3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

in Art, Google, History, Photography, Technology | April 23rd, 2021

To recent news sto­ries about 3D print­ed guns, pros­thet­ics, and homes, you can add Scan the World’s push to cre­ate “an ecosys­tem of 3D print­able objects of cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance.”

Items that took the ancients untold hours to sculpt from mar­ble and stone can be repro­duced in con­sid­er­ably less time, pro­vid­ed you’ve got the tech­nol­o­gy and the know-how to use it.

Since we last wrote about this free, open source ini­tia­tive in 2017, Scan the World has added Google Arts and Cul­ture to the many cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions with whom it part­ners, expand­ing both its audi­ence and the audi­ence of the muse­ums who allow items in their col­lec­tions to be scanned pri­or to 3D print­ing.


Com­mu­ni­ty con­trib­u­tors have uploaded scan data for over 18,000 sculp­tures and arti­facts onto the plat­form.

Chi­na and India are active­ly court­ing par­tic­i­pants to make some of their trea­sures avail­able.

Although Scan the World is search­able by col­lec­tion, artist, and loca­tion, with so many options, the com­mu­ni­ty blog is a great place to start.

Here you will find help­ful tips for begin­ners hop­ing to pro­duce real­is­tic look­ing skulls and sculp­tures — con­trol your tem­per­a­ture, shake your resin, and learn from your mis­takes.

Got an unreach­able object you’re itch­ing to print? Take a look at the drone pho­togram­me­try tuto­r­i­al to prep your­self for tak­ing a good scan — rotate slow­ly, remem­ber the impor­tance of light, and get up to speed on your drone by test-dri­ving it in an open loca­tion.

Keep an eye peeled for com­pe­ti­tions, like this one, which was won by a pho­to edi­tor and retouch­er with no for­mal 3‑D train­ing.

Art lovers with lit­tle incli­na­tion to crack out the 3D print­er will find inter­est­ing essays on such top­ics as the Gates of Hell, scan­ning in the pan­dem­ic, and the his­to­ry of hair­styles in sculp­ture

You can also embark on a vir­tu­al tour of some of the glob­al loca­tions whose splen­dors are being scanned, pro­grammed, and ren­dered in resin.

A vir­tu­al trip to Paris takes in some of the Louvre’s great­est 3‑dimensional hits: the Venus de Milo, Winged Vic­to­ry, and Psy­che Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

(Any one of those ough­ta class up the ol’ bed­sit…)

The vir­tu­al trip to Aus­tria includes Kierling’s mon­u­ment to Franz Kaf­ka, the Beethoven memo­r­i­al in Vienna’s Heili­gen­städter Park, and Klaus Weber’s trib­ute to Hugo Rheinhold’s Dar­win­ian sculp­ture, Mon­key with Skull. (1,868 down­loads and count­ing!)

A Google map awaits those who would tour the orig­i­nal fla­vor inspi­ra­tions in per­son.

Begin your explo­rations of Scan the World here, and do let us know in the com­ments if you have plans for print­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

The Earth Archive Will 3D-Scan the Entire World & Cre­ate an “Open-Source” Record of Our Plan­et

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er, Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, and some­times, a French Cana­di­an bear known as L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Women Street Photographers: The Web Site, Instragram Account & Book That Amplify the Work of Women Artists Worldwide

in Books, Photography | March 24th, 2021

It’s almost impos­si­ble not to won­der how reclu­sive artists of the past — like anony­mous street pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Chica­go nan­ny Vivian Maier — would fare in the age of Tum­blr and Insta­gram. Would Maier have become inter­net famous? Would she have post­ed any of her pho­tographs? The lit­tle we know about her makes it hard to answer the ques­tion. Maier lived a life of abstemious self-nega­tion. “She nev­er exhib­it­ed her work,” Alex Kot­lowitz writes at Moth­er Jones, “she didn’t share her pho­tos with any­one, except some of the chil­dren in her care.”

