faced an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of chal­lenges, but then as now, much of the moti­va­tion to meet them came from com­mer­cial inter­ests. Take the case of Chica­go pho­tog­ra­ph­er George R. Lawrence and his client the Chica­go & Alton Rail­way, who want­ed to pro­mote their brand-new Chica­go-to-St. Louis express ser­vice, the Alton Lim­it­ed. This prod­uct of the gold­en age of Amer­i­can train trav­el demand­ed some respectable pho­tog­ra­phy, a tech­nol­o­gy then still in its thrilling, pos­si­bil­i­ty-filled emer­gence.

A tru­ly ele­gant piece of work, the Alton Lim­it­ed would, dur­ing its 72-year lifes­pan, boast such fea­tures as a post office, a library, a Japan­ese tea-room, and a strik­ing maroon-and-gold col­or scheme that earned it the nick­name “the Red Train.”

Even from a dis­tance, the Alton Lim­it­ed looked upon its intro­duc­tion in 1899 like noth­ing else on the rail­roads, with its six iden­ti­cal Pull­man cars all designed in per­fect sym­me­try — the very aspect that so chal­lenged Lawrence to cap­ture it in a pho­to­graph. Sim­ply put, the whole train would­n’t fit in one pic­ture. While he could have shot each car sep­a­rate­ly and then stitched them togeth­er into one big print, he reject­ed that tech­nique for its inabil­i­ty to “pre­serve the absolute truth­ful­ness of per­spec­tive.”

Only a much big­ger cam­era, Lawrence knew, could cap­ture the whole train. And so, in the words of Atlas Obscu­ra’s Ani­ka Burgess, he “quick­ly went to work design­ing a cam­era that could hold a glass plate mea­sur­ing 8 feet by 4 1/2 feet. It was con­struct­ed by the cam­era man­u­fac­tur­er J.A. Ander­son from nat­ur­al cher­ry wood, with bespoke Carl Zeiss lens­es (also the largest ever made). The cam­era alone weighed 900 pounds. With the plate hold­er, it reached 1,400 pounds. Accord­ing to an August 1901 arti­cle in the Brook­lyn Dai­ly Eagle, the bel­lows was big enough to hold six men, and the whole cam­era took a total of 15 work­ers to oper­ate.” Trans­port­ing the cam­era to Brighton Park, “an ide­al van­tage point from which to shoot the wait­ing train,” required anoth­er team of men, and devel­op­ing the eight-foot long pho­to took ten gal­lons of chem­i­cals.

The adver­tise­ments in which Lawrence’s pho­to­graph appeared prac­ti­cal­ly glowed with pride in the Alton Lim­it­ed, billing it as “a train for two cities,” as “the only way between Chica­go and St. Louis,” as “the hand­somest train in the world.” The whole-train pic­ture beg­gared belief: though it went on to win Lawrence the Grand Prize for World Pho­to­graph­ic Excel­lence at the 1900 Paris Expo­si­tion, Burgess notes, it looked so impos­si­ble that both the pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Chica­go & Alton “had to sub­mit affi­davits to ver­i­fy that the pho­to­graph had been made on one plate.” We in the 21st cen­tu­ry, of course, have no rea­son to doubt its authen­tic­i­ty, or even to mar­vel at its inge­nu­ity until we know the sto­ry of the immense cus­tom cam­era with which Lawrence shot it. Today, what awes us are all those small­er shots of the Alton Lim­it­ed’s inte­ri­or, exud­ing a lux­u­ri­ous­ness that has long van­ished from Amer­i­ca’s rail­roads. If we were to find our­selves on such a train today, we’d sure­ly start Insta­gram­ming it right away.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold a Beau­ti­ful Archive of 10,000 Vin­tage Cam­eras at Col­lec­tion Appareils

19-Year-Old Stu­dent Uses Ear­ly Spy Cam­era to Take Can­did Street Pho­tos (Cir­ca 1895)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Darren’s Big DIY Cam­era

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 or on Face­book.

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Behold Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

in Art, Music, Photography | September 13th, 2018

“If God had designed the orches­tra,” remarks a char­ac­ter in Rick Moody’s Hotels of North Amer­i­ca, “then the cel­lo was His great­est accom­plish­ment.” I couldn’t agree more. The cel­lo sounds sub­lime, looks state­ly… even the word cel­lo evokes regal poise and grace. If orches­tral instru­ments were chess pieces, the cel­lo would be queen: shape­ly and dig­ni­fied, prime mover on the board, majes­tic in sym­phonies, quar­tets, cham­ber pop ensem­bles, post rock bands….

