The Smithsonian Puts 2.8 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain

No mat­ter how many pub­lic insti­tu­tions you vis­it in a day—schools, libraries, muse­ums, or the dread­ed DMV—you may still feel like pri­va­tized ser­vices are clos­ing in. And if you’re a fan of nation­al parks and pub­lic lands, you’re keen­ly aware they’re at risk of being eat­en up by devel­op­ers and ener­gy com­pa­nies. The com­mons are shrink­ing, a trag­ic fact that is hard­ly inevitable but, as Mat­to Milden­berg­er argues at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, the result of some very nar­row ideas.

But we can take heart that one store of com­mon wealth has major­ly expand­ed recent­ly, and will con­tin­ue to grow each year since Jan­u­ary 1, 2019—Pub­lic Domain Day—when hun­dreds of thou­sands of works from 1923 became freely avail­able, the first time that hap­pened in 21 years. This year saw the release of thou­sands more works into the pub­lic domain from 1924, and so it will con­tin­ue ad infini­tum.

And now—as if that weren’t enough to keep us busy learn­ing about, shar­ing, adapt­ing, and repur­pos­ing the past into the future—the Smith­son­ian has released 2.8 mil­lion images into the pub­lic domain, mak­ing them search­able, share­able, and down­load­able through the museum’s Open Access plat­form.

This huge release of “high res­o­lu­tion two- and three-dimen­sion­al images from across its col­lec­tions,” notes Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine, “is just the begin­ning. Through­out the rest of 2020, the Smith­son­ian will be rolling out anoth­er 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Insti­tu­tion con­tin­ues to dig­i­tize its col­lec­tion of 155 mil­lion items and count­ing.”

There are those who would say that these images always belonged to the pub­lic as the hold­ings of a pub­licly-fund­ed insti­tu­tion some­times called “the nation’s attic.” It’s a fair point, but shouldn’t take away from the excite­ment of the news. “Smith­son­ian” as a con­ve­nient­ly sin­gu­lar moniker actu­al­ly names “19 muse­ums, nine research cen­ters, libraries, archives, and the Nation­al Zoo,” an enor­mous col­lec­tion of art and his­toric arti­facts.

That’s quite a lot to sift through, but if you don’t know what you’re look­ing for, the site’s high­lights will direct you to one fas­ci­nat­ing image after anoth­er, from Moham­mad Ali’s 1973 head­gear to the his­toric Eliz­a­bethan por­trait of Poc­a­hon­tas, to the col­lec­tion box of the Rhode Island Anti-Slav­ery Soci­ety owned by William Lloyd Garrison’s fam­i­ly, to Walt Whit­man in 1891, as pho­tographed by the painter Thomas Eakins, to just about any­thing else you might imag­ine.

Enter the Smithsonian’s Open Access archive here and browse and search its mil­lions of new­ly-pub­lic domain images, a mas­sive col­lec­tion that may help expand the def­i­n­i­tion of com­mon knowl­edge.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pub­lic Domain Day Is Final­ly Here!: Copy­right­ed Works Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years

The Library of Con­gress Launch­es the Nation­al Screen­ing Room, Putting Online Hun­dreds of His­toric Films

The Smith­son­ian Design Muse­um Dig­i­tizes 200,000 Objects, Giv­ing You Access to 3,000 Years of Design Inno­va­tion & His­to­ry

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

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

No pho­to­graph sym­bol­izes Amer­i­can vic­to­ry more rec­og­niz­ably than Joe Rosen­thal’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning Rais­ing the Flag on Iwo Jima. Tak­en on Feb­ru­ary 23, 1945, it shows six U.S. Marines rais­ing their coun­try’s flag dur­ing the bat­tle — a bloody one even by the stan­dards of the Sec­ond World War — for con­trol of that Japan­ese island. The Sovi­et Union had an equiv­a­lent image: Yevge­ny Khaldei’s Rais­ing a Flag over the Reich­stag, which shows a Russ­ian sol­dier rais­ing the Sovi­et flag on the roof of the for­mer Ger­man par­lia­ment on May 2, 1945, dur­ing the Bat­tle of Berlin. The sim­i­lar­i­ties are obvi­ous, but the dif­fer­ence isn’t: the Sovi­et pho­to was faked.