And yet, Maier was known to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions about film and the­ater with knowl­edge­able peo­ple. One sus­pects that if she had been able to stay in touch with like minds, she might have been encour­aged by a sup­port­ive com­mu­ni­ty she couldn’t find any­where else. We might imag­ine her, for exam­ple, sub­mit­ting a select few pho­tographs to Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers, a project that began in 2017 as an Insta­gram account and has since “bur­geoned into a web­site, artist res­i­den­cy, series of exhi­bi­tions, film series, and now a book pub­lished this month by Pres­tel,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal.

For women street pho­tog­ra­phers liv­ing and work­ing today, the project offers what founder Gul­nara Samoilo­va says she need­ed and couldn’t find: “I soon began to real­ize that with this plat­form, I could cre­ate every­thing I had always want­ed to receive as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er: the kinds of sup­port and oppor­tu­ni­ties that would have helped me grow dur­ing those for­ma­tive and piv­otal points on my jour­ney.” The project is inter­na­tion­al in scope, bring­ing togeth­er the work of 100 women from 31 coun­tries, “a tiny sam­pling of what’s out there.”

In her intro­duc­tion to the 224-page book, Samoilo­va describes the impor­tance of such a col­lec­tion:

Street pho­tog­ra­phy is both a record of the world and a state­ment of the artist them­selves: it is how they see the world, who they are, what cap­tures their atten­tion, and fas­ci­nates them. There’s a won­der­ful mix­ture of art and arti­fact, poet­ry and tes­ti­mo­ny that makes street pho­tog­ra­phy so appeal­ing. It’s both doc­u­men­tary and fine art at the same time, yet high­ly acces­si­ble to peo­ple out­side the pho­tog­ra­phy world.

There are Vivian Maiers around the world dri­ven to doc­u­ment their sur­round­ings, whether any­one ever sees their work or not. Maier made her pho­tographs “for all the right rea­sons,” says Chica­go artist Tony Fitz­patrick. “She made them because to not make them was impos­si­ble. She had no choice.” But per­haps she might have cho­sen to show her work if she had access to plat­forms like Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers. We can be grate­ful for such out­lets now: they offer per­spec­tives that we can find nowhere else. Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers will announce the win­ners of its inau­gur­al vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tion “on or around April 1.”

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

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

Vivian Maier, Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Dis­cov­ered

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

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A Finnish Astrophotographer Spent 12 Years Creating a 1.7 Gigapixel Panoramic Photo of the Entire Milky Way

in Astronomy, Photography | March 22nd, 2021

In the final, cli­mac­tic scene of Japan­ese nov­el­ist Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Coun­try, the Milky Way engulfs the pro­tag­o­nist — an aes­thete who keeps him­self detached from the world, a uni­ver­sal per­spec­tive over­tak­ing an insignif­i­cant indi­vid­ual.

We now know the Milky Way itself to be a minus­cule part of the whole, just one of 100 to 200 bil­lion galax­ies. But until Edwin Hub­ble’s obser­va­tions in 1924, it was thought to con­tain all the stars in exis­tence.

The Milky Way-as-uni­verse is a pow­er­ful image, and cer­tain­ly more com­pre­hen­si­ble than the uni­verse as astronomers cur­rent­ly under­stand it. Its vast­ness can’t be com­pressed into a sym­bol­ic form like the via lactea, “Milky Way,” or as the Greeks called it, galak­tikos kýk­los, “milky cir­cle.” Andy Brig­gs sum­ma­rizes just a few of the ancient myths and leg­ends:

To the ancient Arme­ni­ans, it was straw strewn across the sky by the god Vahagn. In east­ern Asia, it was the Sil­very Riv­er of Heav­en. The Finns and Esto­ni­ans saw it as the Path­way of the Birds.… Both the Greeks and the Romans saw the star­ry band as a riv­er of milk. The Greek myth said it was milk from the breast of the god­dess Hera, divine wife of Zeus. The Romans saw the riv­er of light as milk from their god­dess Ops.

