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“Studio portrait of the celebrated Parsee traveller Manickjee Antarya in Bombay, posed against a painted backdrop of a rustic scene. This photograph was taken by Hurrichund Chintamon and is one of a series of Ethnographical images from the Archaeological Survey of India Collections, shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Parsees are followers of Zoroaster, and descendants of Persians who fled to India in the seventh and eighth centuries to escape Muslim persecution.”
“Full-length standing studio portrait of a Muslim girl from Karachi in Sind, Pakistan, taken by Michie and Company in c. 1870, from the Archaeological Survey of India Collections. This is one of a series of photographs commissioned by the Government of India in the 19th century, in order to gather information about the dress, customs, trade and religions of the different racial groups on the sub-continent. The girl in the photograph demonstrates the method of wearing ear and nose rings, bracelets and anklets.”
Woman spinning, photographed by Mrs. F M Muriel for the National Photographic Record and Survey. Roscommon, Republic of Ireland, ca. 1900.
Signed postcard of great American jazz and classical pianist and singer Hazel Dorothy Scott (June 11, 1920 – October 2, 1981).
(via backtothefiveanddime)
Poet Dorothea Smart as Clio, the muse of heroic poetry and history. Photograph by Maud Sulter, 1989. V&A.
© Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1930s-1940s, One Shot Teenie
#1: Two young women eating caramel apples, 1940-1945
#2: A woman outside Kay’s Valet Shoppe, 1938-1945
#3: Boys (possibly from Herron Hill School) playing brass instruments, 1938-1945
#4: A woman poses with a car on Mulford Street in Homewood, 1937In the days of film, especially in a controlled setting, photographers often made redundant shots to make sure they captured what they wanted. Not Charles “Teenie” Harris. A native of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the city’s cultural center of African-American life, Harris was a semi-pro athlete and a numbers runner before he bought his first camera in the 1930s. He opened a photography studio and specialized in glamour portraits, earning the nickname “One Shot” because he rarely made his subjects sit for a second take. (read more)
Nearly 80 years later, a retrospective of the photographer’s work, “Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story” is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh until April 7, 2012.
first photograph is just labeled “Africa,” second is titled “Tanganyika. Arusha. A yound(young?) Masai interested in the camera.” ca.1936.
Kusakabe Kimbei
> Kimbei lived from 1841 — 1934, but stopped taking pictures around 1912 or 1913. More on him here, including links to more photographs.
(via sisterwolf)
100 Year Old Color Photographs of Russian Life 1909 - 1912
With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.
花样年华
http://www.satellitevoices.com/shanghai/photography/1654/remembering-sam-sanzetti
http://www.isconshanghai.org/web/article.php?id=183 (short article from Consulate General of Israel in Shanghai)
Through ingenious use of perspective street painters are using the lengths of surfaces to create 3D environments that feel as if you could climb into them. In 1918 photographers, Englishman Arthur S Mole and American John D Thomas, used a half a mile swath of land to accomplish the opposite, colossal 2D recreations of American solidarity. To understand the proportion of these images for the Statue of Liberty image there are 12,000 men in the torch winding down to 17 men at the base.
The process for the monumental undertaking is explained below by the folks at My Modern Met.
“Mole and Thomas were the first to use a unique technique to beat the problem of perspective after they devised a clever way of getting so many soldiers in the pictures. Joseph explains: “Arthur was able to get the image by actually drawing an outline on the lens, he then had the troops place flags in certain positions while he looked through the camera. It would take a week to get all the outlines right, but just 30 minutes to move all the men into position to take the shot. It must have been amazing to watch.”“