To be more spe­cif­ic, Khaldei’s pic­ture was “staged,” and “parts of it were altered before it was pub­lished.” So says Vox’s Cole­man Lown­des in the video above, which reveals all the pre-Pho­to­shop image manip­u­la­tion — a spe­cial­ty of Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­dists even then —  per­formed on Rais­ing a Flag over the Reich­stag.

“Khaldei super­im­posed some black smoke from anoth­er pho­to and manip­u­lat­ed the con­trast to give the scene a lit­tle more dra­ma,” which in itself may be an under­stand­able choice. But he also erased the wrist­watch of one of the sol­diers brought in to pose with the flag, a detail you might not notice even hold­ing the orig­i­nal and the doc­tored ver­sion side by side. As Lown­des explains, “The sol­dier sup­port­ing the flag-bear­er was wear­ing two watch­es, sug­gest­ing he had been loot­ing, a stain that did­n’t fit the image of Sovi­et hero­ism that Stal­in want­ed.”

A look at the pre­ced­ing few years of the war goes some way to explain­ing this. Ger­many had bru­tal­ly invad­ed Rus­sia in 1941, instill­ing in Rus­sia a thirst for revenge that began to seem satiable when the tables began to turn on Ger­many the fol­low­ing year. In and on their way to Ger­many, the Red Army, too, com­mit­ted crimes against the civil­ians in their path, loot­ing sure­ly being among the least of them. Rais­ing a Flag over the Reich­stag does its job in cap­tur­ing a moment of Sovi­et vic­to­ry, but as Lown­des says, “it also cap­tures, and then con­ceals, a sto­ry of vengeance and mutu­al bru­tal­i­ty, of mur­der, orga­nized destruc­tion, and pil­lag­ing, all cul­mi­nat­ing in this icon­ic moment.” And the more icon­ic the moment, the more poten­tial­ly rev­e­la­to­ry its details — even more so in the case of false ones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

The His­to­ry of Rus­sia in 70,000 Pho­tos: New Pho­to Archive Presents Russ­ian His­to­ry from 1860 to 1999

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

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

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 or on Face­book.

The History of the Fisheye Photo Album Cover

Like goth­ic script in heavy met­al, the fish­eye album cov­er pho­to seems like a nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring fea­ture of cer­tain psy­che­del­ic strains of music. But it has a his­to­ry, as does the fish­eye pho­to­graph itself. The Vox video above begins in 1906 with Johns Hop­kins sci­en­tist and inven­tor Robert Wood, a some­what eccen­tric pro­fes­sor of opti­cal physics who want­ed to dupli­cate the way fish see the world: “the cir­cu­lar pic­ture,” he wrote, “would con­tain every­thing with­in an angle of 180 degrees in every direc­tion, i.e. a com­plete hemi­sphere.”

Rather than putting them to under­wa­ter use, lat­er sci­en­tists employed Wood’s ideas in astro­nom­i­cal obser­va­tion. Their next stop was the pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phy mar­ket: the first mass-pro­duced fish­eye lens, made by Nikon, cost $27,000 in 1957. From aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals to the pages of Life mag­a­zine: mass media brought fish­eye pho­tog­ra­phy into pop­u­lar cul­ture. An afford­able, con­sumer-grade lens in 1962 brought it with­in the reach of the mass­es. For the way it com­press­es angles, the fish­eye lens “was, and always has been, a handy tool to cap­ture tight quar­ters, as well as huge spaces.”

The fish­eye lens suit­ed the Bea­t­les phe­nom­e­non per­fect­ly, com­press­ing back­stage hall­ways and sta­di­um-sized crowds into the same hyp­not­i­cal­ly cir­cu­lar dimen­sions. “Per­haps its great­est strength was mak­ing rock stars appear larg­er than life.”

