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Kim Høltermand: Frederiksvej Kindergarten

Kim Høltermand: Frederiksvej Kindergarten

Frederiksvej Kindergarten, a project by Danish studio COBE, is highly focused on details, giving the viewer a slow peek at the materials it was made of. This simplicity, combined with the rawness of black and white, corresponds with the project’s main idea – the roof line was built as if the child would draw it, reminiscent of a sketch. Kim…
Vintage: Historical views of American National Parks (19th Century)

Vintage: Historical views of American National Parks (19th Century)

By the Act of March 1, 1872, Congress established Yellowstone National Park in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming “as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” and placed it “under exclusive control of the Secretary of the Interior.” The founding of Yellowstone National Park began a worldwide national park movement. In the years…
Vintage Daguerreotype portraits from XIX Century (1844 – 1860)

Vintage Daguerreotype portraits from XIX Century (1844 – 1860)

Mathew B. Brady (1822 – 1896) was one of the first American photographers, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York in 1844, and photographed Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, among other celebrities. Here is a collection of mid 19th century Daguerreotypes produced by Mathew Brady’s studio (1844 – 1860). From the…
Posing for the Camera: Gifts from Robert B. Menschel

Posing for the Camera: Gifts from Robert B. Menschel

A selection of some 60 photographs in the Gallery’s collection made possible by Robert B. Menschel are on view in an exhibition that examines how the act of posing for a portrait changed with the invention of the medium. Featured works come from the early 1840s—just after photography was invented—through the 1990s. The exhibition includes pictures by Lewis Carroll, Edward…
Vintage: 1906 San Francisco earthquake

Vintage: 1906 San Francisco earthquake

The 1906 earthquake preceded the development of the Richter magnitude scale by three decades. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the quake on the modern moment magnitude scale is 7.8; values from 7.7 to as high as 8.3 have been proposed. According to findings published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, severe deformations in the earth’s crust…
East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography

East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography

When photography arrived in the United States in 1839, it landed first in a few east coast cities and New Orleans, and then spread north and west into the American interior. The proliferation of photography studios and photographers coincided with the beginnings of massive cultural, commercial, and transportation projects that would ultimately reshape much of the American landscape. Photography quickly…
Wendell MacRae: Rock-Paper-Scissors

Wendell MacRae: Rock-Paper-Scissors

These images capture New York City as it emerged from the Depression and experienced an extraordinary building boom, from the completion of the Empire State Building to the massive Rockefeller Center project, completed in 1940. After an exhibition of his early Modernist work at the pioneering Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, MacRae was hired in 1934 to record the construction…
Vintage: Lisbon in the 1940s

Vintage: Lisbon in the 1940s

During the Estado Novo regime (1926–1974), Lisbon was expanded at the cost of other districts within the country, resulting in nationalist and monumental projects. New residential and public developments were constructed; the zone of Belém was modified for the 1940 Portuguese Exhibition, while along the periphery new districts appeared to house the growing population. The inauguration of the bridge over…
Cheap Rents… and de Kooning: The downtown art world New York, 1957-63

Cheap Rents… and de Kooning: The downtown art world New York, 1957-63

Cheap rents … and de Kooning revisits the New York downtown art scene between 1957 and 1963, when the 10th Street galleries were the center of the art world and inexpensive lofts were still available. Living in this dynamic neighborhood, John Cohen photographed a series of its famous and infamous artists’ haunts―among them the legendary Cedar Bar, the Artists’ Club…
Vintage: Everyday Life of Soviet People during World War II

Vintage: Everyday Life of Soviet People during World War II

The Soviet Union suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the Soviet Union together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered as the Big Four of Allied powers in World War II and…
Biography: 19th Century Daguerreotype Studio – Southworth & Hawes