With all its many son­ic and aes­thet­ic charms, I didn’t imag­ine it was pos­si­ble to love the cel­lo more. Then I saw Roman­ian artist Adri­an Bor­da’s mag­nif­i­cent pho­tos tak­en from inside one. The pho­to above, Bor­da tells us at his Deviant Art page, was tak­en from inside “a very old French cel­lo made in Napoleon’s times.” It looks like the bel­ly of the HMS Vic­to­ry mat­ed with the nave of Chartres Cathe­dral. The light descend­ing through the f‑holes seems of some divine ori­gin.

Bor­da has also tak­en pho­tos from inside an old dou­ble bass (above), as well as a gui­tar, sax, and piano. The stringed orches­tral instru­ments, he says, yield­ed the best results. He was first inspired by a 2009 ad cam­paign for the Berlin­er Phil­har­moniker that “cap­tured the insides of instru­ments,” writes Twist­ed Sifter, “reveal­ing the hid­den land­scapes with­in.” With­out any sense of how the art direc­tor cre­at­ed the images, Bor­da set about exper­i­ment­ing with meth­ods of his own.

He was lucky enough to have a luthi­er friend who had a con­tra­bass open for repairs. Lat­er he trav­eled to Amiens, where he found the French cel­lo, also open. “To achieve these shots,” Twist­ed Sifter notes, “Bor­da fit a Sony NEX‑6 cam­era equipped with a Samyang 8mm fish­eye lens inside the instru­ment and then used a smart remote so he could pre­view the work­flow on his phone.” Depend­ing on the angle and the play of light with­in the instru­ment, the pho­tos can look eerie, somber, omi­nous, or angelic—mirroring the cello’s expres­sive range.

Bor­da gives the cel­lo inte­ri­or shot above the per­fect title “A Long, Lone­ly Time….” Its play of smoke and light is ghost­ly noir. His pho­to below, of the inside of a sax­o­phone, pulls us into a haunt­ed, alien tun­nel. If you want to know what’s on the oth­er side, con­sid­er the strange sur­re­al­ist worlds of Borda’s main gig as a sur­re­al­ist painter of warped fan­tasies and night­mares. Unlike these pho­tos, his paint­ings are full of lurid, vio­lent col­or, but they are also filled with mys­te­ri­ous musi­cal motifs. See more of Bor­da’s inte­ri­or instru­ment pho­tos at Deviant Art and Twister Sifter.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Luthi­er Birth a Cel­lo in This Hyp­not­ic Doc­u­men­tary

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Nine Tips from Bill Mur­ray & Cel­list Jan Vogler on How to Study Intense­ly and Opti­mize Your Learn­ing

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

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Filmmaker Wim Wenders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Photography

in Film, Photography, Technology | August 7th, 2018

Smart­phones have made us all pho­tog­ra­phers — or maybe they’ve made it so that none of us is a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. A cen­tu­ry ago, mere­ly pos­sess­ing and know­ing how to use a cam­era count­ed as a fair­ly notable accom­plish­ment; today, near­ly all of us car­ry one at all times whether we want to or not, and its oper­a­tion demands no skill what­so­ev­er. “I do believe that every­body’s a pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” says cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders, direc­tor of movies like The Amer­i­can Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, in the BBC clip above. “We’re all tak­ing bil­lions of pic­tures, so pho­tog­ra­phy is more alive than ever, and at the same time, it’s more dead than ever.”

Wen­ders made this claim at an exhi­bi­tion of his Polaroid pho­tographs, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. In a sense, the Polaroid cam­era — easy to use, near-instant results, and high­ly portable by the stan­dards of its era — was the smart­phone cam­era of the 20th cen­tu­ry, but Wen­ders does­n’t draw the same kind of inspi­ra­tion from phone shots as he did from Polaroids. “The trou­ble with iPhone pic­tures is that nobody sees them,” he says, and one glance at the speed with which Insta­gram users scroll will con­firm it. “Even the peo­ple who take them don’t look at them any­more, and they cer­tain­ly don’t make prints.”