The fish­eye pho­to “reflect­ed the trip­pi­ness of the psy­che­del­ic era.” Although one of the ear­li­est uses on an album cov­er was Sam Rivers’ Fuschia Swing Song, it soon adorned the Byrds Mr. Tam­bourine Man and—of course—the cov­er of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Expe­ri­enced. The icon­ic band pho­to of the Expe­ri­ence, tak­en by graph­ic design­er Karl Fer­ris, inspired hun­dreds of psy­che­del­ic imi­ta­tors.

Fer­ris thought of the fish­eye pho­to with ref­er­ence, again, not to the ocean but the stars: Hendrix’s music, he said, was “so far out that it seemed to come from out­er space.” In order to intro­duce the band to audi­ences who hadn’t heard of them yet, he con­ceived of them as a “group trav­el­ing through space in a Bios­phere on their way to bring their oth­er­world­ly space music to earth.” Insep­a­ra­ble from space trav­el after NASA’s many fish­eye pho­tos of the Apol­lo mis­sions, the fish­eye album cov­er con­tains entire worlds in a sin­gle droplet, and promis­es to trans­port us to the out­er reach­es of sound.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Peo­ple Pose in Uncan­ny Align­ment with Icon­ic Album Cov­ers: Dis­cov­er The Sleeve­face Project

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

Watch Annie Leibovitz Photograph and Get Scolded by Queen Elizabeth: “What Do You Think This Is?”

No mat­ter how many cul­tur­al icons you’ve met, Annie Lei­bovitz has almost cer­tain­ly met more of them. Not only has she met them, she’s talked with them, spent long stretch­es of time with them, told them what to do, and even looked into the nature of their very being — which is to say, she’s pho­tographed them. Hav­ing put in her crosshairs the likes of John Lennon, Michael Jack­son, Christo­pher Hitchens, and Barack Oba­ma, one would assume Lei­bovitz has lost entire­ly the abil­i­ty to be intim­i­dat­ed by any per­son­age, no mat­ter how august. But then, she did­n’t have to address any of the afore­men­tioned fig­ures as “Your Majesty.”

“Back in 2007, Lei­bovitz was hired to shoot a set of por­traits of the Queen at Buck­ing­ham Palace in prepa­ra­tion for a state vis­it to the Unit­ed States,” writes Petapix­el’s Michael Zhang. “The pho­tog­ra­ph­er and her 11 assis­tants spent 3 weeks prepar­ing for the 30-minute pho­to shoot.” For the Queen’s part, prepa­ra­tion includ­ed “the full regalia of the ancient Order of the Garter, com­plete with tiara,” putting on all of which took 15 min­utes longer than planned.

But when she got the Queen seat­ed, Lei­bovitz — per­haps fig­ur­ing that, if a casu­al man­ner works with pop stars and pres­i­dents, it might work even bet­ter with roy­al­ty — sug­gest­ed that “it will look bet­ter with­out the crown.” It would look bet­ter, she sug­gest­ed, “less dressy.” “Less dressy?” the Queen snaps back in a kind of irri­tat­ed aston­ish­ment. “What do you think this is?”

Lei­bovitz, to her cred­it, remains unfazed, even when informed that the tiara can’t go back on once it’s been tak­en off. You can see it hap­pen in the Dutch TV clip above, which takes its footage from the BBC doc­u­men­tary A Year with the Queen. Despite the pres­sure, the por­traits came out well, as did the sec­ond series Lei­bovitz shot of the Queen in 2016. These more recent pho­tographs were tak­en under less strict con­di­tions. “I was told how relaxed she was at Wind­sor, and it was real­ly true,” says Lei­bovitz in the accom­pa­ny­ing Van­i­ty Fair sto­ry. “You get the sense of how at peace she was with her­self, and very much enthralled with her fam­i­ly.” At the Queen’s request, the pic­tures includ­ed her fam­i­ly mem­bers both human and cor­gi, all arranged accord­ing to her own ideas. If she tires of her cur­rent job, she may have a promis­ing future in por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy ahead of her.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy in Her First Online Course