A barred spi­ral galaxy spin­ning around a “galac­tic bulge” with an emp­ty cen­ter, a “mon­strous black hole,” notes Space.com, “bil­lions of times as mas­sive as the sun”… the Milky Way remains an awe­some sym­bol for a uni­verse too vast for us to hold in our minds.

Wit­ness, for exam­ple, the just-released image fur­ther up, a 1.7 gigapix­el panoram­ic pho­to of the Milky Way, from Tau­rus to Cygnus, 100,000 pix­els wide, pieced togeth­er from 234 pan­els by Finnish astropho­tog­ra­ph­er J‑P Met­savainio, who began the project all the way back in 2009. “I can hear music in this com­po­si­tion,” he writes at his site, “from high sparks and bub­bles at left to deep and mas­sive sounds at right.”

Over 12 years, and around 1250 hours of expo­sure, Michael Zhang writes at Petapix­el, Met­savainio “focused on dif­fer­ent areas and objects in the Milky Way, shoot­ing stitched mosaics of them as indi­vid­ual art­works.” As he began to knit the galac­tic clouds of stars and gasses togeth­er into a Pho­to­shop panora­ma, he dis­cov­ered a “com­plex image set which is part­ly over­lap­ping with lots of unim­aged areas between and around frames.” Over the years, he filled in the gaps, shoot­ing the “miss­ing data.” He describes his equip­ment and process in detail, for those flu­ent in the tech­ni­cal jar­gon. The rest of us can stare in silent won­der at more of Metsavainio’s work on his web­site (where you can also pur­chase prints) and Face­book, and let our­selves be over­tak­en by awe.

via Petapix­el and Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

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

Earth­rise, Apol­lo 8’s Pho­to of Earth from Space, Turns 50: Down­load the Icon­ic Pho­to­graph from NASA

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

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Alan Watts Reads “One of the Greatest Things Carl Jung Ever Wrote”

in Photography, Religion | February 9th, 2021

Carl Jung found­ed the field of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy more than a cen­tu­ry ago, and many ref­er­ence his insights into the human mind and con­di­tion still today. Alan Watts cer­tain­ly did his bit to keep the Jun­gian flame alive, what­ev­er the out­ward dif­fer­ences between a Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and an Eng­lish inter­preter of Tao­ism, Hin­duism, and Bud­dhism, espe­cial­ly of the Zen vari­ety. Both men believed in cast­ing a wide spir­i­tu­al net, all the bet­ter to expose the com­mon core ele­ments of seem­ing­ly dis­parate ancient tra­di­tions. And in so doing they could hard­ly afford to ignore the reli­gious under­pin­nings of the Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion, broad­ly speak­ing, from which they emerged. In fact, Watts became an ordained Epis­co­pal priest at the age of 30 — though, owing to the com­plex­i­ties of his beliefs as well as his per­son­al life, he resigned the min­istry by age 35.

But Watts’ invest­ment in cer­tain tenets of Chris­tian­i­ty endured, and he named as one of Jung’s great­est writ­ings a lec­ture deliv­ered to a Swiss cler­gy group. “Peo­ple for­get that even doc­tors have moral scru­ples and that cer­tain patient’s con­fes­sions are hard even for a doc­tor to swal­low,” begins the speech as Watts reads it aloud in the video above. “Yet the patient does not feel him­self accept­ed unless the very worst in him is accept­ed too. No one can bring this about by mere words. It comes only through reflec­tion and through the doctor’s atti­tude towards him­self and his own dark side.” To help anoth­er per­son, in oth­er words, one must first accept that per­son as he is; but to accept anoth­er per­son as he is first requires tak­ing one­self straight, less-than-admirable qual­i­ties and all.

