But the accompanying captions set punk’s poet laureate apart. No LOLs here. It’s clear that the award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train thinks about her content, carefully crafting each post before she publishes. Each is a bite-sized reflection, a page-a-day meditation on what it means to be alive:
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female characters hits the lecture circuit to set the record straight premieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
As deep as we get into the 21st century, many of us still can’t stop talking about the 20th. That goes especially for those of us from the West, and specifically those of us from America and Britain, places that experienced not just an eventful 20th century but a triumphant one: hence, in the case of the former, the designation “the American Century.” And even though that period came after the end of Britain’s supposed glory days, the “Imperial Century” of 1815–1914, the United Kingdom changed so much from the First World War to the end of the millennium — not just in terms of what lands it comprised, but what was appearing and happening on them — that words can’t quite suffice to tell the story.
Enter Britain from Above, an archive of over 95,000 pieces of aerial photography of Britain taken not just from the air but from the sweep of history between 1919 and 2006. Its pictures, says its about page, come from “the Aerofilms collection, a unique aerial photographic archive of international importance.
The collection includes 1.26 million negatives and more than 2000 photograph albums.” Originally created by Aerofilms Ltd, an air survey set up by a couple veterans of World War I and later expanded to include smaller collections from the archives of two other companies, it “presents an unparalleled picture of the changing face of Britain in the 20th century” and “includes the largest and most significant number of air photographs of Britain taken before 1939.”
Attaining a firm grasp of a place’s history often requires what we metaphorically call a “view from 30,000 feet,” but in the case of one of the leading parts of the world in as technologically and developmentally heady a time as the 20th century, we mean it literally. Enter the Britain from Above photo archive here.
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.
The British photographer Alfred Buckham (1879–1956) came of age during the early history of flight and served, starting in 1917, as a reconnaissance photographer for the Royal Naval Air Service. Apparently a better photographer than pilot, Buckham “crashed nine times before he was discharged from the Royal Naval Air Service as a hundred per cent disabled,” writes the National Galleries Scotland website. (At the age of 39, he damaged his voice box and had to breathe out of a tracheotomy tube for the rest of his life.) But, nonetheless, his passion for aerial photography continued unabated.
In 1920, Buckham captured this rather splendid aerial photo of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. It’s his chef d’oeuvre. About the photograph, the National Galleries writes:
Buckham’s aerial view of Edinburgh has become one of the most popular photographs in our collection. The view is taken from the west, with the castle in the foreground and the buildings of the Old Town along the Royal Mile gradually fading into a bank of mist with the rocky silhouette of Arthur’s Seat just visible in the distance. Buckham was always keen to capture strong contrasts of light and dark, often combining the skies and landscapes from separate photographs to achieve a theatrical effect. As he does here, he sometimes collaged or hand-painted the form of a tiny aircraft to enhance the vertiginous effect. Yet accuracy remained a concern; Buckham later professed a particular fondness for his view of Edinburgh, ‘because it presents, so nearly, the effect that I saw’.
Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breathless with the anticipation of catching Pokémon on your phone screen?
If so, you might enjoy bagging some of the Pokeverse’s real world counterparts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new photo-identification app. It does for the natural world what Shazam does for music.
Aim your phone’s camera at a nondescript leaf or the grasshopper-ish-looking creature who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the relevant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get better acquainted.
Registered users can pin their finds to their personal collections, provided the app’s recognition technology produces a match.
(Several early adopters suggest it’s still a few houseplants shy of true functionality…)
Seek’s protective stance with regard to privacy settings is well suited to junior specimen collectors, as are the virtual badges with which it rewards energetic uploaders.
While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is building a photo library, composed in part of user submissions.
You’ll recall, a few months ago, when Google made it possible for all of your Facebook friends to find their doppelgängers in art history. As so often with that particular company, the fun distraction came as the tip of a research-and-development-intensive iceberg, and they’ve revealed the next layer in the form of three artificial intelligence-driven experiments that allow us to navigate and find connections among huge swaths of visual culture with unprecedented ease.
Google’s new Art Palette, as explained in the video at the top of the post, allows you to search for works of art held in “collections from over 1500 cultural institutions,” not just by artist or movement or theme but by color palette.
You can specify a color set, take a picture with your phone’s camera to use the colors around you, or even go with a random set of five colors to take you to new artistic realms entirely.