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

A Very Brief His­to­ry of Roy­al Wed­dings

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Behold Félix Nadar’s Pioneering Photographs of the Paris Catacombs (1861)

As a tourist in Eng­land, one may be per­suad­ed to pick a piece of mer­chan­dise with the now-ubiq­ui­tous slo­gan “Keep Calm and Car­ry On,” from a lit­tle-dis­played World War II moti­va­tion­al poster redis­cov­ered in 2000 and turned into the 21st-cen­tu­ry’s most cheeky emblem of stiff-upper-lip-ness. Trav­el across the Chan­nel, how­ev­er, and you’ll find anoth­er ver­sion of the sen­ti­ment, drawn not from war mem­o­ra­bil­ia but the ancient warn­ing of memen­to mori.

“Keep Calm and Remem­ber You Will Die” say mag­nets, key chains, and oth­er sou­venirs embla­zoned with the logo of the Paris Cat­a­combs, a major tourist attrac­tion that sells timed tick­ets “to man­age the large queue that forms dai­ly out­side the non­de­script entrance on the Place Den­fert-Rochere­au (for­mer­ly called the Place d’Enfer, or Hell Square),” writes Alli­son Meier at Pub­lic Domain Review. Still pro­found­ly creepy, the Cat­a­combs were once as for­bid­ding to descend into as their walls of skulls and bones are to gaze upon, requir­ing vis­i­tors to car­ry flam­ing torch­es into their depths.

When pio­neer­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er Félix Nadar “descend­ed into this ‘empire of death’ in the 1860s arti­fi­cial light­ing was still in its infan­cy.” Using Bun­sen bat­ter­ies “and a good deal of patience,” Nadar cap­tured the Cat­a­combs as they had nev­er been seen. He also doc­u­ment­ed the com­ple­tion of “artis­tic facades” of skulls and long bones, built “to hide piles of oth­er bones,” notes Strange Remains, from an esti­mat­ed six mil­lion corpses exhumed from over­crowd­ed Parisian ceme­ter­ies in the 18th and 19th cen­turies.

Nadar (the pseu­do­nym of Gas­pard-Félix Tour­na­chon, born 1820), helped turn the Cat­a­combs into the glob­al­ly famous des­ti­na­tion they became. His “sub­ter­ranean pho­tographs,” writes Matthew Gandy in The Fab­ric of Space: Water, Moder­ni­ty, and the Urban Imag­i­na­tion, “played a key role in fos­ter­ing the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of sew­ers and cat­a­combs among mid­dle-class Parisians, and from the 1867 Expo­si­tion onward the city author­i­ties began offer­ing pub­lic tours of under­ground Paris.” The Cat­a­combs became, in Nadar’s own words, “one of those places that every­one wants to see and no one wants to see again.”

Vis­i­tors came seek­ing the grim fas­ci­na­tions they had seen in Nadar’s pho­tos, tak­en dur­ing a “sin­gle three-month cam­paign,” Meier notes, some­time in 1861, after the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “pio­neered new approach­es to arti­fi­cial light.” The project was an irre­sistible pho­to­graph­ic essay on the lev­el­ing force of mor­tal­i­ty. In an essay titled “Paris Above and Below,” pub­lished in the 1867 Expo­si­tion guide, Nadar described the “egal­i­tar­i­an con­fu­sion of death,” in which “a Merovin­gian king remains in eter­nal silence next to those mas­sa­cred in Sep­tem­ber ’92.”

The ancient and the mod­ern dead, peas­ants, aris­to­crats, vic­tims of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary ter­ror all piled togeth­er, “every trace implaca­bly lost in the unac­count­able clut­ter of the most hum­ble, the anony­mous.” The huge necrop­o­lis ini­tial­ly had no shape or order. Its 19th cen­tu­ry redesign reflect­ed that of the Parisian streets above. In 1810, Napoleon autho­rized quar­ries inspec­tor Héri­cart de Thury to under­take a ren­o­va­tion that account­ed for what Thury called “the inti­mate rap­port that will sure­ly exist between the Cat­a­combs and the events of the French Rev­o­lu­tion.”