Accord­ing to Watts, Jung him­self demon­strat­ed this rare self-aware­ness. “He knew and rec­og­nized what I some­times call the ele­ment of irre­ducible ras­cal­i­ty in him­self,” says Watts in a talk of his own pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “He knew it so strong­ly and so clear­ly, and in a way so lov­ing­ly, that he would not con­demn the same thing in oth­ers, and would there­fore not be led into those thoughts, feel­ings, and acts of vio­lence towards oth­ers which are always char­ac­ter­is­tic of the peo­ple who project the dev­il in them­selves upon the out­side, upon some­body else, upon the scape­goat.” As Jung puts it to his cler­i­cal audi­ence, “In the sphere of social or nation­al rela­tions, the state of suf­fer­ing may be civ­il war, and this state is to be cured by the Chris­t­ian virtue of for­give­ness and love of one’s ene­mies.”

What Chris­tian­i­ty holds as true of the out­er world goes just as well, Jung argues, for the inner one. “This is why mod­ern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sore­ly beset by his own bad con­science and wants, rather, to know how he is to rec­on­cile him­self with his own nature, how he is to love the ene­my in his own heart and call the wolf his broth­er.” He “does not want to know in what way he can imi­tate Christ, but in what way he can live his own indi­vid­ual life, how­ev­er mea­gre and unin­ter­est­ing it may be.” Only by being allowed to fol­low this “ego­ism” to its con­clu­sion of “com­plete iso­la­tion” can he “get to know him­self and learn what an invalu­able trea­sure is the love of his fel­low beings”; it is only “in the state of com­plete aban­don­ment and lone­li­ness that we expe­ri­ence the help­ful pow­ers of our own natures.” With­out know­ing our own natures, we can hard­ly expect even the most time-test­ed belief sys­tems to put an end to the civ­il wars inside us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’ (1959)

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons

in Art, History, Photography | February 9th, 2021


More than 40 years after Nor­man Rock­well’s death, the ques­tion of whether his paint­ings are real­is­tic or unre­al­is­tic remains open for debate. On one hand, crit­i­cal opin­ion has long dis­missed his Sat­ur­day Evening Post-adorn­ing visions of Amer­i­can life as sheer­est fan­ta­sy. “A lit­tle girl with a black eye, an elder­ly woman say­ing grace with her grand­son, a boy going to war: Rock­wellian scenes rep­re­sent a cer­tain sen­ti­men­tal Amer­i­ca — an ide­al Amer­i­ca, or at least Rock­well’s ide­al,” says a 2009 NPR sto­ry on his work.

On the oth­er hand, if Rock­well’s admir­ers give him a pass on this sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, his detrac­tors often turn a blind eye to his obvi­ous tech­ni­cal mas­tery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a cam­era.  Indeed, his process began with an actu­al cam­era. Accord­ing to that NPR piece, he “used pho­tos, tak­en by a rotat­ing cast of pho­tog­ra­phers, to make his illus­tra­tions — and all of his mod­els were neigh­bors and friends,” res­i­dents of his small town of Stock­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts.

The cam­era­men includ­ed a Ger­man immi­grant named Clemens Kalis­ch­er: “An artist-pho­tog­ra­ph­er him­self, Kalis­ch­er was at odds with the trac­ing tech­niques and sac­cha­rine sub­ject mat­ter in Rock­well’s work. After all, Rock­well nev­er paint­ed free­hand, and almost all of his paint­ings were com­mis­sioned by mag­a­zines and adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shut­ter, Rock­well direct­ed every facet of every com­po­si­tion,” as you can see by exam­in­ing his paint­ings and ref­er­ence pho­tos togeth­er, fea­tured as they’ve been on sites like Petapix­el.

At Google Arts & Cul­ture, you can scroll through a short exhi­bi­tion of Rock­well’s late work on race rela­tions in Amer­i­ca that reveals how he had not just one but many pho­tographs tak­en as source mate­r­i­al for each paint­ing, which he would then com­bine into a sin­gle image. This qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic “edit­ing” process brings to mind the “sto­ry­board­ing” of Edward Hop­per, who stands along­side Rock­well as one of the most Amer­i­can painters of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