Hav­ing worked in cin­e­ma for around half a cen­tu­ry now (and for a time with the late cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­by Müller, one of the most respect­ed and idio­syn­crat­ic in the indus­try), Wen­ders has seen first­hand how our rela­tion­ship to the image has changed in that time. “I know from expe­ri­ence that the less you have, the more cre­ative you have to become,” he says, asked about the pre­pon­der­ance of pho­to­graph­ic fil­ters and apps. “Maybe it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a sign of cre­ativ­i­ty that you can turn every pic­ture into its oppo­site.” Still, he has no objec­tion to cam­era-phone cul­ture itself, and even admits to tak­ing self­ies him­self — with the caveat that “look­ing into the mir­ror is not an act of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

If self­ie-tak­ing and every­thing else we do with the cam­eras in our smart­phones (to say noth­ing of the image manip­u­la­tions we per­form) isn’t pho­tog­ra­phy, what is it? “I’m in search of a new word for this new activ­i­ty that looks so much like pho­tog­ra­phy, but isn’t pho­tog­ra­phy any­more,” Wen­ders says. “Please, let me know if you have a word for it.” Some com­menters have put forth “faux­tog­ra­phy,” an amus­ing enough sug­ges­tion but not one like­ly to sat­is­fy a cre­ator like Wen­ders who, in work as in life, sel­dom makes the obvi­ous choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wim Wen­ders Explains How Polaroid Pho­tos Ignite His Cre­ative Process and Help Him Cap­ture a Deep­er Kind of Truth

Wim Wen­ders Reveals His Rules of Cin­e­ma Per­fec­tion

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 or on Face­book.

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Rare Photos of Frida Kahlo, Age 13–23

in Art, History, Photography | July 23rd, 2018

“Before they were famous” pho­tos are a click­bait sta­ple, espe­cial­ly if they reveal a hereto­fore unseen side of some­one whose image is tight­ly con­trolled:

The smol­der­ing activist-actress-direc­tor as a gawky, open-faced sopho­more, her hair moussed to the very lim­its of her mod­el­ing school test shots?

The ris­ing polit­i­cal star, pim­ple-faced and cen­ter-part­ed, pos­ing with the oth­er three mem­bers of his high school’s Dun­geons and Drag­ons Club?

What about ever­green art star Fri­da Kahlo?

Though her hus­band, mural­ist Diego Rivera, was the one who urged her to adopt the tra­di­tion­al Tehua­na dress of their native Mex­i­co as a uni­form of sorts, Fri­da engi­neered her image by plac­ing her­self cen­ter stage in dozens of alle­gor­i­cal, inti­mate self-por­traits.

Much of her work alludes to the hor­rif­ic acci­dent she suf­fered at 18, and the tor­tu­ous treat­ments and surg­eries she under­went as a result for the rest of her life.

It shaped the way she saw her­self, and, in turn, the way we see her. Her endur­ing appeal is such that even those who aren’t over­ly famil­iar with her work feel they have a pret­ty good han­dle on her, thanks to her ubiq­ui­ty on tote­bags, appar­el, and var­i­ous gift relat­ed items—even Fri­da Kahlo action fig­ures and paper dolls.

We know this lady, right?

What a plea­sure to get to know her bet­ter. A col­lec­tion of pho­tos that has recent­ly come to light intro­duces us to a younger, more can­did Frida—both before and after the acci­dent, when she returned to her stud­ies at Nation­al Prepara­to­ry School.

Tak­en togeth­er with the por­traits made by her pho­tog­ra­ph­er father, they show ear­ly evi­dence of the force­ful per­son­al­i­ty that would dom­i­nate and define her pub­lic image, Mary Jane-style pumps with socks, a mid­dy blouse, and a vari­ety of blunt bobs aside.

Some of the lat­er pho­tos in this batch speak to her increas­ing inter­est in dis­tin­guish­ing her­self from her female peers. Her exper­i­ments in cross dress­ing ensured she would stand out in every group pho­to, a dash­ing fig­ure in suit, tie, and slicked back hair.

Though this peri­od of her life is less a mat­ter of pub­lic record, it gets its due in the 2017 graph­ic nov­el Fri­da: The Sto­ry of Her Life by Van­na Vin­ci. Some of the oth­ers in these pho­tos, includ­ing her sis­ters and her first boyfriend, Ale­jan­dro Gómez Arias, appear as char­ac­ters, as does Death in the form of print­mak­er José Guadalupe Posada’s La Calav­era Cat­ri­na—per­haps the only image for­mi­da­ble enough to hold its own against the fab­u­lous Fri­da.