This “rap­port” not only includ­ed the “mass bur­ial of the vic­tims of the 1792 Sep­tem­ber Mas­sacres” Nadar ref­er­ences in his essay, but also, Meier points out, the arrange­ment of bones in “pat­terns, rows, and cross­es; altars and columns were installed below the earth. Plaques with evoca­tive quo­ta­tions were added to encour­age vis­i­tors to reflect on mor­tal­i­ty.” Because of the long expo­sure times the pho­tographs required, Nadar used man­nequins to stand in for the liv­ing work­ers who com­plet­ed this work. The only liv­ing body he cap­tured was his own, in the self-por­trait above.

Learn more about the his­to­ry of the Cat­a­combs and Nadar’s now-leg­endary pho­to­graph­ic project at Pub­lic Domain Review and see many more memen­to mori images here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Notre Dame Cap­tured in an Ear­ly Pho­to­graph, 1838

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

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

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

The Very First Picture of the Far Side of the Moon, Taken 60 Years Ago

Six­ty years ago, mankind got its very first glimpse of the far side of the Moon, so called because it faces away from the Earth. (And as astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson have long tak­en pains to point out to Pink Floyd fans, it isn’t “dark.”) Tak­en by the Sovi­et Union, that first pho­to may not look like much today, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the high-res­o­lu­tion col­or images sent back from the sur­face itself by Chi­na’s Chang’e‑4 probe ear­li­er this year. But with the tech­nol­o­gy of the late 1950s, even the tech­nol­o­gy com­mand­ed by the Sovi­ets’ then-world-beat­ing space pro­gram, the fact that it was tak­en at all seems not far short of mirac­u­lous. How did they do it?

“This pho­to­graph was tak­en by the Sovi­et space­craft Luna 3, which was launched a month after the Luna 2 space­craft became the first man-made object to impact on the sur­face of the Moon,” explains astronomer Kevin Hain­line in a recent Twit­ter thread. “Luna 2 fol­lowed Luna 1, the first space­craft to escape a geo­syn­chro­nous Earth orbit.” Luna 3 was designed to take pho­tographs of the Moon, hard­ly an uncom­pli­cat­ed prospect: “To take pic­tures you have to be sta­ble on three-axes. You have to take the pho­tographs remote­ly. AND you have to some­how trans­fer those pic­tures back to Earth.” The first three-axis sta­bi­lized space­craft ever sent on a mis­sion, Luna 3 “had to use a lit­tle pho­to­cell to ori­ent towards the Moon so that now, while sta­bi­lized, it could take the pic­tures. Which it did. On PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM.”

Even those of us who took pic­tures on film for decades have start­ed to take for grant­ed the con­ve­nience of dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy. But think back to all the has­sle of tra­di­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy, then imag­ine mak­ing a robot car­ry them out in space. Once tak­en Luna 3’s pho­tos “were then moved to a lit­tle CHEMICAL PLANT to DEVELOP AND DRY THEM.” (In oth­er words, “Luna 3 had a lit­tle 1 Hour Pho­to inside.”) Then they con­tin­ued into “a device that shone a cath­ode ray tube, like in an old­er TV, through them, towards a device that record­ed the bright­ness and con­vert­ed this to an elec­tri­cal sig­nal.” You can read about what hap­pened then in more detail at Damn Inter­est­ing, where Alan Bel­lows describes how the space­craft sent “the light­ness and dark­ness infor­ma­tion line-by-line via fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed ana­log sig­nal — in essence, a fax sent over radio.”