But while Hop­per gave artis­tic form to the coun­try’s alien­ation, Rock­well — whom his­to­ry has­n’t remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py man — cre­at­ed an “Amer­i­can sanc­tu­ary oth­ers wished to share.” And though nei­ther Hop­per nor Rock­well’s Amer­i­ca may ever have exist­ed, they were craft­ed from the pieces of Amer­i­can life the artists found every­where around them.

via Petapix­el/Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Rock­well Illus­trates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1936–1940)

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Edward Hopper’s Cre­ative Process: The Draw­ing & Care­ful Prepa­ra­tion Behind Nighthawks & Oth­er Icon­ic Paint­ings

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Nikon Offers Free Online Photography Courses During the Holidays

in Online Courses, Photography | November 25th, 2020

A quick heads up. From Novem­ber 23rd through Decem­ber 31st, you can stream for free all class­es offered by Nikon School Online. Nor­mal­ly priced at $15-$50 per course, this 10-course offer­ing cov­ers Fun­da­men­tals of Pho­tog­ra­phy, Dynam­ic Land­scape Pho­tog­ra­phy, Macro Pho­tog­ra­phy, Pho­tograph­ing Chil­dren and Pets, and more.

Find­ing the cours­es on the Nikon site is not very intu­itive. To access the cours­es, click here and then scroll down the page until you see a yel­low but­ton that says “Watch Full Ver­sion.” From there you will get a prompt that allows you to sign up for the cours­es…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy in Her First Online Course

Take a Free Course on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy from Stan­ford Prof Marc Lev­oy

Learn Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy with Har­vard University’s Free Course

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

in History, Photography | November 19th, 2020

Errol Mor­ris did­n’t go all the way to the Crimean Penin­su­la just because of a sen­tence writ­ten by Susan Son­tag. “No,” he once explained to a friend, “it was actu­al­ly two sen­tences.” Found in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, Son­tag’s late book-length essay on war pho­tog­ra­phy, these lines deal with the fact that “many of the canon­i­cal images of ear­ly war pho­tog­ra­phy turn out to have been staged, or to have had their sub­jects tam­pered with.” Take Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death, pio­neer­ing war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Roger Fen­ton’s famous­ly des­o­late 1855 image from the Crimean War. Fen­ton actu­al­ly shot this land­scape twice: in one pic­ture, “can­non­balls are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before tak­ing the sec­ond pic­ture — the one that is always repro­duced — he over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself.”

Or did he? Mor­ris had his doubts — and, as the mak­er of such acclaimed doc­u­men­taries on the nature of truth and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion as The Thin Blue Line and Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure and the author of the book Believ­ing is See­ing: Obser­va­tions on the Mys­ter­ies of Pho­tog­ra­phy — he clear­ly has an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in the sub­ject.

“I spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time look­ing at the two pho­tographs and think­ing about the two sen­tences,” Mor­ris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Son­tag know that Fen­ton altered the land­scape or, for that mat­ter, ‘over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself?’ ” How, for that mat­ter, “did Son­tag know the sequence of the pho­tographs? How did she know which pho­to­graph came first?”

Unable to turn up any per­sua­sive evi­dence, Mor­ris launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of his own, inter­view­ing experts, dig­ging into Fen­ton’s let­ters, and even­tu­al­ly mak­ing his way to the Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death itself (not to be con­fused with the oth­er, bet­ter-known val­ley across which Ten­nyson’s Light Brigade charged). All of this Mor­ris did in the name of find­ing out which came first, the pho­to with the can­non­balls beside the road, or the one with the can­non­balls on the road. You can hear him dis­cuss this increas­ing­ly obses­sive quest for the truth in the video above from Vox’s Dark­room, the series that pre­vi­ous­ly gave us a break­down of the very first faked pho­to­graph. But then, as this and oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions by Mor­ris into the rela­tion­ship between images, lan­guage, and real­i­ty have under­scored, there is no such thing as a true pho­to­graph.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris: Two Essen­tial Truths About Pho­tog­ra­phy

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

How the “First Pho­to­jour­nal­ist,” Math­ew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Pho­tos from the Civ­il War

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series, First Per­son, Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

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

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The Iconic Photography of Gordon Parks: An Introduction to the Renaissance American Artist

in Photography | November 3rd, 2020

I felt the need for me to some­how or anoth­er, use human­i­ty to get peo­ple to become aware of how peo­ple suf­fered. That was what drove me to it.

