Art
Unearthed Photographs from National Geographic’s Archive
The arresting images that have thrived on the pages of National Geographic since 1888 are just a fraction of the photographs taken for the magazine.
Photography
Art
Portraying the Monstrous Elegance of Parasites with Tintypes
Tapeworms, leeches, lice, bedbugs, fleas, and ticks — the litany of Marcus DeSieno's photographic subjects is enough to cause a few paranoid itches
Books
Dispatches from the Gateways to Death Valley
Two rural communities have ominously declared themselves the "Gateway to Death Valley" — Baker, California and Beatty, Nevada — each isolated as the last stop before miles of harsh landscape.
Art
Scaling the Spires of Cambridge with 1930s Urban Explorers
Back in the 1930s, a group of amateur climbers scaled the centuries-old Gothic stonework and shaky water pipes to reach the spires of the Cambridge colleges.
Books
Portraits of America's New Nomads
There is a loose tribe living at nature's margins in the United States, slaughtering goats raised by hand at Idaho's Lost River and picking cherries growing wild in California's Marble Mountain Wilderness.
Art
Stretching the Truth of Photography
Photography’s initial accomplishment was to allow for the instantaneous transformation of a four-dimensional object or event into a static, two-dimensional representation. However, in the catalogue for the 1970 exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter C. Burnell insis
Books
Drugs, Guns, Photographs: Taking Shots with William S. Burroughs
Writer William S. Burroughs took thousands of photographs from the 1950s to 1970s, but it's likely you've not seen many as even he didn't treat them like an art, but a mode of disrupting time.
Art
Photographs of the Ecological Healing of WWII Bomb Scars
Almost masked in nature's regrowth are craters from World War II in Germany, pocking the ground as reminders of violence that erupted in the landscape. Photographer Henning Rogge set out to discover as many as he could through aerial maps and the exploration of old battlegrounds.
Art
The First 100 Years of Camera Advertising
Ever since the invention of photography, we've been deeply fascinated by cameras and the images they produce.
Books
Photographing the Desert Where the Mountains Float
Given just the right optical conditions, a mountain can appear to hover above the Earth. Photographer Mike Osborne sought to capture that effect, and other fascinations of the landscape of the Great Basin Desert between Utah and Nevada, where the real world becomes alien.
Art
Edward Steichen's War Years
Edward Steichen was the first modern fashion photographer, best known for shadowy portraits of silver-screen stars like Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, and Louise Brooks. That the dark room master spent two years during World War I developing photographic surveillance techniques is less common kno
Books
A Photographic Survey of America's Public Libraries
Walking into my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, it looks more or less like any other: computers to the left, children’s section to the right, non-fiction dead ahead. It’s only when I go upstairs to the already small fiction section that I see something abnormal: more shelves are empty t