Sovi­et Sci­en­tists could thus “retrieve one pho­to­graph­ic frame every 30 min­utes or so. Due to the dis­tance and weak sig­nal, the first images received con­tained noth­ing but sta­t­ic. In sub­se­quent attempts in the fol­low­ing few days, an indis­tinct, blotchy white disc began to resolve on the ther­mal paper print­outs at Sovi­et lis­ten­ing sta­tions.” As Luna 3’s pho­tos became clear­er, they revealed, as Hain­line puts it, that “the back­side of the moon was SO WEIRD AND DIFFERENT” — cov­ered in the craters, for exam­ple, which have become its visu­al sig­na­ture. For a mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent to this achieve­ment, we might look not just to Chang’e‑4 but to the image of a black hole cap­tured by the Event Hori­zon Tele­scope this past April — the one that led to an abun­dance of arti­cles like “In Defense of the Blur­ry Black Hole Pho­to” and “We Need to Admit That the Black Hole Pho­to Isn’t Very Good.” Astropho­tog­ra­phy has come a long way, but at least back in 1959 it did­n’t pro­duce quite so many takes.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Pho­tos

8,400 Stun­ning High-Res Pho­tos From the Apol­lo Moon Mis­sions Are Now Online

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

There’s a Tiny Art Muse­um on the Moon That Fea­tures the Art of Andy Warhol & Robert Rauschen­berg

The Glo­ri­ous Poster Art of the Sovi­et Space Pro­gram in Its Gold­en Age (1958–1963)

Won­der­ful­ly Kitschy Pro­pa­gan­da Posters Cham­pi­on the Chi­nese Space Pro­gram (1962–2003)

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 or on Face­book.

Beautiful New Photo Book Documents Patti Smith’s Breakthrough Years in Music: Features Hundreds of Unseen Photographs

Pat­ti Smith is always sur­pris­ing her fans with new work and new oppor­tu­ni­ties to admire her com­mit­ment to art and activism. If she isn’t pub­lish­ing anoth­er mem­oir, or lead­ing 250 peo­ple in a protest song, she’s show­ing her pho­tographs, which she’s tak­en since the 60s, with Polaroid cam­eras and a Ger­man Minox 35EL. “I am not a pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” she says, “yet tak­ing pic­tures has giv­en me a sense of uni­ty and per­son­al sat­is­fac­tion. They are relics of my life. Sou­venirs of my wan­der­ing.” She sur­prised her fans once again by putting her trea­sury of pic­tures on Insta­gram.

But as com­fort­able as Smith has been behind the cam­era, she has been even more relaxed in front of it: “wide­ly regard­ed as a style icon,” writes Stephanie Eckardt at W mag­a­zine, “she’s been a mag­net for pho­tog­ra­phers almost imme­di­ate­ly” after she arrived in New York “to hang around CBG­B’s and pose for Robert Map­plethor­pe.”

She appeared in plen­ty of pho­tos with Map­plethor­pe when the two were just kids. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Frank Ste­fanko cap­tured her bohemi­an loung­ing in the 60s and 70s in stark black and white. (When he first encoun­tered her in South Jer­sey, he says, she looked like “the bad guy walk­ing into a saloon in an old West­ern movie.”)

“There are many pho­tog­ra­phers who have pho­tographed Pat­ti who are won­der­ful artists,” writes Lynn Gold­smith, whose own strik­ing pho­to­graph­ic record of Smith’s career is now being pub­lished in a new book by Taschen titled Before East­er After. Unlike Gold­smith, how­ev­er, “they did not do doc­u­men­tary as well as con­cert as well as stu­dio work with her. So that enabled Pat­ti and I to have a nar­ra­tive in the book that we could share with peo­ple of what was going on at that time.”

Smith describes what was going on with her usu­al casu­al lyri­cism:

We traipsed the path of rock ‘n’ roll, savour­ing its swag­ger, yet dodg­ing the pit­falls. [Lynn] wit­nessed for­ma­tive nights at CBG­Bs, gain­ing ground across Amer­i­ca, my acci­dent in a Tam­pa are­na, and the strug­gle to rise again.