Admittedly, scrolling through the hundreds of chromatically similar works of art from all throughout history and across the world can at first feel a little uncanny, like walking into one of those houses whose occupant has shelved their books by color. But a variety of promising uses will immediately come to mind, especially for those professionally involved in the aesthetic fields. Famously color-loving, art-inspired fashion designer Paul Smith, for instance, appears in another promotional video describing how he’d use Art Palette: he’d “start off with the colors that I’ve selected for that season, and then through the app look at those colors and see what gets thrown up.”
In collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, Google’s Art Recognizer, the second of these experiments, uses machine learning to find particular works of art as they’ve variously appeared over decades and decades of exhibition. “We had recently launched 30,000 installation images online, all the way back to 1929,” says MoMA Digital Media Director Shannon Darrough in the video above. But since “those images didn’t contain any information about the actual works in them,” it presented the opportunity to use machine learning to train a system to recognize the works on display in the images, which, in the words of Google Arts and Culture Lab’s Freya Murray, “turned a repository of images into a searchable archive.”
The formidable photographic holdings of Life magazine, which documented human affairs with characteristically vivid photojournalism for a big chunk of the twentieth century, made for a similarly enticing trove of machine-learnable material. “Life magazine is one of the most iconic publications in history,” says Murray in the video above. “Life Tags is an experiment that organizes Life magazine’s archives into an interactive encyclopedia,” letting you browse by every tag from “Austin-Healey” to “Electronics” to “Livestock” to “Wrestling” and many more besides. Google’s investment in artificial intelligence has made the history of Life searchable. How much longer, one wonders, before it makes the history of life searchable?
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.
Just when you think the fabled downtown New York 70s punk scene centered around CBGBs has no more secrets to offer, another homegrown documentarian appears to show us photographs (on Instagram) we’ve never seen and tell some pretty nifty stories to go along with them. Julia Gorton came to New York from her native Delaware in 1976 and used a Polaroid camera to capture her firsthand encounters with legends like Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Tom Verlaine, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch (below), “a natural for the glamorous black-and-white photos I liked to make,” she says, and a “a real partner” in Gorton’s enterprise and her most-photographed subject.
In Christina Cacouris’ interview with Gorton at Garage, we learn that the photographer “ended up meeting Tom’s mom [Television singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine] at the flea market in Wilmington [Delaware]. She was a proud mom who played her son’s single on a cassette player in the back of her station wagon while she sold things on a folding table.”
Exactly this kind of intimacy and family atmosphere pervades Gorton’s work in the punk clubs, downtown streets, and record stores. Like most of the performers onstage, Gorton was a relative amateur, learning her craft alongside the musicians and artists she photographed. “You didn’t need to be perfect before you started,” she says.
Although she found her lack of technical ability frustrating, in hindsight, Gorton says, “images that I perceived at the time as failures actually represent the true character of the time period more honestly and powerfully than the images I thought were ‘successful.’” In many cases, however, it has taken 21st century digital technology to unearth some of her most revealing shots.
The cost of film prohibited her from taking multiple exposures, and the darkness of CBGBs left many prints too murky. Using Photoshop, Gorton has been able to revisit many of these seemingly failed attempts, like the moody portrait above of Tom Verlaine. “I was able to scan and finally pull him out of the shadows of decades past,” she muses.
Along with the glamour of her portraits, Gorton’s candid shots of the period capture downtown legends in rare moments and poses. (Check out John Cale above at CBGBs, for example, or Jean Michel Basquiat, then known as SAMO, dancing on the right, below.) Shot while she was a student at the Parsons School of Design, Gorton’s photos of the punk, New Wave, and No Wave scene were the beginning of her long career as a photographer, illustrator, and graphic designer.
On her Instagram feed, 70s and 80s images mix in with her current projects, and the juxtaposition of contemporary musicians and artists with their counterparts from 40 years ago gives a sense of the long continuity reflected in Gorton’s engagement with street art and underground rock culture. Explore her photo collection here.
Wim Wenders began his prolific feature filmmaking career in 1970, and nearly half a century later — having directed such cinephile favorites as Alice in the Cities, The American Friend, Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire along the way — he shows no signs of slowing down. Known for his collaboration with cinematographers, and with Robby Müller in particular, Wenders has worked in everything from black-and-white 16-millimeter film, when he first started out, to digital 3D, which he’s spent recent years putting to a variety of cinematic ends. But we can trace all of his visions back, in one way or another, to the humble Polaroid instant camera.
