Thursday, January 17, 2008

You must check this out

WOW talk about coincidence, I was thinking yesterday about the frames I bought over Christmas and what to put in them. The only thing my mind is made up on is that I want black and white prints for the 40x50 frames and that got me thinking to the fact that the Library of Congress in the States offer many amazing photographs for sale and would be well worth looking at.


This shows the cross section of a 900-year-old Red Wood tree with important dates marked such as the pilgrims landing and the Battle of Hastings.

You can buy some seriously classic shots. For example Dorothea Lange was employed to cover the American depression in the 1930s and you can see her amazing shots on the website.

Her Migrant Mother shot which is an iconic image of the time depicting the absolute pain of a woman’s family situation etched on the woman’s face. She told Lange how the family were eating frozen vegetables from a nearby field, birds the children had caught and how she had just sold her car tyres to buy food. The photographs have to be seen to be appreciated.

And they are for sale and reasonably priced too. I have been threatening to purchase some of these shots for years, imagine having history on your wall printed from the original negatives. Imagine having an original Eve Arnold photograph on your wall or any of the other iconic images.



And then by coincidence Flickr Blog has a piece today about the Library of Congress and how we punters who have been tagging some 2 million times a day on Flickr can now tag images in the library.

Not only that but the Library has the most amazing Flickr photostream which they have been submitting images to since Jan 3 and have now clocked up more than 3,000 photographs. Talk about losing yourself, expect light blogging as I trawl my way through history both on the library website and their Flickr photostream. They also have a blog and in this post talk about using Flickr.

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