Results for "Smithsonian Institution. Archives. Institutional History Division"
- Blog Post
Upon Closer Inspection . . .
- Date: December 9, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="attachment_3532" align="aligncenter" width="220" caption="Lorgnette Humaine, Scan from The English Mechanic, 1897 drawing of an invention using X-Rays to scan luggage, courtesy of Flickr user Mark Wahl, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] A week or so ago, shoes off and stuck in the slow moving security check line at an airport, I became fixated as I
- Blog Post
Made You Look!!!
- Date: July 8, 2010
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="attachment_7261" align="alignleft" width="430" caption="Advertisement on Fifth Avenue in New York City, 2010, Photo courtesy of Marvin Heiferman."][/caption] You’ve probably noticed, in recent years, that in order to attract shoppers’ attention retail establishments have been filling both exterior and interior display spaces with big, colorful, and evocative
- Blog Post
Looking Death in the Face
- Date: February 1, 2010
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="384" caption="Moseley, Greenwood Cemetery, 1998, by Titus Brooks Heagins, Digital photograph, Anacostia Community Museum, Titus Brooks Heagins Collection, Gift of Titus Brooks Heagins, © 1998 Titus Brooks Heagins, PH 2005.7010.01."][/caption] At one point, early in CNN’s round-the-clock television coverage of Haiti after the earthquake
- Blog Post
Someone To Watch Over Me: Home Edition
- Date: November 11, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="attachment_3132" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Surveillance camera found in hallway, 2009, courtesy of Marvin Heiferman."][/caption]Note to readers: the "News in the Visual" blog posts referenced below have now been moved to the "What Gets Saved" category on THE BIGGER PICTURE (2/20/2011).Talk about ironic. The whole time I’ve been writing “News in the
- Blog Post
Politics: Prettier When Pictured
- Date: December 8, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="attachment_3084" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="President Obama conducts interviews in the Map Room 3/30/09. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza."][/caption] Some photographs, instead of illustrating the news, are designed to make news. Given the speed at which photographic images can be distributed, the audiences they reach, and the attention they
Cut and Paste, Old Style
- Date: September 13, 2011
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: Some years back, and for what seemed like quite a while, people were talking about scrapbooking. As more aspects of everyday life were going digital, it felt like more and more people were paying homage to the paper-based mementoes of their experiences that appeared to be heading for oblivion. Quickly, and to support all the saving, trimming, and gluing that people were
- Blog Post
Look! Up In the Sky! It's . . .
- Date: July 1, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="277" caption="Cascading Light, by Terry Mann."][/caption] It was 3 o’clock in the morning and something out of the ordinary was happening. And good neighbor that she is—although it might not seem that way to all of you—Terry Mann grabbed her camera then started waking people up. There wasn’t anything wrong in the neighborhood, but she
- Blog Post
Ditched Once, Loved Still
- Date: January 5, 2011
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: A couple of years ago, in the process of curating Now is Then, an exhibition for the Newark Museum, I spent some time researching and thinking about the content, meaning and sequential lives of snapshots. Since their introduction in the late 19th century, inestimable numbers of those small, but powerful pictures have been made, looked at and saved—at least for a while.
- Blog Post
Look at Me! No. Look at You!
- Date: July 10, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: Toward the end of a long day last week, tired of looking at and thinking about still pictures, I decided to take a break to check out what kinds of videos about photography had been posted on YouTube. The key word "photo" yielded 885,000 videos and feeling a little daunted, I started scanning the first couple of hundred to see what turned up. All the how-to videos about
- Blog Post
Looking for Mr. or Ms. Right
- Date: April 20, 2010
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Perfect, by Bruce Berrien, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] At the turn of the 21st century, as federal organizations and private corporations were competing against each other in the race to decode the human genome, a number of exhibitions that explored areas where genetic science and visual imagery
- Blog Post
Seeing another world, this one behind the Iron Curtain…
- Date: May 26, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="293" caption="Completed SA-2 missile site showing characteristic Star of David pattern, National Security Archive, The George Washington University"][/caption] Strangely beautiful surveillance photographs shot from an American U-2 spy plane triggered a terrifying nuclear standoff, The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In a new click!
- Blog Post
That Picture Looks Great On You
- Date: August 28, 2009
- Creator: Marvin Heiferman
- Description: [caption id="attachment_2114" align="aligncenter" width="240" caption="Flickr Photographer T-shirt with Flickr Badge, photo by Ritsa, from RobW_'s Flickr photostream."][/caption] Not only are photographs everywhere, but they’re on everything. And you, too, can contribute to the picture pile-up.