Wednesday, March 19, 2008

BLOGS THAT I'VE STUMBLED ONTO...

While searching through Google and other search engines in search of related vernacular site, dealers and bloggers and stumbled across these listed below.

To check our other blogs that we have listed previously, browse through our previous posts.

These are new ones we came across and feel that there worth giving a look at, and if anyone has any further suggestions or additional blogs, please feel free to post them.

Thanks and enjoy

Blogs:
Vernacular Photography

(http://www.squidoo.com/vernacularphoto)


Random Camera Blog (http://randomphoto.blogspot.com/2007/09/vernacular-photography.html)

I SHOOT FILM

I SHOOT FILM plate2


Ephemera

(http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2008/04/vernacular-phot.html)

Sewingwomen








Lost and Found Photos.com

(http://photosdie.typepad.com/lostandfoundblog/

Lost and Found Photos

(http://photosdie.typepad.com/)


Swapatorium: A Journey Through Junkland


(http://swapatorium.typepad.com/)


042208masks



Vernacular Photography Enthusiast (http://www.squidoo.com/VernacularPhotography)

Other People's Pictures

Article on NPR.ORG: All things considered. (June 2004)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1964382


At New York's Chelsea Flea Market, collectors sort through boxes and albums full of discarded snapshots: a black-and-white photo of a yawning girl, a Polaroid of a couple embracing at the kitchen table, a yellowed print of a group of Nazis smiling in the snow. Kaleidoscopic slices of life, these abandoned photos can sometimes bring in hundreds of dollars a piece.

Other People's Pictures, a new documentary from filmmakers Lorca Shepperd and Cabot Philbrick, examines the lives and minds of nine people who collect these lost and discarded photographs. One man searches only for "male affection" snapshots of men embracing or holding hands. Another looks for pictures that simply tell an unfinished story. An Israeli immigrant who lost family members in the Holocaust and whose own family album was destroyed years ago, owns what he calls a "banality of evil" collection: photos of Nazis in everyday situations.

NPR's Andrea Seabrook speaks to Shepperd and Philbrick about their film and the people obsessed with the snapshots of strangers.

76 Kisses


76 Kisses at the City Reliquary Museum & Civic Organization
Snapshots from the collection of Lori Becker and David E. Brown
February 1 - March 30

http://cityreliquary.org/news/archives/000473.shtml

The City Reliquary presents a Valentine of Kisses

A soldier’s parting kiss, a summer kiss at a picnic, a midnight kiss on New Year’s Eve, a lusty kiss not meant to be seen. Luckily, a camera was present to capture all of them.

76 KISSES, an exhibition of snapshots at The City Reliquary, presents an intimate and compelling look at the kiss. Just in time for Valentine’s Day!

The carefully selected vintage photographs comprise a catalog of the kiss. Each photo captures some essential quality of love and affection—the unguarded moment when two people, overcome with emotion, find their lips meeting another’s.

The photos span a full century, from a risqué and intimate smooch in a Victorian parlor to a 1990s Polaroid of a New York couple at a dance, with its super-saturated color and long embrace the very opposite of the 19th century image. The core of the collection are snapshots from the 1930s through the 1960s, widely considered the Golden Age of the American snapshot. 76 KISSES showcases the inventive, intuitive, and surprising explosion of creativity that small cameras and fast film brought.

The photographs in 76 KISSES come from Lori Baker and David E. Brown’s collection of more than 200 vintage snapshots of kisses. They have been culled from flea markets, junk shops, photo albums, yard sales, eBay, and chance finds. Baker and Brown estimate that they have looked at approximately 800,000 photographs in the search of these pictures.

Vernacular photography–that is, snapshots–has become the newest and most democratic frontier of photography collecting. Thousands of people have found art, beauty, and meaning amid billions of discarded snapshots. Vernacular photographs have been the subject of several major exhibitions, including the National Gallery’s “The Art of the American Snapshot” (opening at the Amon Carter Museum on February 16), Thomas Walther’s “Other Pictures” at the Metropolitan Museum, and “Snapshots” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Snapshots and their collectors have been the subject of an award-winning documentary (Other People’s Pictures) and created numerous books, including Babette Hines’s Photobooth and Mark Michaelson’s Least Wanted.

76 KISSES is on view at the City Reliquary from February 1 to March 31, 2008. The opening reception is Friday, February 8, from 7 to 9 pm. The City Reliquary is open Saturdays and Sundays from 12 pm to 6 pm and by appointment.

Now is Then



NOW IS THEN at the Newark Museum
Snapshots from the Maresca Collection
February 13 - May 11, 2008

http://www.newarkmuseum.org/


View vintage images from America’s golden age of snapshot photography.
From early portraits to contemporary voyeurism, the 150 works in this exciting exhibition chart the evolution of snapshot art and form an extraordinary document of American life in the first half of the 20th century.




Saturday, March 1, 2008

"Polaroid abandons instant photography"

NY Times Article, Feb. 8, 2008

It was a wonder in its time: A camera that spat out photos that developed themselves in a few minutes as you watched. You got to see them where and when you took them, not a week later when the prints came back from the drugstore.

But in a day when nearly every cellphone has a digital camera in it, “instant” photography long ago stopped being instant enough for most people. So today, the inevitable end of an era came: Polaroid is getting out of the Polaroid business.

The company, which stopped making instant cameras for consumers a year ago and for commercial use a year before that, said today that as soon as it had enough instant film manufactured to last it through 2009, it would stop making that, too. Three plants that make large-format instant film will close by the end of the quarter, and two that make consumer film packets will be shut by the end of the year, Bloomberg News reports.

The company, which will concentrate on digital cameras and printers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001 and was acquired by a private investment company in 2005. It started in 1937 making polarized lenses for scientific and military applications, and introduced its first instant camera in 1948.

The Lede remembers fondly how magical it was to watch the image gradually manifest itself from the chemical murk right there in your hand. But truth be told, the Lede’s own scuffed Polaroid SX-70 camera, which used to get regular use in all manner of situations, from producing a quick step-by-step primer on how to do the Ickey Shuffle to documenting a problem with a house he was buying that cropped up the day before the closing, hasn’t come out of its cabinet drawer in years.

Loyal users take heart, though — Polaroid said it would happily license the technology to other manufacturers should they want to go on supplying the niche market with film after 2009.