Photos of children around the world with their most prized possessions; a photo collection by Gabriele Galimberti. Check out the collection HERE.

Girl Dancing in Front of Painting

Found this wonderful photo on The Mudflats Facebook page, which bore the caption: this is why we need art in our schools. Absolutely.

KKK Child and African American State Trooper (1992 Photo)

Poynter has the background on the photo HERE. [click to enlarge]

Keith Jarrett's rant against losing the moment to gadgets

A neat post from Fast Company. Check it out HERE.

New beauty product revealed

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Earth, Wind & Fire in the late 1970s

Bought this photo back in the day, I am assuming it was in San Diego in the late 1970s. Verdine White (L) is the reason i eventually became a bassist, and I cannot count the hours of joy Maurice White's (C) music has given me. Guitarist Al McKay (R) played some mean rock and rhythm, but he was replaced in the early 80s. If I had to guess I would say this was 1978 or so. Can't say enough about the powerhouse that this band was.

Carnival 2011

The Atlantic has a wonderful set of carnival photos from around the world. See it HERE.

There's also one by MSNBC HERE.

Stanley Clarke 10-21-10

Alexa Meade' Photos Designed to Look Like Paintings

Check out Alexa Meade's amazing photos in her Flickr photostream HERE. Only the eyes are a giveaway, and in the photos where the eyes are not visible because they are closed or looking down, the photos are dead ringers for paintings.






h/t to The Daily Dish.

Carnival 2010 photos

Boston.com posts 39 dazzling photos from Carnival celebrations in Europe and the Americas (h/t The Daily Dish).

And MSNBC has another bunch of photos.

Congolese Sapeur Fashion photographed by Hector Mediavilla

I'm going full Congo for the moment. Check out this posting of Congolese fashionistas known as sapeurs, with wonderful photographs by Hector Mediavilla HERE.

The Lost Photographs of the Hiroshima Bombing

Design Observer/Adam Levy Hat tip to the Daily Dish.

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.

He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.

At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima.

In a dispassionate and scientific style, the seven hundred and one photographs inside the suitcase catalogued a city seared by a new form of warfare. The origin and purpose of the photographs were a mystery to the man who found them that night. Now, over sixty years after the bombing of Hiroshima, their story can be told.

Read the post HERE.

New Orleans photographer Michael P. Smith (1937-2008)

I missed this when it happened. He was a documentarian to the wonderful culture of New Orleans.

Times-Picayune

Photographer, jazz archivist Michael Smith dies at 71
Posted by beggler September 27, 2008 22:31PM

Michael P. Smith, a photographer who spent three decades capturing vivid, vibrant images at jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indian ceremonies and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, died Friday at his New Orleans home of two diseases that destroyed his nervous system. He was 71.

A man of boundless energy who devoted himself to the culture he chronicled, Mr. Smith seemed to be everywhere at whatever event he was shooting. Fellow photographers joked that every good Jazzfest picture they took included the back of Mr. Smith's head.

Mr. Smith's subjects included Mahalia Jackson, Irma Thomas, James Booker, Harry Connick Jr., Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, as well as anonymous mourners, strutters and Indians whom Mr. Smith always managed to capture caught up in the moment.

"I don't think there's another photographer who has more sensitively documented very significant aspects of the second half of 20th century New Orleans culture," said Steven Maklansky, a former curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Mr. Smith started concentrating on this kind of photography at a 1969 jazz funeral and kept at it, covering every Jazzfest through 2003. Though he showed up at subsequent festivals, silently cradling his camera, the degeneration of his nervous system had put an end to his career.

He built up a trove of more than 500,000 negatives, many of which remain unprocessed because he couldn't afford to have them developed, said Michael Sartisky, president and executive director of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

"He did something that no other photographer had done: He captured the cultural landscape of the streets and did so with a vision of passion and beauty," said Jason Berry, who has written extensively about indigenous music.

This world provided a sharp contrast to the genteel environment in which he had grown up. A child of Metairie who was a star athlete, he was the son of a member of the Rex organization and the Boston Club, and he graduated from Metairie Park Country Day School and Tulane University.

Everything changed, he said in a 1995 interview, when he went to work as Tulane's jazz archive's staff photographer in the 1960s. He heard hours and hours of the music that had been created in New Orleans' bars and brothels, and he was hooked.

"He paid attention when many locals took that culture for granted or ignored it," said Bruce Raeburn, the archive's curator.

Around that time, Mr. Smith met Matthew Herron, a photographer with the Black Star agency living in New Orleans, and became his assistant.

With Paul Barbarin's funeral in 1969, Mr. Smith began his photographic exploration, abandoning the realm of his youth.

"I have friends in that privileged world, but haven't had much interest in the society I grew up in since discovering the folk community of New Orleans, a side of town I had never known that struck me as the real heart of the city," Mr. Smith said in the interview.

He summed up his philosophy in three words: "Follow the music."

He was a founder of Tipitina's, the Uptown music club that has become famous worldwide. Mr. Smith's pictures have been collected in five books, and in magazine articles.

To supplement his income, Mr. Smith regularly took commercial jobs, such as shooting pictures for annual reports.

