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Category / Editor’s Picks

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CLXXXVIII)

1. Photoshop from the 1930s Beauty retouching has been around a lot longer than we thought. The side-by-side images above from the early 1930s show what a glamour portrait looked like before and after manual ‘Photoshopping.’ Photographer George Hurrell shot the portrait of actress Joan Crawford as a publicity shot for the 1931 film Laughing Sinners. A retoucher named James…

The Anti-Nazi Teen Gang that Beat Up Hitler Youth and Danced to Jazz

A band of adolescent music-lovers, swing dancers and snappy dressers– not exactly the type you’d expect to take on the Nazi Hitler Youth. But in pre-WWII Germany, the Nazi regimentation of society inadvertantly gave rise to massive teenage street gangs who beat up the Hitler Youth, tagged anti-Nazi graffiti at train stations– and listened to…

The 1930s Secret Cambridge Club of Rooftop Climbers

As night fell on Cambridge University in the 1930s, a dapper gang of undergraduate students regularly met in secret to climb up historical buildings, illegally exploring their campus via its rooftops and façades. They were known as the “Night Climbers of Cambridge”, immortalised in a cult guide book on the forbidden practice, anonymously published by the daredevil you see in…

The Compendium of Awful Library Books, Made by Awesome Librarians

When we think of librarians, stereotypes have taught us to think of ladies wearing sinister pointy glasses who sit there and shush us when fits of uncontrollable giggles comes over oneself while reading up on the complete mind-numbing history of something or another. But today, I stumbled upon the secret world of the librarian in the…

River Rockets of the Soviet Space Age

It looks like a prop from Star Wars doesn’t it? Trust the Soviets to have the coolest abandoned stuff lying around. During the cold war period and into the 1980s, this rusting behemoth was once part of a fleet of vessels which rose out of the water at high speed and were considered the heroes of the Russian riverways.…

Stop Everything, Check out these Miniature Mediocre Motels

Among my favourite things are mid-century American kitsch and teeny tiny stuff. Put the two together and you basically send me into overload. I’m not exactly sure why run-down vintage motels fascinate me so; perhaps that seedy glamour of America is much more appealing to a European road-tripper like me who hasn’t stayed in enough of them yet to have encountered bed bugs. But those pastel…

Art of the Damned: Sculptures made from Abandoned Spaces

Ian Strange isn’t your average sculptor. He doesn’t work with stone, metal, ceramics, wood or plaster to create his masterpieces. He uses abandoned buildings. From covering condemned facades in spray-paint or cutting out gaping holes in the roofs of homes destined for demolition to wrapping a historical building with 600 sq meters of gold wallpaper, Stange has used…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CLXXXIV)

1. The House Donald Trump couldn’t Buy Vera Coking’s Atlantic City, New Jersey, home, which Donald Trump attempted to acquire through eminent domain to build limousine parking for his casino (photo by Jack Boucher/Historic American Buildings Survey). Find the full article on Holdouts: The Solitary Resisters of Real Estate, found on Hyperallergic. 2. Liveable Manholes…

All the Colour they Left Behind

Man oh man, do I need to get a look at this photographer’s address book. Mattias Haker is up there with the best abandoned photographers I’ve seen. And I like that he’s not shy with the saturation, highlighting all those vibrant colours that were left to fade over time. You can tell he spends a lot of…

The Swedish Subculture Hoarding More 1950s American Cars than the USA

I started this article because I was researching a Scandinavian subculture of ‘greasers’ said to be responsible for Sweden having amassed more restored American 1950s cars than the United States itself has today. The “Raggare” movement, which emerged from a post-war youth counterculture mainly in Sweden and parts of Norway, is known for its undying love of vintage American…

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