She refers to her fall off­stage in 1977 while the band toured their album Radio Ethiopia. She broke her neck and spent the year recov­er­ing. Gold­smith cap­tured the trag­ic event: “I saw her near­ing the edge of the stage, but I thought she knew what she was doing because she always did this turn­ing dervish on that song, where she spun and spun and spun.”  The fol­low­ing year, the band released East­er, their third and “most wide­ly known and dis­trib­uted” album, notes AnOth­er, and Gold­smith ner­vous­ly shot Smith onstage at CBG­Bs in a neck brace.

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er sur­prised Smith by ask­ing her long­time friend Sam Shep­ard to write a poem for the book inspired by the 1977 pho­to above. And at the book’s Octo­ber 8th launch par­ty, which includ­ed Hen­ry Rollins, Rosan­na Arquette, Moon Zap­pa, and John Dens­more, Smith sur­prised her 150 guests by play­ing a set of songs “inspired by Goldsmith’s pre­vi­ous unseen pho­tographs of the trans­for­ma­tive peri­od doc­u­ment­ed in the book,” writes Taschen. “She end­ed her set with her best-known hit ‘Because the Night’ from the album East­er… joined in song by every per­son in the room.”

The book is avail­able in a pricey edi­tion from Taschen. Here’s hop­ing they’ll sur­prise Pat­ti Smith fans for the hol­i­days with a paper­back.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith, The God­moth­er of Punk, Is Now Putting Her Pic­tures on Insta­gram

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

Pat­ti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

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

The First Faked Photograph (1840)

The pho­to­graph was invent­ed in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, but who invent­ed it? His­to­ries of pho­tog­ra­phy point to sev­er­al dif­fer­ent inde­pen­dent inven­tors, most of them French: Nicéphore Niépce, for exam­ple, who in 1826 made the first work rec­og­niz­able as a pho­to­graph, or more famous­ly Louis Daguerre, hon­ored for his inven­tion of the daguerreo­type pho­to­graph­ic process by the French Acad­e­my of Sci­ences and the Académie des Beaux Arts in 1839. But what about Daguer­re’s con­tem­po­rary Hip­poly­te Bayard, who had also been devel­op­ing and refin­ing his own form of pho­tog­ra­phy? After going unac­knowl­edged by the Acad­e­my, he had only one option left: sui­cide.

The Vox Dark­room video above tells the sto­ry of Bayard’s 1840 Self Por­trait as a Drowned Man, which depicts exact­ly what its title sug­gests: Bayard’s corpse, retrieved from the water and propped up unclaimed at the morgue. “The Gov­ern­ment which has been only too gen­er­ous to Mon­sieur Daguerre, has said it can do noth­ing for Mon­sieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned him­self,” reads the note on the back of the pho­to­graph. “Oh the vagaries of human life.…!”

A sor­ry tale, to be sure, and of a kind not unknown in the his­to­ry of inven­tion. But wait: how could a dead man shoot a “self-por­trait”? And if indeed “no-one has rec­og­nized or claimed him,” as the note adds, who would have both­ered to write the note itself?

Bayard, still very much alive, made Self Por­trait as a Drowned Man as a kind of artis­tic stunt, the lat­est in a series of self-por­traits test­ing his pho­to­graph­ic process. The “morgue” shot con­tains some of the arti­facts in its pre­de­ces­sors, includ­ing a gar­den stat­ue, a flo­ral vase, and Bayard’s sig­na­ture broad straw hat. (Even the expres­sion of death was of a piece with his pre­vi­ous self-por­traits: the long expo­sure time meant he’d had to hold absolute­ly still with his eyes closed in all of them as well.) Until his death in 1887 — long after Daguerre had passed — Bayard con­tin­ued exper­i­ment­ing with pho­tog­ra­phy, cre­at­ing real­i­ty-depart­ing images includ­ing “dou­ble self por­traits.” If he could­n’t go down as the inven­tor of the pho­to­graph, at least he could go down as the inven­tor of the fake pho­to­graph — a still-rel­e­vant inven­tion, to say the least, giv­en our increas­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with the truth in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

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

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

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ates Real­is­tic Pho­tos of Peo­ple, None of Whom Actu­al­ly Exist

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

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

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 or on Face­book.

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