She was an unknown street photographer of Chicago and died last year. John Maloof discovered her photos after buying tens of thousands of negatives at an auction. A selection of photos are already online. Maloof writes:
After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very “keep your distance from me” type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.
PicApp is an idea I’ve liked from the start: Professional news photography being made available to everyone, via embedding like the Afghanistan photo here. In the first phase the service didn’t work so well, so I ended up not using it that often. But the new version has serious improvements. Now embed code in different sizes is directly available (no login necessary), and photo presentation is better as well. Advertising is only displayed — as far as I understand — when you click on a photo.
PST har lagt ut fotoalbumet fra Treholt-saken ikke bare på lukkede Facebook, men heldigvis også på åpne Flickr. Sikkerhetstjenesten har til og med spionert seg fram til en Creative Commons-lisens på bildene — navngivelse, ingen bearbeidelse (står egentlig noe i veien for å velge den aller frieste lisensen, med kun navngivelse? De ivrigste vil nok remikse Treholt-bildene uansett).
Jeg håper virkelig at mange offentlige institusjoner vil følge PST og gjøre historiske fotografier tilgjengelig. Treholt-bildene er en påminnelse om at det ikke bare er arkiver, biblioteker, museer eller NRK som sitter på viktig historisk materiale.
Digitaliseringen av fotografier, både av offentlige hendelser og private minner, har potensial til å påvirke vår historieforståelse. Både profesjonelle aktører og amatører vil bidra. Min personlige favoritt for tiden er Bergensavisens Fotomuseum på Origo. Ved siden av bilder fra avisens eget arkiv er det nå begynt å dukke opp mange spennende bilder fra private samlinger. Se for eksempel bilder tatt av Franz Blaha. Fascinerende. En utfordring for Origo blir å legge til rette for at publikum kan føre på stikkord (tags) som på Flickr, og å innarbeide Creative Commons-lisenser. Burde være mulig å få til, folkens?
Se min temaside med flere relevante saker om historisk fotografi.
A few years ago Creative Commons licensing of photos (and other works) was mostly for geeks, but I believe use of the licenses are gaining in popularity, and slowly but surely, users will also credit photographers in the correct way. At least now that, finally, Google has launched Creative Commons filtering in their image search.
Still, so far I much prefer Peter Shanks’ flickrCC search site, which manages to combine usability with beauty — no small accomplishment. I can live with the limitation that here you “only” search through Flickr images.
Extraordinary: The four photographers who captured the “Tank Man” on Tiananmen Square 20 years ago tell their individual stories of the event. An afterthought from Charlie Cole about the man with the bags — who remains unidentified, his destiny unknown:
I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.
Cole reflects further:
In my opinion, it is regretful that this image alone has become the iconic “mother” of the Tiananmen tragedy. This tends to overshadow all the other tremendous work that other photographers did up to and during the crackdown. Some journalists were killed during this coverage and almost all risked being shot at one time or another. (…) and we should not be lured into a simplistic, one-shot view of this amazingly complex event.
The photojournalist’s dilemma?
The event was also recorded on video; the moving pictures provide context and answers to some questions remaining after seeing the still images.
When Google first announced on its blog that the Life archive was up, it seemed like another Google good deed: rescuing the name of Life magazine and the glorious 20th-century tradition of still photojournalism. But Google has failed to recognize that it can’t publish content under its imprint without also creating content of some kind: smart, reported captions; new and good-looking slide-show software; interstitial material that connects disparate photos; robust thematic and topical organization. All this stuff is content, and it requires writers, reporters, designers and curators. Instead, the company’s curatorial imperative, as usual, is merely “make it available.”
With the use of the site, the photographers have been exchanging pictures that they shot over the past three weeks, each photographer in his or her close surroundings, and discussing professional matters against the background of the military campaign.
Troops parade past the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (and Generalfeldmarschall Göring) in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse on March 1, 1939. The photo is one of about 100.000 donated by Germany’s Bundesarchiv to Wikimedia Commons and being uploaded today. The photos are published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany license.
Have a look at Jonas Bendiksen and Magnum’s production The Places We Live, an online adaptation of the project where Bendiksen visits slum dwellers in Venezuela, Kenya, India and Indonesia. The production is introduced on Magnum’s blog (and I wish they would start offering embedding of photos — hey, it’s not as dangerous as you think).
Soon, we Flickr users can earn some money on our photos if Getty Images editors like them. So better hurry up and post some new pictures? Well, there are some issues here that are discussed quite interestingly in the comment section. One potential problem that struck me immediately, as well as commenter Stephen:
I wonder what effect this will have on whether Flickr photographers elect to post their images using the Creative Commons license.
For five years, brave Reuters photographers, cameramen, correspondents and support staff have documented the Iraq war. Now they have put together a stunning multimedia production. Especially impressive is the timeline. Watch. (via Media Storm blog).
This photo was taken yesterday in Kabul by Paula Bronstein for Getty Images. I didn’t “steal” it, it is published here completely legal by way of the new PicApp service from the Israeli company PicScout. Just search the database, find the picture you want and paste a piece of javascript into your publishing system.
It seems to work well, and is definitely worth a try. Now a blogger or any small publishing operation can have professional news photography on their site (for example, there are lots of new photos from the US election campaign in the database). Apparently a next step for the service is to share revenue generated from the ads published with the photos.
Not so sure about the guy peering out on top of the photo, though…
The photograph above was taken in 1942 by David Bransby. It shows a worker at the Vega Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California. It has been made available on Flickr by the US Library of Congress as a pilot project where users can add tags to and comment the pictures. And it’s definitively a hit. The photos have just been online for a few days, but already many of them have been viewed thousands of times, and the flickerati are busy tagging and commenting (UPDATE: details on the Flickr blog). Popularity among users is important in itself. Many cultural institutions — museums, archives, libraries, broadcasters — have been working for years digitising their collections, but are they reaching the audiences? Cooperating with a big, user-enthusiast-driven site like Flickr is obviously a brilliant way of making a cultural treasure known. But the project tackles another important issue as well. Librarians are currently discussing (link to story in Norwegian) whether to allow users/readers to add tags to the otherwise strictly controlled catalogue system. Library of Congress has decided to give it a try, and it’ll be exciting to see where the experiment goes.
Meanwhile, the photos published on Flickr are without known copyright restrictions, so there is no reason not to display such gems as the one below — photographed in 1942 in Colorado by Andreas Feininger — on your own blog.
