The future in the form of flash cards ...doesn't have the same romance to it.
Posted on 08/09/2010 5:41:39 AM PDT by navysealdad
As someone who makes his living making photographs (thats how we “arteests” refer to it) I have always been in awe of the folks they had working for the government. All of these shots, plus the likes of Ansel Adams and the west coast crowd.
I cannot imagine a similar project today. Perhaps a video history of the country? If they spent money on sending out photogs to shoot “America” today, I wonder if the results would be as iconic.
The future in the form of flash cards ...doesn't have the same romance to it.
There are always sensitive people who understand the medium and can do excellent work. However, given the FaceBook, CameraPhone and YouTube type of culture we have now, I think that any effort to “shoot America” now would result in 10 trillion snapshots of “Heather and Her Friends Flashing Gang Signs” and about 17 photographs of rare beauty which capture the spirit of our age. But just try to pick ‘em out of the pile.
Why don’tyou print out some of these photos and make a display of them somewhere in Derby?
A coffeehouse, a library.
To remind people what we lost. How we used to look.
that would be a good Tea Party move without one word of propaganda.
I have it on good authority that no colors existed before 1937, when color was invented by Russians as a wartime research project.
From Wiki:
The three-color method, which is the foundation of virtually all practical color processes whether chemical or electronic, was first suggested in an 1855 paper on color vision by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
Maxwell's 1855 suggestion and this seriously defective 1861 demonstration appear to have been promptly and completely forgotten until being brought to light again in the 1890s. In the intervening decades, the basic concept was independently re-invented by several people, although usually with the serious error, arising from centuries of artists' experience with pigments, that red, yellow and blue were the required filter colors.
In 1898, however, it was possible for anyone with sufficient funds to buy the required equipment and supplies ready-made. Two adequately red-sensitive photographic plates (the Lumière Panchromatic and the Cadett Spectrum)[6] were already on the market, and two very different systems of color photography with which to use them, tantalizingly described in photographic magazines for several years past, were finally available to the public.
In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern "integral tripack" color film and called it Kodachrome, a name recycled from an earlier and completely different two-color process. Its development was led by the improbable team of Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky (nicknamed "Man" and "God"), two highly regarded classical musicians who had started tinkering with color photographic processes and ended up working with the Kodak Research Laboratories. Kodachrome had three layers of emulsion coated on a single base, each layer recording one of the three additive primaries, red, green, and blue. In keeping with Kodak's old "you press the button, we do the rest" slogan, the film was simply loaded into the camera, exposed in the ordinary way, then mailed to Kodak for processing. The complicated part (if the complexities of manufacturing the film are ignored) was the processing, which involved the controlled penetration of chemicals into the three layers of emulsion. Only a simplified description of the process is appropriate here: as each layer was developed into a black-and-white silver image, a "color coupler" added during that stage of development caused a cyan, magenta or yellow dye image to be created along with it. After all three layers had been developed, the silver images were chemically removed, leaving only the three layers of dye images in the finished film.
Initially, Kodachrome was available only as 16mm film for home movies, but in 1936 it was also introduced as 8mm home movie film and short lengths of 35mm film for still photography. Sheet film in various sizes for professional photographers followed in 1938, and also in that year changes were made to cure early problems with unstable colors and simplify the processing procedure to some degree.
In 1936, the German Agfa followed with their own integral tripack film, Agfacolor Neu, which was generally similar to Kodachrome but had one important advantage: Agfa had found a way to incorporate the color couplers into the emulsion layers during manufacture, allowing all three layers to be developed at the same time and greatly simplifying the processing. Most modern color films, excepting the now-discontinued Kodachrome, use the incorporated color coupler technique, but since the 1970s nearly all have used a modification developed by Kodak rather than the original Agfa version.
Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963. Like Polaroid's contemporary instant black-and-white film, their first color product was of the peel-apart type and produced a unique print on paper. The negative could not be re-used and was discarded. The blight created by carelessly discarded Polaroid negatives, which tended to accumulate most heavily at the prettiest, most snapshot-worthy locations, horrified Polaroid founder Edwin Land and prompted him to develop the later SX-70 system, which produced no separate negative to discard.
The library there is becoming a regular Obamaville. The Homeless have made their shelters there for years, but a few new tents get added every so often.
ping
(1) There are no fat people.
(2) Issues like gay-rights and universal health care didn't exist when people were just trying to survive. Much of today's liberal agenda exists only because of the prosperity the people in these photos brought to America through their hard work, ingenuity and faith.
Thank you so much.
thank you for posting these photos. Margaret Post Wolcott was a true artist — the other pictures interesting because of the subject matter, but not great works on their own.
The Russians invented color so that camouflage would make sense.
Wow, THAT was impressive. I’m not quite old enough to remember those kinds of scenes, but by the time I was old enough to participate in life, things hadn’t really changed an awful lot. We had steam trains, wooden buildings, one-room schools, barefoot kids everywhere. The industrial photos are especially interesting. We have come a long way, but it illustrated just what kind of economy America was capable of producing. I will be saving that link.
My bad. I forgot to read between the lines... :o)
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