Fri­da Kahlo The Sto­ry of Her Life p. 22–23

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

The Fri­da Kahlo Action Fig­ure

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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French Bookstore Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cover Art

in Art, Books, Literature, Photography, Travel | July 13th, 2018

You can lead the I‑generation to a book­store, but can you make them read?

Per­haps, espe­cial­ly if the vol­ume has an eye-catch­ing cov­er image that bleeds off the edge.

If noth­ing else, they can be enlist­ed to pro­vide some stun­ning free pub­lic­i­ty for the titles that appeal to their high­ly visu­al sense of cre­ative play. (An author’s dream!)

France’s first indie book­store, Bordeaux’s Librairie Mol­lat, is reel­ing ‘em in with Book Face, an irre­sistible self­ie chal­lenge that harkens back to DJ Carl Mor­ris’ Sleeve­face project, in which one or more peo­ple are pho­tographed “obscur­ing or aug­ment­ing any part of their body or bod­ies with record sleeve(s), caus­ing an illu­sion.”

The results are pro­lif­er­at­ing on the store’s Insta­gram, as fetch­ing young things (and oth­ers) apply them­selves to find­ing the best angles and cos­tumes for their lit-based Trompe‑l’œil mas­ter­strokes.

…even the ones that don’t quite pass the forced per­spec­tive test have the capac­i­ty to charm.

…and not every shot requires intense pre-pro­duc­tion and pre­ci­sion place­ment.

Hope­ful­ly, we’ll see more kids get­ting into the act soon. In fact, if some young­sters of your acquain­tance are express­ing a bit of bore­dom with their vacances d’été, try turn­ing them loose in your local book­store to iden­ti­fy a like­ly can­di­date for a Book Face of their own.

(Remem­ber to sup­port the book­seller with a pur­chase!)

Back state­side, some librar­i­ans shared their pro tips for achiev­ing Book Face suc­cess in this 2015 New York Times arti­cle. The New York Pub­lic Library’s Mor­gan Holz­er also cites Sleeve­face as the inspi­ra­tion behind #Book­face­Fri­day, the hash­tag she coined in hopes that oth­er libraries would fol­low suit.

With over 50,000 tagged posts on Insta­gram, looks like it’s caught on!

See Librairie Mol­lat’s patrons’ gallery of Book Faces here.

Read­ers, if you’ve Book Faced any­where in the world, please share the link to your efforts in the com­ments sec­tion.

via This is Colos­sal/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. In hon­or of her son’s 18th birth­day, she invites you to Book Face your baby using The Big Rum­pus, her first book, for which he served as cov­er mod­el. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Color Film Was Designed to Take Pictures of White People, Not People of Color: The Unfortunate History of Racial Bias in Photography (1940–1990)

in Life, Photography, Science | July 2nd, 2018

In the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy and film, get­ting the right image meant get­ting the one which con­formed to preva­lent ideas of human­i­ty. This includ­ed ideas of white­ness, of what colour — what range of hue — white peo­ple want­ed white peo­ple to be. 

- Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Cul­ture

As the bride in the 2014 Inter­ra­cial Wed­ding Pho­tog­ra­ph­er skit (see below) on her tit­u­lar sketch com­e­dy TV show, come­di­an Amy Schumer cast her­self in a small but essen­tial back­ground role. She is for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es a liv­ing Shirley card, an image of a young white woman that was for years the stan­dard pho­tog­ra­phy techs used to deter­mine “nor­mal” skin-col­or bal­ance when devel­op­ing film in the lab.

The Shirley card—named for its orig­i­nal mod­el, Kodak employ­ee Shirley Page–featured a suc­ces­sion of young women over the years, but skin tone-wise, the resem­blance was strik­ing.

As described by Syree­ta McFad­den in a Buz­zfeed essay that also touch­es on Car­rie Mae Weems’ 1988 four-pan­el por­trait, Peach­es, Liz, Tami­ka, Elaine, a col­or wheel meme fea­tur­ing actress Lupi­ta Nyong’o, and artists Adam Broomberg and Oliv­er Cha­narin’s 2013 project that trained an apartheid-era Polaroid ID2 cam­era and near­ly 40-year-old film stock on dark-skinned South African sub­jects as a lens for exam­in­ing racism:

She is wear­ing a white dress with long black gloves. A pearl bracelet adorns one of her wrists. She has auburn hair that drapes her exposed shoul­ders. Her eyes are blue. The back­ground is gray­ish, and she is sur­round­ed by three pil­lows, each in one of the pri­ma­ry col­ors we’re taught in school. She wears a white dress because it reads high con­trast against the gray back­ground with her black gloves. “Col­or girl” is the tech­ni­cians’ term for her. The image is used as a met­ric for skin-col­or bal­ance, which tech­ni­cians use to ren­der an image as close as pos­si­ble to what the human eye rec­og­nizes as nor­mal. But there’s the rub: With a white body as a light meter, all oth­er skin tones become devi­a­tions from the norm.

