Reborn

The front and back of a photograph that ran in The New York Times on Oct. 16, 1970, accompanying a story about a mannequin warehouse sale. The annotated print has lived in The Times's physical photography archive for over 40 years. It was brought back to life on The Lively Morgue on February 27, 2012.

Photographs are timecapsules, are beauty on paper, are storytellers. The fact that people do not generally print them and hold them dear as tangible objects anymore keeps me up at night. How is it that my grandchildren will never know the distinct pleasure of sitting next to me on a couch with a photo album between us, peeling back a thin plastic layer from a thick cardstock page, unsticking a rectangle of glossy paper, and holding it in close view to laugh at what I was wearing and how my hair was longer on one side than the other back then? How will that never happen? I fully embrace the unbridled innovation of my digital present, but no photos? Perhaps this all bothers me more than others because I am an aspiring archivist, but if you are also phobic of a photo-less world, The New York Times has just begun a project that I suspect will help stave off the full-blown panic you may be experiencing. With an aptly named Tumblr The Times is opening up their physical photo archive to a world wide audience. The Lively Morgue is a simple and beautiful project that mines the unfathomable, unknowably large collection of printed photographs and photographic media that by best estimation includes

“five million to six million prints and contact sheets (each sheet, of course, representing many discrete images) and 300,000 sacks of negatives…at least 10 million frames in all…[and] 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery.”

Just how vast is that collection? If the Tumblr feed featured 10 photos every weekday, just from the printed portion of that collection alone, it wouldn’t have the whole thing online until the year 3935! The thing that is stunning is that this is not unique (although admittedly The Times holds a comparatively large collection), there are untold numbers of rooms filled with boxes of photographs and negatives and slides. So much treasure remaining unseen.

The emergence of the paper dress trend! Originally published March 4, 1968.

Enough with the sad news, let's get back to the happy Morgue project. The site will feature a few photographs a week; a selection of timely or just simply breathtaking subject matter. The lovely and amazing part of the project is that the editors have had the foresight to satisfy at least some aspect of the photophile's desire to see a physical object: they have scanned the back of the photographs, presenting each image recto and verso. Thus they retain all of the little handwritten and hand-stamped details that tell the photo's life story. They have even included an annotated key to help you decipher the information scrawled, stamped, or pasted onto the photograph. It is a beautiful moment of analog and digital hybridization. And, as with any photo archive anywhere in existence, it includes fantastic fashion information, from high fashion subject matter to documents of popular dress.

A dress form hollowed out and refilled with liquor bottles at a speakeasy posing as a tailor shop. The photograph originally ran on January 9, 1930.

The Lively Morgue (so named after the nickname bestowed on the storage room itself) is a new project, having just begun two days ago. Bookmark/RSS/Feed it now and watch it come alive.

Historical Hotness

Single subject Tumblrs have me at hello. This one had me at hot. The genius behind My Daguerreotype Boyfriend has begun combing the annals of historical photography for the men who melted the lens, even way back when. I think the site makes an awfully good case for you guys out there to dust off your cravats and join something that requires a uniform. I'm going to share a few photos with you, but you'll have to visit the site for your boyfriend's stats. Some are criminals, some are soldiers, some are imports...all are hot. (Except one or two with muttonchops...)

Gosh, something about those sepia tones make the brooding even broodier.

Opie x Rodarte

Image of a Rodarte gown by Catehrine Opie.

The photographer Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of gender. She takes photos of "men" and "women" in ways that show you the confusion of those terms, the identity they impose, and the ways they are expressed. She also photographs the body as a platform for thought and or pain. Self-portraits of the artist are disturbing and beautiful documents of self harm, or of love. It's this mix of the rough and soft, of the dark and the warm, that makes her pairing with Rodarte a natural fit. As a satellite to their MoCA show (which they call a case study of their still young work) Rodarte is releasing a book of photographs by Catherine Opie and Alec Soth. Californian landscapes of interest and inspiration to Kate and Laura have been photographed by Soth, while Opie has taken photographs of the Mulleavy sisters' clients and favorite models in their gorgeous American couture pieces.

The photos above are all included in the book which is available for pre-order on Amazon.

One/One-Thousand: Jacques Lartigue

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Portrait of Jacques Lartigue by Jeanloup Sieff, 1972.

The images of Jacques Henri Lartigue are black-and-white odes to the birth of photography and the infinite beauty it captured, and then encouraged. I first came across the photograph below while reading Seeing Through Clothes by Anne Hollander (a must for anyone interested in the representation of fashion, from body to fabric):

Hollander used the 1911 photo to illustrate the way that photography absolutely changed fashion. Prior to the common proliferation of photographic images, many women wore clothing that was complicated, or rather took time for the eye to comprehend, arrange, and reconcile. They could afford this complication and still be stylish because the garments were seen in person, in a three dimensional view, or they were shown illustrated in the flat plain, a method of display that allowed for much tweaking and finagling. The result of the snap of a lens, however, favored linear, geometric, lean shapes. As such, sartorial lines crisped, silhouettes slimmed, and elegance became a matter of proportion rather than of fabric or materials. Lartigue was one of the first to capture this transitional phenomenon on film.

