Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Posing with a yearbook picture of myself, by Billy Mabray, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] I’m a fan of yearbooks. I was an editor of mine in college, a somewhat unusual, multi-volume, and boxed object that included two books, a booklet, a brochure, and (it being the late sixties) a balloon. Back then, we
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives will be celebrating African American History Month throughout February with a series of related posts on THE BIGGER PICTURE.
Description: [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="133" caption="Earth, 1971, Apollo 15, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Center for Earth and Planetary Studies"][/caption] The planets and outer space used to seem far, far away from our lives down on earth. But as this slideshow reveals, by the mid-twentieth century—with Ford Galaxies in our driveways, satellite-shaped barbeque
Description: [caption id="attachment_3065" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Detail of a vinyl advertisement, Chennai, India, 2004, by Preminda Jacob."][/caption] It’s interesting to think about how shrewdly and often free still photography is used to get us to pay to watch motion pictures. Still photographs—often shot by special photographers on sound stages or on location, just
Description: [caption id="attachment_7871" align="alignleft" width="187" caption="A rendering of the AT&T Building, now the SONY Building, in New York, recently purchased by the Victoria & Albert Museum from a newly discovered cache of material from the Philip Johnson’s architectural practice. Photo courtesy Capelin Communications.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Eraser, by Sarah McKenzie, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] An interesting story surfaced about a week ago, concerning an over-eager defense lawyer anxiously seeking to expunge not only governmental, but media archives, too, of potentially damaging information or previously published articles about a number
Description: [caption id="attachment_2262" align="aligncenter" width="186" caption="Frankenstein by MARX!, by Flickr user TCM Hitchhiker."][/caption] For all the talk about creative seeing and the art of photography, the technical parameters of picture-taking and making have, for the most part, been defined by manufacturers of camera and photographic supplies. That wasn’t always the case;
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Window Necklace, by Hoong Wei Long, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] For those who continue to believe that bigger is better—that you’re better off, for example, the more megapixels your digital camera delivers—a recent article by Jordan Ellenberg in WIRED magazine suggests the opposite may be true.
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
Description: Right after Thanksgiving, on a promotional tour stop for his post-presidential memoir, Decision Points, George W. Bush visited Palo Alto, California to chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. According to a CBS News report, Mr. Bush mentioned that while he has more than 600,000 Facebook "friends," and now uses a Blackberry and iPad, during his presidency, he didn’t make much
Showing results 13 - 24 of 26 for University of Miami. Institute of Marine Science