Mr. Smith's work has been shown in galleries, embassies and museums and at jazz festivals, and it is part of the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Louisiana State Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

In March 2007, the Historic New Orleans Collection bought Mr. Smith's archives, which contain more than 2,000 rolls of black-and-white film, tens of thousands of color slides and about 200 audiotapes. Collection spokeswoman Mary Mees declined to disclose the price.

"Michael P. Smith has defined the visual appearance of contemporary homegrown New Orleans music for people around the world," said John Lawrence, the collection's director of museum programs.

Mr. Smith's work is important, Lawrence said, because "it serves to document not just the musicians and their music, but the environment, social structures and neighborhoods that both create and sustain the musical traditions."

Mr. Smith received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor's Arts Award, the Clarence John Laughlin Lifetime Achievement Award from the local chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers and the Artist Recognition Award from the New Orleans Museum of Art's Delgado Society.

Survivors include a companion, Karen Louise Snyder; two daughters, Jan Lamberton Smith of Quail Springs, Calif., and Leslie Blackshear Smith of New Orleans; a brother, Joseph Byrd Hatchitt Smith of Port Angeles, Wash.; and two grandchildren.

People in Need Ads

Some rather effective and striking donation solicitation photographs (by Carl Stolz) from the Dutch charity Cordaid Mensen in Nood (People in Need). Wow.

Early Photography: An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives

New York Times
April 17, 2008
An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives
By RANDY KENNEDY

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

In the weeks since Dr. Schaaf’s surprising pronouncement was made public, “The Leaf,” originally thought to have been made around 1839 or later, has become the talk of the photo-historical world. The speculation about its origins became so intense that Sotheby’s and the print’s owners decided earlier this month to postpone its auction, so that researchers could begin delving into whether the image may be, in fact, one of the oldest photographic images in existence, dating to the 1790s.

This week the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which own similar photogenic drawings that once belonged to the same album as “The Leaf,” said that they planned to perform scientific analysis and further research on their images as well.

With these decisions, suddenly, a group of antique images known to the academic and auction worlds at least since 1984 — when Sotheby’s first sold them, fetching only $776 for the leaf print — have become the subjects of a high-profile detective story that could lead back to the earliest, murky years of the birth of photo technology and that could help to fill in crucial historical blanks.

Dr. Schaaf, who said he was not paid by Sotheby’s or by the owner of “The Leaf” print, said that he had been aware of the images — also known as photograms, cameraless prints made by placing objects on photosensitive paper exposed to light — for many years. He had seen five of the six prints that were once compiled in an album by Henry Bright, a Briton whose family was part of a group of scientists and tinkerers active around Bristol in the late 18th century.

But as with so many other early photographic images, Dr. Schaaf said, there was so little information about these that he never gave much thought to their origins. “In most cases we just don’t have any place even to get started,” he said.

It was when Sotheby’s inquiry reminded him that the images came from the Henry Bright family that he began to think about them again and to connect the dots with research that he had been doing for years into a group of photographic experimenters who had long predated Talbot and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the other acknowledged inventor of photography.

Probably in the 1790s, according to accounts written shortly afterward, Thomas Wedgwood, a son of the Wedgwood china family, began experimenting with what he called solar pictures, making images on paper coated with a silver nitrate solution. A friend of his, James Watt, wrote in a 1799 letter that he intended to try similar experiments and in 1802 another friend, Humphry Davy, wrote an account of Wedgwood’s experiments in an article for a scientific-society journal, titling it “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver.”

Like the lost plays of Aeschylus that were written about but did not survive themselves, no known examples of the work of Wedgwood and his circle have ever been found. But Dr. Schaaf, in looking deeper into the leaf image, realized that these legendary lost images had something else in common: their creators were all part of the close social circle of the family of Henry Bright.

“The reason that I got so excited about this was that it was the most solid, indicative collection I’ve seen,” he said. “I’m fully prepared for ‘The Leaf’ to have been made by Henry Bright, or by his father, after the 1790s. But I’ve never seen a story that fits together so neatly.”

He added, with the resolve that comes from more than 30 years of research into early photography and Talbot, “Someone could obviously come along and say that these images are all in fact Talbots, but they would be wrong.”

Jill Quasha is the photo dealer and expert who bought “The Leaf” in 1989 as she was building the Quillan Collection, a group of world-renowned photographs that Sotheby’s sold (without the leaf print) for almost $9 million on April 7. She said that it was still too early to say exactly what type of research would be conducted on the image. Tests could include those to determine the age of the paper and to identify the chemical makeup of any substances on the paper.

“I think it has to be done quickly and efficiently and with the least amount of damage to the photograph,” said Ms. Quasha, who added that she hoped the research could be completed within six months so that the print could be put up for auction again with a more iron-clad, and perhaps stunning, provenance. (As a Talbot, it was estimated to sell for $100,000 to $150,000; if it is determined to be older, it could bring substantially more.)

But Dr. Schaaf cautioned that even when the all scientific evidence is in — along with what might be found by deep sleuthing in the archives of the families of Bright, Wedgwood, Watt and Davy — the best that experts might be able to say about it being among the oldest photographic images is “maybe.”

“Somewhere in the course of the work we might find a smoking gun,” he said. “But then again, we very well might not.”