Poet, nov­el­ist, jazz pianist, clas­si­cal com­pos­er, co-founder of Essence mag­a­zine, and first Black direc­tor of a major Hol­ly­wood film, based on a book he him­self wrote.… Oh, and he also direct­ed Shaft, the high water­mark of Blax­ploita­tion film and a pro­duc­tion, says Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, above, “that helped to save MGM and the larg­er stu­dio sys­tem from bank­rupt­cy.” Gor­don Parks lived “enough for ten lives,” but the resume above miss­es out on Parks’ “great­est con­tri­bu­tion to Amer­i­can art in the 20th cen­tu­ry… his pho­tog­ra­phy.”

The self-taught Parks began tak­ing pic­tures at 25, inspired by news­reel footage of the bomb­ing of an Amer­i­can gun­ship. After see­ing the film, he pur­chased his first cam­era and soon moved to Chica­go, where he honed his craft in the ear­ly 40s and devel­oped the skills that would bring him to the New Deal’s Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion. There he worked under the leg­endary Roy Stryk­er, the for­mer Colum­bia econ­o­mist who also hired Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, Edwin Rosskam, and oth­er pho­tog­ra­phers who went on to have long careers in pho­to­jour­nal­ism.

None of these Depres­sion-era gov­ern­ment pho­tog­ra­phers neglect­ed the Black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca; under Stryker’s direc­tion, the FSA did its best to faith­ful­ly doc­u­ment work­ing-class and poor Amer­i­cans of all back­grounds. Before being com­mis­sioned to do so, how­ev­er, Parks, the only Black pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the group, was already seek­ing out can­did, inti­mate images of life on the South Side of Chica­go. When he began work­ing for the FSA, he pro­duced one of the most icon­ic images of the peri­od, “Amer­i­can Goth­ic,” a solo restag­ing of the Grant Woods paint­ing fea­tur­ing a clean­ing woman named Ella Wat­son, broom in one hand, mop in the oth­er.

Stryk­er, one of the most dar­ing pho­to edi­tors of the time, helped estab­lish the bold doc­u­men­tary style that dom­i­nat­ed in the com­ing decades of Look and Life mag­a­zines. But even he saw Parks’ “Amer­i­can Goth­ic” as too incen­di­ary. As Parks remem­bers in a clip above, “he says, ‘Well, you’re get­ting the idea, but you’re going to get us all fired. (Laughs) He says, ‘This is a gov­ern­ment agency, and that pic­ture is an indict­ment against Amer­i­ca.’” Parks did not get fired. Instead, he went on to work for the FSA’s suc­ces­sor, the Office of War Infor­ma­tion, and pho­tographed the Tuskegee Air­men.

Parks’ skills as an artist were wide-rang­ing: his vision took in every­thing. He doc­u­ment­ed the Black expe­ri­ence in the 20th cen­tu­ry with more sen­si­tiv­i­ty and depth than any oth­er pho­tog­ra­ph­er. His pho­to essay of a Harlem gang leader earned him the first staff appoint­ment for a Black pho­tog­ra­ph­er at Life in 1948. He would go on to doc­u­ment the Civ­il Rights move­ment and both cel­e­brat­ed and ordi­nary peo­ple around the coun­try and the world for the next sev­er­al decades, return­ing often to the fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy in which he got his start. He was a renais­sance artist with an activist’s heart. Parks once called the cam­era a “weapon against pover­ty and racism,” but he tend­ed to wield it much more like a paint­brush.

You can view gal­leries of Parks’ pho­to­graph­ic work at The Gor­don Parks Foun­da­tion web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art of the New Deal: Why the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Fund­ed the Arts Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Found: Lost Great Depres­sion Pho­tos Cap­tur­ing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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