Feb 07 2008
Penn, Capa, Taro, Lincoln, and Flickr: Oh my!
This seems to be a banner season for archives and photographs. Suddenly, it seems like wherever I turn, I run into more articles about donations and recent findings.
First it was the snapshots that quite possibly show Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg some 144 years ago, on the day of delivering his famous address. This op-ed intrigued me greatly, for one of the biggest problems with this type of photo is the actual identification of the subjects within the frame. While the author can make no certain claim, the feeling evoked by the article is one of participating in a particularly historic and interesting moment. And this? Poetry:
Looking at Lincoln in these two photographs — all but his hat nearly lost in the emulsion of the film itself — I find myself wondering what it would have been like if photography had been a rudimentary discovery and had been with us, say, as long as the printing press. What would the photographic record show if it reached back, say 500 years, instead of 180?
One answer is that it would show us this same structure over and over again: a fiercely concentrated knot of people hanging on the words of someone at the center of the crowd. And around them? People standing in looser and looser concentrations, until finally — far enough from the epicenter — their attention turns away from history and focuses on the abiding interest of almost anything else. And this is somehow the inherent bias of the camera. It always directs us toward the center of attention, never away to the periphery, even though that is where our attention eventually wanders.
Full article: History and the Problem of Following the Camera’s Gaze
Related Newsweek article: Flickr Helps the Library of Congress
If you haven’t read about the Library of Congress and their Flickr project, you haven’t been paying attention. LoC recently posted a small (very, very small) digitized portion of their image collection on Flickr’s new public image area, The Commons. Using Web 2.0 and social tagging, the LoC has brought their collections to an audience that may not have otherwise encountered these images. More in Wired, and on the LoC blog.
Lastly, the Robert Capa and Gerda Taro photos, seemingly lost to history and then rediscovered and eventually acquired by the International Center for Photography. I’m really interested in seeing the rest of the reclaimed negatives– and finding out if any other evidence surrounding “The Falling Soldier” was found.
NYT article: The Capa Cache