When he was seven, Lartigue's wealthy parents gifted him a camera. The new technology fascinated his young mind and soon he was rarely without a shutter. He captured everything that caught his eye: car races, swimmers splashing, family outings, and stylish strangers. The young boy not only snapped the shots, but even developed his images on his own in a darkroom in his home. One of Lartigue's favorite subjects were the women who paraded through the streets of Paris on their morning strolls with coy yet certain determination to be seen by the others doing the same. The youngster created beautiful images of these street scenes and is a forebear of the ubiquitous street style photographers now leading the fashion press. He's the granddaddy of current photographers like Bill Cunningham, Tommy Ton, Scott Schuman, and Yvan Rodic.

Lartigue was an archival prodigy of sorts, snapping photos, developing them, and mounting them in huge albums for all to see before most kids his age were aware of anything past their own noses. For years though, Lartigue's photos went completely unnoticed by the majority. It wasn't until he turned a wise 69 when the lifelong photographer was traveling in America, that his work was discovered on a large scale. The collection of nearly 120 photo albums he had kept since his childhood came to the attention of then curator of the MoMA Mr. John Szarkowski, and Lartigue soon found himself on fashion assignments for Vogue, showing in Life Magazine, and shooting with fellow photog Richard Avedon. His images are now some of the most revered in the annals of photography.

For all of his status and regard, one of Lartigue's enduring traits throughout his nearly 90 years as a working photographer, was his infectious and pure joy for the art. In the below series of clips from an interview conducted in the '80s, Lartigue's twinkling eyes could very well still be peering out from the diminutive frame of a seven year old boy, enthralled with his new magic image capturing device.

Videos from a BBC documentary produced in 1983. Photos found through a Google image search of "Jacques Henri Lartigue" and represent the photographer's work from the 1910s through the 1930s.

In Almost Every Picture.

In Almost Every Picture #6.

Ad-man and photography fanatic Erik Kessels is a partner in communications/publishing company KesselsKramer. It's a Dutch house dedicated to producing unique media products and also printing limited edition books featuring found photography. One of the company's ongoing series is called In Almost Every Picture which assembles estate sale, flea market, or gifted photos in single-subject books. With eight issues, the subject matter has been as varied as a rabbit with a flat, object-balancing head (the pre-cursor to those wacky Stuff on Cats pic books), to a carnival gun toting woman who rigged a camera to snap her photo whenever she shot at a target at the fair game booth.

She was married to an adoring photo enthusiast. #1.

The photos are always part of a series that tells a story over time. The first issue published many of the hundreds of pictures snapped by an unknown husband of his fetching, anonymous wife over their loving marriage. Kessels found the 400 or so photos in a box at a Barcelona flea market and saved them from the rain. He held on to them for years before printing them up in the premier In Almost Every Picture. The brisk sales of the now sold out issue, and a well-attended gallery exhibition of the book's contents proved that people love to look at others' memories on paper.

The twins in issue #4.

In Almost Every Picture #4 a set of twins are shown on their vacations, holidays, special occasions, and photo worthy days dressed nearly identically over a number of years. In the WWII time frame, the series takes a mysterious and seemingly tragic twist when the photos become portraits of one sister, an empty space marking the absence of her other half.

Passport autobiography from #6.

The sixth issue of the series is a vast collection of a single woman's passport photos over a period of sixty years. It's an autobiography in tiny black and white photobooth snaps; a no frills life story.

A slide show of the fair game femme from issue #7.

The simple notion of this series is so richly engaging. Boxes and boxes of photos are ubiquitous sights at flea markets and antique shops. I love thumbing through them, and you all know how much I enjoy the Flickr universe. Looking at others' photos is the ultimate in people watching, but having little to no information beyond the images themselves make the activity of photo viewing a lovely foray into storytelling. Who? Why? What happened? It is what you think it is. Open endings from beautiful beginnings.

All images from the KesselsKramer website.

Beautiful Lee.

I've written of Lee Miller here before, of her fantastic photography that was captured both with the artistic eye of a surrealist, and as an entrenched woman at war. The mere existence of her images is a testament to the magnetism of her presence, which defied the repressive gender norms of her time. In a day where the Mrs. was supposed to be home tending the chores and awaiting the arrival of her battle weary man--bullets whizzed by and tanks drove through and Lee got her shot.

But, even before she was a trailblazer, Miller was a stark beauty. Her gorgeousness is an impressive thing, almost an object to be studied all on its own. A friend of mine who's style sense mirrors that of a certain superhero's Spidey Sense, mentioned Lee as a recent muse, and I can only take that to mean that we will all be worshiping the idol of Miller in a matter of time. Here, behold the gorgeous creature and her work.

Surreal. Beautiful.