After discovering What Was On (1957), I became a big fan of Square America. Well, Ofer has pointed me to another image collection on the site that is not to be missed: a sequence of stills from a 1970’s IBM ad that looks like it could be a collaboration between John Baldassari and Ed Ruscha. Brilliant.

See it here.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Over the last few years, Edward Burtynsky has been investigating the possibilities of long-term preservation for artifacts in hopes of finding a proper home for the 10,000-year Clock (also known as the “Clock of the Long Now”) and, in turn, has rediscovered a process for producing photographic prints that could resist fading for – no joke – as long as it takes for the Clock to cycle. Burtynsky has proposed the creation of a 10,000-year Gallery to house the Clock alongside a slowly rotated selection of long-life photographs.

If you’re anything like me, you’re getting chills just imagining a gallery space with the Clock (ticking once a year, the century hand advancing once every one hundred years, the cuckoo coming out on the millennium) and photographs lining the walls.

Here’s an excerpt from the Blog of Long Now, explaining more:

Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past. Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, “because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.”

Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn’t work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called “carbon transfer print.” It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone-the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany-and the black ink is carbon.

On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

The popularization of such printing methods would no doubt change the face of the photography. But at present, making just one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000 and only ten artisans in the world have the knowledge and skills to do it correctly, says Burtynsky.

Read the rest of the story here. And check back here for an .mp3 of Burtynsky’s Long Now Seminar, where he discussed the 10,000-year Gallery.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Thanks to Leslie, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last fifteen minutes with this great little Java applet that can turn any website into a graph.

For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):

Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):

Curious what the colors mean?

blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s Google (google.com):

Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.

Head to the site and try it for yourself!

Popularity: 36% [?]

Stephen Sasson with his digital camera prototype
© James Rajotte / New York Times

For her New York Times article, At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again, Claudia H. Deutsch spoke with Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the “first digital camera.” When Sasson created his prototype at Eastman Kodak in the ‘70s, he told her, the idea was not as easy to pitch as you might think.

“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’”

In her article, Deutsch discusses how Kodak has since learned to embrace digital technology and takes a look at what new technologies they releasing and researching for.

Read it online here.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, is raising a lot of interesting questions about sharing ideas and the role of the internet. (Along with the above video, also see his TED talk on collaborative innovation and the “rise of the amateur professional” and, if you have the time, read the first three chapters of his book, We Think.)

Lately I’ve been considering how this all affects photographers and bloggers and would love to host some conversation on the topic here.

Share your thoughts (because you can?)!

Popularity: 27% [?]

Recently, I posted about the Sweedish publisher Farewell Books and their latest publication entitled Making a Map, a selection of photographs by Japanese photographer Wakaba Noda. Mårten Lange, Farewell’s founder and editor, was kind enough send me a copy to take a closer look at.

When I first opened Making a Map, I immediately thought of all of the self-published books that I’ve been seeing lately, books made using online custom printing services such as Lulu or Blurb. While printing this way may never compare to the precision and image quality of Steidl’s publications, I’ve been really quite impressed with a number of them. The exciting part of this technology being so accessible (and so affordable) now is that anyone with a book idea and basic design skills can produce a quality publication. This is a large part of Lange’s inspiration when he started Farewell in 2007.

Inspired by a digital do-it-yourself spirit, Farewell was created as a way of bypassing the barrier of exclusiveness that often surrounds photo book publishing. By printing small editions and using the Internet as the primary distribution channel, a Farewell book is both accessible and exclusive at the same time.

Farewell began with two books from Lange himself, Woodland and Machina, followed by John Divola’s As Far As I Could Get and Late Winter Early Spring by Magnus Gyllensten. Wakaba Noda’s Making a Map is the most recent book, Farewell’s fifth publication.

The book itself is relatively small (approximately 16×21.3cm, 8.4×6.3in), softcover and perfect bound. It contains 32 pages, featuring 28 offset printed full color images and no accompanying text. Without a description of the project, Noda’s photographs feel very much open to interpretation. That said, there seems to be great care taken in the sequencing (and pairing) of the images.

spread from Making a Map, 2008
© Wakaba Noda / Farewell Books

spread from Making a Map, 2008
© Wakaba Noda / Farewell Books

spread from Making a Map, 2008
© Wakaba Noda / Farewell Books

The simplicity of design and lack of text is fitting for this work. I found myself easily entering Noda’s world: a majestic scene of grazing horses in the grass, a curious pattern found in the netting at what might be a baseball field or a driving range, a small glimpse of a rainbow at sunset.

The subtle tonality of the photographs is consistent and makes moving from one image to another a pleasure. The format of the images, what seems to be a slightly elongated frame, somewhere in between the ratio of 35mm and a standard panoramic, is also nice. The photographs sometimes appear to be distant in location but are always close in feeling; with Making a Map, Noda weaves together small wonders that feel somehow insignificant and somehow profound and in doing so “makes a map of a world not defined by geography, but by the possibilities that photography offers.”

If expensive printing is not the most important thing to you in a photo book, I highly recommend this collection of quietly considered photographs.

Visit Farewell Books to purchase a copy.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Inspired by a totally cosmic conversation about inner and outer space, I give you Powers of Ten!

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend.

Popularity: 24% [?]

© DSS Consortium, SDSS, NASA/ESA

Google Sky is every astronomy nerd’s new best friend.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Sad, sad news released today:

The company that pioneered instant photography is getting out of the film business to focus on digital imaging.

Polaroid says it will close its two remaining film manufacturing plants in Massachusetts. The facilities in Norwood and Waltham employed about 150 people and made large-format film for commercial use.

Polaroid has already halted the production of instant cameras. Chief Operating Officer Tom Beaudoin told The Boston Globe the company will focus on digital photography equipment and flat-panel TVs.

As it says above, the Norwood and Waltham plants make large-format films. Polaroid also makes professional-grade films in Mexico, and its consumer film packs come from a factory in the Netherlands. However, all of these plants are slated for closure sometime this year.

Shoot as much as you can right now – that’s what I suggest (especially if you’re working in a larger format). Here’s that last black and white Polaroid that I mentioned, from the pack of Polapan 100 Type 664 film that Mrs. Deane sent me.

Austin in Morning Light, Essex, VT, 2007
© Shane Lavalette

Read more here and here.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Linked on Things Magazine, Polaroid’s ZINK technology takes us one step closer to a modern day Land Camera, complete with a digital sensor and built-in printer. This is what it’s looking like.

Here’s a little science from the Polaroid website:

The patented ZINK Paper is an advanced composite material with embedded yellow, magenta and cyan dye crystals, activated with 200 million heat pulses, in 30 seconds, in a single pass. With 100 billion crystals in a 2×3” print, the paper is 100% inkless. A ZINK-enabled printer uses heat to activate and colorize these crystals. Because there is no ink, every ZINK-enabled device has the unique benefits of being small, simple, elegant, and eco-friendly.

Watch a demo of the ZINK “on the go” printer on Engadget.

Does technology make anyone else sad?

Popularity: 22% [?]