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World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893

World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893

The World’s Columbian Exposition was a World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492. The Exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago’s self-image, and American industrial optimism. Most of the buildings of the fair…
Life, a Sport. Jules Decrauzat – A Pioneer of Photo-reportage

Life, a Sport. Jules Decrauzat – A Pioneer of Photo-reportage

A great find: almost 1,250 glass negatives dating from between 1910 and 1925 that had defied the ravages of time in the archive of the Swiss picture agency Keystone. While the quality of those photographs was well known, the circumstances under which they were taken were largely obscure. Now, thanks to thorough research work, a new chapter in the history…
Biography: Documentary/Architecture photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

Biography: Documentary/Architecture photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures. To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures, such as the winding towers that haul coal and iron ore…
Interview with Black and White photographer Hannah Kozak

Interview with Black and White photographer Hannah Kozak

Hannah Kozak was born to a Polish father and a Guatemalan mother in Los Angeles, California. At the age of ten, she was given a Kodak Brownie camera by her father, Sol, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and began instinctively capturing images of dogs, flowers, family and friends that felt honest and real. As a teenager growing up…
Hoflehner – Jet Airliner: The Complete Works

Hoflehner – Jet Airliner: The Complete Works

Photographs by Josef Hoflehner and Jakob Hoflehner. The Jet Airliner series was taken over a period of several months between early 2009 and late 2011 at Maho Beach on the Dutch/French island of St. Maarten / St. Martin in the Caribbean Sea. The beach is directly adjacent to the relatively short runway of the airport, therefore passenger jets roar as…
Neofuturistic architecture of Eero Saarinen (1950s and 60s)

Neofuturistic architecture of Eero Saarinen (1950s and 60s)

Eero Saarinen was a Finnish American architect and industrial designer of the 20th century famous for shaping his neofuturistic style according to the demands of the project: simple, sweeping, arching structural curves or machine-like rationalism. Photographer Balthazar Korab worked for Saarinen, skillfully capturing the nuances, shapes, and lines of his structures and documenting the creative process involved. In the process,…
Biography: Documentary photographer Lewis Hine

Biography: Documentary photographer Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine (1874 – 1940) was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine was educated as a sociologist at the University of Chicago, during the years when John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen were on its faculty. He continued his education at New York and Columbia Universities, and taught at the School of Ethical Culture. (Among his students there was Paul Strand,…
Interview with Hand-Made/Portrait photographer Jessica Somers

Interview with Hand-Made/Portrait photographer Jessica Somers

Jessica Somers is a photographer specializing in historic and hand-made photographic techniques and self-portraiture. Her photographs explore the struggle and balance between the choices one makes and the uncontrollable circumstances that intervene with these choices. Jessica’s work has been exhibited nationally, has been published in various periodicals and is represented by the Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston, TX. Her research…
Biography: Pictorial Rural Life photographer Peter Henry Emerson

Biography: Pictorial Rural Life photographer Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson (1856 – 1936) was a British photographer. He bought his first camera in 1882 and spent the next several years studying and experimenting in photography. By 1885 he was exhibiting his work and winning prizes widely. In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson published Naturalistic Photography a handbook detailing his approach and the theories he believed supported it. Although…
Biography: City / Street photographer Eva Besnyo

Biography: City / Street photographer Eva Besnyo

Eva Besnyo (1910–2002) was a Dutch-Hungarian photographer who participated in the Nieuwe Fotografie (New Photography) movement. In 1928, she started to study photography at József Pécsi’s studio where she also served an apprenticeship. In 1930, at the age of 20, she moved to Berlin where she first worked for advertising photographer René Ahrlé before working on photoreportages with the press…
Vintage: Dracula (1931)

Vintage: Dracula (1931)

Dracula is a 1931 vampire-horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi as the title character. The concept of Dracula is taken from the stageplay as opposed to the novel, and the results are highly theatrical. Lugosi laughs evilly throughout; no wonder, his depiction of the Count-as-seducer is aeons removed from the feral creature represented in Nosferatu and…
Vintage: Altstadt, Dresden, Saxony, Germany in the late 19th Century

Vintage: Altstadt, Dresden, Saxony, Germany in the late 19th Century

The city of Dresden had a distinctive silhouette, captured in famous paintings by Bernardo Bellotto and by Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl. Between 1806 and 1918 the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony (which was a part of the German Empire from 1871). During the Napoleonic Wars the French emperor made it a base of operations, winning…
Interview with Fine Art Landscape photographer Michel Rajkovic

Interview with Fine Art Landscape photographer Michel Rajkovic

There are places that carry you, lights that you freeze and moods that you fill emotions. It is through a long period of research and location scouting that his work begins. Michel Rajkovic does not try to capture the landscape as we perceive it. On the contrary, patiently, with long exposure technics, he invites the time and chance to bring…
Stanley Kubrick’s Photos from the 1940s

Stanley Kubrick’s Photos from the 1940s

Stanley Kubrick—who wrote and directed Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining—was one of America’s most influential filmmakers. Directors ranging from the Coen Brothers to Tim Burton paid visual homage to his works in their own films, and no less than Steven Spielberg said: “Nobody could shoot a picture better in history.” In fact…
Biography: Documentary photographer Walker Evans

Biography: Documentary photographer Walker Evans

Walker Evans (1903 – 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”. Many of his…
Vintage: historic photos of Peking, China (1920s)

Vintage: historic photos of Peking, China (1920s)

An older English spelling, Peking, is the Postal Map Romanization of the same two characters as they are pronounced in Chinese dialects spoken in the southern port towns first visited by European traders and missionaries. Those dialects preserve the Middle Chinese pronunciation of 京 as kjaeng, prior to a phonetic shift in the northern dialects to the modern pronunciation.
Biography: Nude/Fetish photographer Elmer Batters

Biography: Nude/Fetish photographer Elmer Batters

Elmer Batters (November 24, 1919 – June 25, 1997) was a pioneer fetish photographer who specialized in capturing artful images of women with an emphasis on stockings, legs, and feet: ahead of his time in popularizing foot fetishism imagery as erotic entertainment. Batters started out publishing his photographs himself, and since the early 1960s his work was featured in magazines…
Tomasz Gudzowaty: Monsters of the Deep

Tomasz Gudzowaty: Monsters of the Deep

The southern elephant seal is the largest carnivore living today. The seal gets its name from its giant size and the large proboscis of the adult males, resembling an elephant’s trunk. According to an 18th-century description, the “Monsters of the Deep” make “dreadful Howlings and Voices which seem too terrible for Human Ears”. Indeed, they can be extremely noisy and…
Interview with Black and White photographer Spiros Zervoudakis

Interview with Black and White photographer Spiros Zervoudakis

Spiros Zervoudakis was born in Athens . He studied Mathematics in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , continued with Post Graduate studies (Msc) in Applied Mathematics in the Technical University of Crete and Philosophy of Mathematics in National University of Athens. His occupation with photography started when he attended classes on Photography in the Photographic Group of the Aristotle University…