Long before the first public announcements of photographic processes in 1839, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a scientifically-minded gentleman living on his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saône, France, began experimenting with photography. Fascinated with the craze for the newly-invented art of lithography which swept over France in 1813, he began his initial experiments by 1816. Unable to draw well, Niépce first placed engravings, made transparent, onto engraving stones or glass plates coated with a light-sensitive varnish of his own composition. These experiments, together with his application of the then-popular optical instrument, the camera obscura, would eventually lead him to the invention of the new medium.
The Panoramic Photograph Collection contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. These panoramas offer an overview of the nation, its enterprises and its interests, with a focus on the start of the twentieth century when the panoramic photo format was at the height of its popularity. Subject strengths include: agricultural life; beauty contests; disasters; engineering work such as bridges, canals and dams; fairs and expositions; military and naval activities, especially during World War I; the oil industry; schools and college campuses, sports, and transportation. The images date from 1851 to 1991 and depict scenes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. More than twenty foreign countries and a few U.S. territories are also represented. These panoramas average between twenty-eight inches and six feet in length, with an average width of ten inches.
Welcome
The Royal Photographic Society was founded in 1853 'to promote the Art and Science of Photography', a mission it continues to this day in the United Kingdom and through its considerable overseas membership.
Membership is open to everyone interested in photography: be they amateur or professional, artist or scientist, young or old. As well as becoming a member of The Society itself, many members also Join one or more of the specialist Groups which concentrate more closely upon their chosen interests within the medium.
A chronology of Photography with cross-referenced timelines of Politics and Culture is provided below. It may also be useful to refer to Photographers and Exhibitions elsewhere on this site. Please select a decade below to begin to explore this resource.
E xpatriate Englishman Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement imperceptible to the human eye. Hired by railroad baron Leland Stanford in 1872, Muybridge used photography to prove that there was a moment in a horse's gallop when all four hooves were off the ground at once. He spent much of his later career at the University of Pennsylvania, producing thousands of images that capture progressive movements within fractions of a second.
Historical photographic collections are an essential part of our cultural heritage. The growing interest in photography, as a form of artistic expression as well as a visual record of past times, has raised questions about how to treat photographic materials in a responsible way. These questions are not only relevant to collection keepers in archives, museums and libraries but also to anyone with old family albums at home. This website will offer some guidance in finding information about the long-term preservation of all kind of photographic materials.
Aims & Scope
Visual Studies is a major international peer-reviewed journal published on behalf of the International Visual Sociology Association. The journal publishes visually-oriented articles across a range of disciplines, and represents a long-standing commitment to empirical visual research, studies of visual and material culture, the development of visual research methods and the exploration of visual means of communication about social and cultural worlds. Visual Studies is a key resource for all disciplines that engage with images, society and culture, and sets the standard for the scholarly use of visual material.
The multidisciplinary character of the journal is reflected in its attention to visually-based research in sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, documentary film and photography, information technology, education, communication studies as well as other fields concerned with image-based study.
The aims of Visual Studies are to:
* Provide an international forum for the development of visual research.
* Promote acceptance and understanding of a wide range of methods, approaches and paradigms that constitute image-based research.
* Reduce the disparity in emphasis between visual and written studies in the social sciences.
* Promote an interest in developing visual research methodology in all its various forms.
* Encourage research that employs a mixture of visual methods and analytical approaches within one study.
* Critically reflect and contribute to the dialogue surrounding 'the visual' across the social sciences and humanities.
* Provide an arena for in-depth exploration of various approaches, particular methods, themes and visual phenomena.
Most articles published in the journal are accompanied by appropriate visual material, and the journal encourages visually-led submissions.
The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project has prepared a comprehensive edition of the nearly 10,000 letters to and from Talbot (1800-1877), the Wiltshire polymath best known for his invention of photography. Draft transcriptions of nearly all the letters were posted by September 2003 and these are now being further annotated and edited.
About
Welcome to my site. Here you will find summaries of my work, videos to watch, papers to download, images to study and links to pursue.
I have three areas of interest - photography, multimedia and politics. I am particularly concerned with (1) how documentary photography, photojournalism and satellite imaging visually enact our world; (2) how multimedia technologies are transforming the capacity of photography to tell stories about our hybrid world; and (3) how issues of identity and representation help structure international politics. A full CV/resume is available here.
As professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the UK, I am associated with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies. In 2009 I have a fellowship at Durham's Institute for Advanced Study to work on photographs from the Sudan archive for my 'Geopolitics and Visuality' project.
Search millions of historic photos
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor's house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.
He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges - snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.
Born in Rhuddlan, Wales, Jones Griffiths studied pharmacy in Liverpool and practiced in London while photographing part time for the Manchester Guardian. In 1961 he became a full-time freelancer for the London Observer. He covered the Algerian War in 1962 then became based in Central Africa, moving from there to Asia. He photographed in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968. He went back to Vietnam in 1970 and became famous for his 1971 book on the war, Vietnam Inc.
My lai massacre in pictures, U.S army photographers captured the events of the day, from the morning at LZ Dottie to the massacre itself.
Some of the photos of the operation were published in a U.S Army newspaper without giving the impression that a massacre had taken place, other photos were secretly taken by R. Haeberle on his own camera, rather than the army issued one which was subject to censorship
an estimated 504 Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai, during the Vietnam War
Napalm is any of a number of flammable liquids used in warfare, often jellied gasoline. Napalm is actually the thickener in such liquids, which when mixed with gasoline makes a sticky incendiary gel. Developed by the U.S. in World War II by a team of Harvard chemists led by Louis Fieser, its name is a combination of the names of its original ingredients, coprecipitated aluminum salts of naphthenic and palmitic acids. These were added to the flammable substance to cause it to gel.[1]