“Every movie starts with a certain idea,” says Wenders in the short “Photographers in Focus” video above, and the Polaroid was just a collection of constant ideas.” The auteur speaks over images of some of the Polaroids he’s taken throughout his life, relating his history with the medium.
“My very first Polaroid camera was a very simple one. Mid-sixties. I was 20, and I used Polaroid cameras exclusively until I was about 35 or so. Most of them I gave away, because when you took Polaroids, people were always greedy and wanted them because it was an object, it was a singular thing.”
Wenders describes his Polaroids as “very insightful into the process of my first six, seven movies, all the movies I did through the seventies,” the era in which he mastered the form of the road movie first in his native Germany, then in the much-mythologized United States. He not only shot Polaroids in preparation, but during production, snapping them casually, much as one would on a genuine road trip. “Polaroids were never so exact about the framing. You didn’t really care about that. It was about the immediacy of it. It’s almost a subconscious act, and then it became something real. That makes it such a window into your soul as well.” Polaroid photographs, as Wenders sees them, capture a deeper kind of truth. It’s no surprise, then, even in age of the 3D digital camera, to see them making a comeback.
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.
Some writers are restless by nature, roaming like Ernest Hemingway or Henry Miller, settling nowhere and everywhere. Others are homebodies, like William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Their fiction reflects their desire to nest in place. Strolling the grounds of Faulkner’s Rowan Oak one sweltering summer, I swear I saw the author round a corner of the house, lost in thought and wearing riding clothes. Visitors to Virginia Woolf’s home in the village of Rodmell in East Sussex have surely had similar visions.
Woolf’s home contains her writing life within the lush garden grounds and cottage walls of the 17th century Monk’s House—Virginia and Leonard’s retreat, then permanent home, from 1919 until her suicide by drowning in the nearby River Ouse in 1941.
Even in death she belonged to the house; Leonard buried her ashes beneath an elm in the Monk’s House garden. Although Leonard was the gardener, “there are very few entries” in Virginia’s diary “which do not mention the garden.”
But there are many other ways to meet the author of Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room than traveling to her writer’s lodge, a tidy, tiny house on the Monk’s House grounds that served as her office. Like an avid Instragrammer—or like my mother and probably yours—Woolf kept careful record of her life in photo albums, which now reside at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The Monk’s House albums, numbered 1–6, contain images of Woolf, her family, and her many friends, including such famous members of the Bloomsbury group as E.M. Forster (above, top), John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey (below, with Woolf and W.B. Yeats, and playing chess with sister Marjorie). Harvard has digitized one album, Monk’s House 4, dated 1939 on the cover. You can view its scanned pages at their library site.
There are vacation photos and family photos; landscapes and photos of pets; clippings from newspapers and magazines; and, of course, the garden. The albums span the period 1890 to 1947 (including additions by Leonard after Virginia’s death). Many of the photos are labeled, many are not. Many of the albums’ pages are left blank. The photographs are arranged in no particular order. The net effect is that of a life recollected in pregnant images laced with lacunae, a psychological theme of so much of Woolf’s writing. Woolf, writes Maggie Humm, “believed that photographs could help her to survive those identity-destroying moments of her own life—her incoherent illnesses.”
But photography was also a means for cultivating relationships. Woolf “skillfully transformed friends and moments into artful tableaux, and she was surrounded by female friends and family who were also energetic photographers,” including her sister, Lady Ottoline Morrell, her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, and her great aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. She “frequently invited friends to share her reflections. The letters and diaries describe a constant exchange of photographs, in which the photographs become a meeting-place, a conversation, aide-mémoires, and sometimes mechanisms of survival and enticement.”
Unlike Monk’s House, a world built and shared with her husband, Woolf’s albums represent her own personal network of relationships. They serve as memorials and meditations after the deaths of those close to her. “Photographs of friends were important memento mori,” such as the portrait of poet Julian Bell, above, her nephew, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. The photos document gatherings and important life events among her social circle. They perform all the tasks of ordinary photo albums, and more—showing us the “chain of perceptions” of which personal identity is made in Woolf’s modernist vision, with repetitions and sequences centered around familiar objects like her favorite chair.
For fans, avid readers, critics, and literary historians, the photographs provide a visual record of a life we come to know so well through the letters, diaries, and romans à clef. Writing to her sister, Woolf once described painting a portrait “using dozens of snapshots in the paint.” Visit her photo album here at the Harvard Library site, and flip through the pages of her life in snapshots.
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