The details are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa Aldridge, the woman in red. Lesa didn’t drink at the time, but both were 18, the legal age then. As the bars closed at 3 a.m., the two followed some other revelers to a friend’s house nearby. In the mix was a 30-something man who had been taking pictures all night. “I always thought of Bill as just like us,” Karen says today, “until years later, when I realized that he was famous.”
Analog jumps back into the game and kicks serious patootie. Tom Swift’s New Camera, Ready for Space and Spies For that last line, read, “How can we spy on our citizens better?”
I’m apparently three months late, but I didn’t see anybody else post this.
They Needed to Talk
Excavating Time–Lost Photos Found
This site shares photos found in vintage cameras, forgotten by former owners, never developed until now. By way of RobotActionBoy.sucka pants
This collection of photos from someone called sucka pants on Flickr reminded me of the grungy, sub-sub-subculture photos of We’re Desperate or of Richard Kern. I especially recommend this shot. I…I don’t know girls like this.The Classic Photos of Garry Winogrand
I came across a book of Garry Winogrand photos the other day (too expensive to buy), and had to quickly educate myself about him and his darkly humorous work, much shot on the streets of New York. The man had an eye for the grotesque and the unseemly, and from looking at the photos you would think America is just one collection of freaky-ass lookin’ people (wait, it isn’t?). This long About.com article on Winogrand should do nicely. There’s a gallery here, but watch out for f’ing popups.The Photography of Stephen Gill
Stephen Gill has traveled to Estonia, Poland, and Croatia, but the most depressing country in his portfolio is his own England. Check out the photos for Invisible, Trolley Portraits, Hackney Wick, and Roadworks for a taste of the soggy isle.
By way of City of SoundJapan in Black and White
Groove, baby, on these mysterious black and white photos by some Japanese cat called Yamasaki Ko-ji. No, that’s not a photo of him above.
By way of Robot Action BoyLovely Pinhole Photography
This is a blog of black and white photography by R. Gardiner. It’s good stuff!Russia! Turn o’ the Century! In COLOR!
Wowowow! Back in the 1900’s, Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii figured out a way of photographing in color, using three black and white photos shot simultaneously with red, blue, and green filters in place. When he projected them back, he could combine the three (much like in printing) and attain a color image. Now the Library of Congress has painstakingly recombined the original negs into simply amazing color photographs of a world few have seen except for old, grainy black and white. Looks like it was shot yesterday…damn!
The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition)Forget Megapixels, try Tom Swift’s Camera
As an adolescent, Clifford Ross was an apathetic science student but obsessed by Tom Swift. Now 52, Mr. Ross has become a character appropriate to a boys’ adventure novel. An artist and businessman, he recently became an inventor – of a camera unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.
Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.