Biography: 19th Century Daguerreotype Studio – Southworth & Hawes

Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) operated a daguerreotype studio together in Boston, MA. They are considered the finest American portrait photographers of the nineteenth century. Southworth & Hawes worked almost exclusively in the daguerreotype process. Working in the 8 ½ x 6 ½ inch whole plate format, their images are brilliant, mirror-like, and finely detailed. Writing…
Olivier Robert: Lakes, from Léman to Biwa

Olivier Robert: Lakes, from Léman to Biwa

This work started on the shores of the Lake Geneva in Switzerland and in France, as I arrived in this region in 1995 and where I still live. My approach consists in using the ‘unintentional aesthetic’ of the man-made objects or structures left alongside the lakes to reveal a personal appreciation of the way these objects and the landscapes answer…
Vintage: Everyday Life around the Yangtze River, China (1910s)

Vintage: Everyday Life around the Yangtze River, China (1910s)

“Yangtze” was actually the name of Chang Jiang for the lower part from Nanjing to the river mouth at Shanghai. However, due to the fact that Christian missionaries carried out their activities mainly in this area and were familiar with the name of this part of Chang Jiang, “Yangtze river” was used to refer to the whole Chang Jiang in…
Saul Leiter: Early Black and White

Saul Leiter: Early Black and White

The distinctive iconography of Saul Leiter’s early black-andwhite photographs stems from his profound response to the dynamic street life of New York City in the late 1940s and ’50s. While this technique borrowed aspects of the photo-documentary, Leiter’s imagery was more shaped by his highly individual reactions to the people and places he encountered. Like a Magic Realist with a…
Rouge: Michael Kenna

Rouge: Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna (born 1953) has long been acclaimed as one of the most important landscape photographers of our time. He is best known for lyrical black and white images made under natural light conditions—often at dawn or dusk, or indeed long exposures made at night—and is understood as heir to the Pictorialist tradition; his work with industrial and postindustrial landscapes…
Biography: Portrait photographer Gertrude Käsebier

Biography: Portrait photographer Gertrude Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier (1852 – 1934) was one of the most influential American photographers of the early 20th century. She was known for her images of motherhood, her portraits of Native Americans and her promotion of photography as a career for women. In July 1899 Alfred Stieglitz published five of Käsebier’s photographs in Camera Notes, declaring her “beyond dispute, the leading…
Vintage: Portrait of Miss Lily Elsie (1900s and 1910s)

Vintage: Portrait of Miss Lily Elsie (1900s and 1910s)

Lily Elsie’s biggest success came in creating the title role in the English-language version of The Merry Widow in the London production. Edwardes took Elsie to see the original German version (Die Lustige Witwe) in Berlin. Elsie was at first reluctant to take on the demanding part, thinking her voice too light for the role, but Edwardes persuaded her to…
Jakob Tuggener: Maschinenzeit

Jakob Tuggener: Maschinenzeit

Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is one of those exceptions in Swiss photography. His personal and highly expressive photographs of the boisterous parties in better social circles are legendary, and his book “Fabrik” of 1943 is regarded as a milestone in the history of the photobook. The exhibition “Machine Age” focuses on his photographs and films from the world of work and…
Serge Ramelli: Paris

Serge Ramelli: Paris

Paris is the City of Light, love, and savoir vivre. And this world-class capital is surely one of the planet’s most photographed destinations, whether by tourists snapping a quick souvenir shot or professionals with high-end cameras. The brief preview we provide here shows how special this city really is. Paris has never been showcased as impressively, meaningfully, or dramatically as…
Vintage: Great Boston Fire of 1872 (Exactly 145 years ago)

Vintage: Great Boston Fire of 1872 (Exactly 145 years ago)

The conflagration began at 7:20 p.m. on November 9, 1872, in the basement of a commercial warehouse at 83-87 Summer Street. The fire was finally contained 12 hours later, after it had consumed about 65 acres (26 ha) of Boston’s downtown, 776 buildings and much of the financial district, and caused $73.5 million in damage. Despite these devastations, only thirteen…