The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at the Library of Congress is one of those marvellous websites that have a great deal of content if you know what to search for. In one of my rambles through an essay on the history of photography, The Machine in The Garden Revisited (PDF, author's website is here), I found a reference to Ansel Adams’s Manzanar photographs.
So I did a Google search, found the Wikipedia entry on Adams, found a photo from Manzanar, followed the link from there to Ansel Adams’s Manzanar Photos, clicked on 'new search' and then previewed all the images. From there, I could look at thumbnails of the 244 photos in the collection, and also see a larger jpeg copy.
The main online catalogue has "about a million images". You can browse by collection, or do a search. I did a search for Dorothea Lange and found that some records had no images, some had only a thumbnail, and some had a link to a larger image. Not all collections have viewable photos but those that do are quite marvellous.
February 23, 2009
"About a million images"
February 21, 2009
Ceramics Points of View at the V&A
The Victoria & Albert Museum has a set of podcasts, although I found their podcast page more than a little confusing. It's just easier to go to iTunes, search for Victoria & Albert, and go from there. If you want to hear just the episodes for Ceramics Points of View, this is the link, sort of.
I did the direct iTunes route, listened to the podcast for each piece, while going to the Ceramics Points of View website to see each piece in a larger format. Then I figured out that if I clicked on the Quicktime/video link below each speaker's photo I could see what they were doing while they were speaking. I like listening to the commentator's voice in the iTunes podcast, hearing the snarky remarks of some of the speakers, and then seeing them handle the ceramics in the video as they spoke. In most cases, all six experts had a wide range of criticisms or praise for the ceramics they commented on.
February 13, 2009
Jean-Étienne Liotard at the Frick Collection
There are so many artists I have never heard of, and whose work I would never have seen if not for reviews in the New York Times and other places.
I found out about the Jean-Étienne Liotard exhibit at the Frick Collection through an article, Jean-Étienne Liotard, the Unrelenting Eye of the Enlightenment, in the NYT from 2006. Written by Holland Cotter, it is a pleasure to read - he likes the art, he likes the artist, and he isn't afraid to say so.
The web exhibit at the Frick has quite a bit of detail about the paintings shown but the images themselves aren't very big.
To see how Liotard paints portraits, visit the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, which has a good collection of Liotard's works, especially pastels - the captions are in Dutch, but the magnification is excellent as long as you click the text link "Bekijk het object extra groot". You will have to search to find Liotard's pastels - this link may work. The text here is in Dutch, but other parts of the site are in English.
February 05, 2009
A photography blog/podcast the way it should be done
There are many blogs and podcasts on the web that offer educational components. Some of them are good and some aren't.
One good (wonderful!) podcast that I have found that offers education in a painless way, along with good graphics and a supportive and organized blog (not all that common, unfortunately), is the History of Photography Podcasts "Class lectures with Jeff Curto from College of DuPage". You can subscribe through iTunes, watch sessions online, or download to your QuickTime Player. I prefer listening in iTunes because I can stop the sessions where I want and restart from that point. Also the images are a bit larger than on the webpage sessions. Using both methods (and depending on the quirks of your browser), you can click back and forth between the podcast and the other material on the blog.
I'll leave it to you to work your way through the blog entries. I started with the first one from February 24, 2008, and will work through the rest eventually, maybe.
In a later blog entry, I want to post about what I found about some of the photographers Curto mentioned in the first podcast. There is a long list of them in the handout for the February episode but I will look up a few of those working more recently. Given that I get easily distracted, it may take a while to do that, but I'll try.