This explains why the por­trait ses­sion McFadden’s mom set up in a shop­ping mall stu­dio chain yield­ed results so dis­as­trous that McFad­den instinc­tive­ly grav­i­tat­ed toward black-and-white when she start­ed tak­ing pic­tures. Grayscale did a much bet­ter job of sug­gest­ing the wide vari­ety of mul­ti­cul­tur­al skin tones than exist­ing col­or film.

In her 2009 paper “Look­ing at Shirley, the Ulti­mate Norm: Colour Bal­ance, Image Tech­nolo­gies and Cog­ni­tive Equi­ty,” Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­si­ty media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion stud­ies pro­fes­sor Lor­na Roth went into the chem­istry of inher­ent, if uncon­scious, racial bias. The poten­tial to rec­og­nize a spec­trum of yel­low, brown and red­dish skin tones was there, but the film com­pa­nies went with emul­sions that catered to the per­ceived needs of their tar­get con­sumers, whose hides were notice­ably lighter than those of black shut­ter­bugs also seek­ing to doc­u­ment their fam­i­ly vaca­tions, mile­stones, and cel­e­bra­tions.

Indus­try progress can be chalked up to pres­sure from ven­dors of wood fur­ni­ture and choco­late, who felt their dark prod­ucts could look bet­ter on film.

Oprah Win­frey and Black Enter­tain­ment Tele­vi­sion were ear­ly adopters of cam­eras equipped with two com­put­er chips, thus enabling them to accu­rate­ly por­tray a vari­ety of indi­vid­ual tones simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.

Who knew that Amy Schumer sketch, below, would turn out to have such his­toric sig­nif­i­cance? Once you know about the Shirley card, the com­e­dy becomes even dark­er. Gen­er­a­tions of real brides and grooms, whose skin tones fell to either side of Schumer’s TV groom, DJ Ali Sha­heed Muham­mad of A Tribe Called Quest fame, failed to show up in their own wed­ding pho­tos, through no fault of their own.

via Vox

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Pho­tographs of Snowflakes: Dis­cov­er the Ground­break­ing Micropho­tog­ra­phy of Wil­son “Snowflake” Bent­ley (1885)

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

New Archive of Mid­dle East­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy Fea­tures 9,000 Dig­i­tized Images

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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New Archive of Middle Eastern Photography Features 9,000 Digitized Images

in Archives, History, Photography | June 21st, 2018

From Shamoon Zamir, a lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor at NYU Abu Dhabi, comes a “research archive of his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phy from the Mid­dle East and North­ern Africa (MENA),” designed to be  ful­ly acces­si­ble to the pub­lic. We’re told:

Today, Akkasah: The Cen­ter for Pho­tog­ra­phy at NYU Abu Dhabi boasts an archive of 62,000 images from the UAE and across the MENA region – of which 9,000 are already dig­i­tized and avail­able online — the only of its kind in the Mid­dle East. These images offer new insights into the his­to­ry and rapid trans­for­ma­tion of the UAE and the broad­er Arab world. They include his­tor­i­cal col­lec­tions rang­ing from the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry to the late twen­ti­eth, cov­er­ing a vari­ety of themes and top­ics, from ear­ly images of the Holy Lands and from the Ottoman Empire, to images from fam­i­ly albums, insti­tu­tion­al archives and the his­to­ry of Egypt­ian cin­e­ma.

You can vis­it the col­lec­tion of images here, which is itself divid­ed into a few key areas: His­tor­i­cal Col­lec­tions,  Con­tem­po­rary Projects, and Pho­to Albums.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

20,000 Endan­gered Archae­o­log­i­cal Sites Now Cat­a­logued in a New Online Data­base

New Dig­i­tal Archive Puts Online 4,000 His­toric Images of Rome: The Eter­nal City from the 16th to 20th Cen­turies

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

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