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Photo of the contestants in the 1927 Atlantic City Pageant, the forerunner of the Miss America Pageant. (Larger photo here.) Compare with a photo of the contestants in the 2007 competition. What strikes me most about the 1927 photo is all the short hair.
Very much on the travel to-do list: head to Japan to see the cherry blossoms.
Update: In an earlier iteration of this post, I incorrectly identified the woman in the photo as a Palestinian…she is a Jewish settler. (thx to everyone who wrote in)
Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man, is about 9/11 and the title is a reference to the falling man photograph taken of a person falling from the WTC.
Interview with Gretchen Ludwig about her dressing room photography. She started the project after she noticed her anti-advertising, anti-corporation self buying a lot of clothes from big corporations that advertise a lot. “The dressing room is not only a very private space, but it is also a space where consumers make most of their decisions. And it’s also mostly void of extraneous marketing ‘noise.’ You don’t have the trendy atmosphere, you don’t have the pressure of others watching and judging you.”
Joerg Colberg asked a bunch of photographers and photography bloggers: what makes a great photo? The answers, with examples, form a great informal discussion about art, photography, and curating. “It’s hard for me to describe what makes a great photo mostly because it’s hard to predict what you might like before you see it. I’m often surprised by things that I’ve never thought I would enjoy or seek out in the world.”
Museumr lets you insert one of your Flickr photos into a museum (sort of). I gave my beer bottle-shaped sausage photo the Museumr treatment. (thx, chuck)
Women in light pink playing Nintendo DS by Eliot Shepard.
Shorpy, the 100-year-old photoblog, is pulling photos from just after the turn of the century and posting them. This one’s going right in the daily reads pile.
Collection of photos of basketball players with normal people. (thx, brian)
Expectations of Adolescence is a series of photographs of two cousins as they grow up, seen periodically only at large family gatherings. “We see them as they grow up, become more and more themselves, chafing perhaps at the obligations implied by required attendance in surroundings of upper-crust comfort that remain unchanged and constant.”
The Face2Face Project takes similar photographs of Palestinians and Israelis and displays them together in pairs. “After a week [in Israel and Palestine], we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families. It’s obvious, but they don’t see that. We must put them face to face. They will realize.” (via 3qd)
The National Portrait Gallery has a nice online gallery of photographs of “twentieth-century America’s famous and influential women”. p.s. it’s International Women’s Day today.
Photos of people sleeping. Each series of photos depcits a full night’s sleep. (via cyn-c)
Close-up photography of bugs that have splattered on cars and windshields. Way less gross than you’d think.
Photographer Alec Soth has a response to the Richard Avedon essay regarding his portrait of Henry Kissinger. “While Avedon is correct that the subject is sometimes ‘implicated in what’s happening,’ more often than not the photographer holds all of the cards.” (thx, jen)
In 1940, an ultra orthodox Jewish group known as the Lubavitchers bought a building at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The building became so well-known and revered within the community that other “770s” have been built around the world and subsequently captured by photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher. (via paks)
Richard Avedon on photographing Henry Kissinger: “A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.” Here’s the photo that Avedon is referring to. (via personism)
For next time around, how to photograph a lunar eclipse. Here’s a list of upcoming eclipses. (via inmyallstars)
Nice composite photo of the lunar eclipse last night. We missed it because it was a bit cloudy and tall buildingy in NYC last night. (thx, ajit)
Update: Here’s another, another, and one more.
Over 1,000 photos and carte de visites of the Civil War. (What’s a carte de visite?)
The seminal photography collective Magnum has a new blog.
Photos of baskets and truffles at the Lalbenque truffle market in France.
Video montage of classic movie photos taken by Magnum photographers.
Nick Tosches wonders where the desktop photo on his new computer was taken and it takes him a year (and several messages to the likes of Bill Gates, the editor of Vermont Life, and S.I. Newhouse) to find out.
Some interesting photos taken in the Moscow subway. (thx, malatron)
Rule of thumb to avoid photographing people with their eyes closed: divide the number of people by three (or by two if the light is bad). That means that if you’re taking a photo of 12 people, you need to take at least 4 photos to have a good chance of getting a photo with everyone’s eyes open. (via photojojo)
Update: Jeff writes: “Way back when we only used film I learned you could tell before looking at the photo whether someone blinked by asking them what color was the flash. If it was white or bluish white, then their eyes were open. If it was orange, then their eyes were closed and they had ‘seen’ the flash through their eyelids.”
Specific Things is a collection of photos and stories of, er, specific things like raffle winners, teams called The Pirates, and wedding cakes. (via youngna)
Uncovered is Jordan Matter’s large gallery of photos of topless women on the streets of NYC. It’s legal for women to go topless in New York. Nsfw.
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