Summer in the Seventies with Andy Warhol

This is your chance to relive the summer vacations of an icon– and hey, it’ll only cost you $85,000,000. Andy Warhol’s Montauk estate ↑, a 30-acre oceanfront compound with a historic equestrian farm, where the most famous faces of the 1970s went to escape, is now up for sale. But before you go checking your bank balance…

Backstage with the Real “Almost Famous” Queen of Groupies

If someone told you their earliest romantic encounters were with David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger, you’d either slap them or roll your eyes. Unless that someone was Bebe Buell, of course. In the 1970s, the American model just so happened to be in the right place, at the right time, well, countless times, solidifying…

Wish You Were Here: Saugatuck Art Colony, 1949

I‘m currently yearning for the itching of grass on my bare legs, for that awful predicament of having nothing to do but lounge around in the sun all day until I think to myself: “maybe I could take up painting for the summer”. This photostory I found buried in the LIFE Archives, labelled “Saugatuck Art…

The Circus Girls, 1949

There’s something about this photo story that I dug out of the LIFE archives that makes me want to pack up my website and join the circus. Shot by the acclaimed photographer Nina Leen in 1949, we find our sassy subculture of circus girls in Sarasota, Florida, dubbed “the home of the American circus”. You…

15 Fabulous Frida Kahlo Moments in Rarely Seen Photographs

As a huge Frida Kahlo fan myself, I thought I’d seen just about all the best photographs of the iconic artist, but today I stumbled upon an enormous archive of personal snaps on the Casa Azul tumblr site. It may not be her estate’s official Tumblr, but it sure feels like I’ve been flicking through…

It’s about Time we Reinvented the Autochrome

Show me an Instagram filter that can do this and I’ll personally take you out to dinner so that we can become lifelong friends. Autochrome is a dead art – a secret recipe – if you will, that has been long lost to the modern world, left uncharted by 21st century technology and yet to be…

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Opium Underworlds

I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, so if you’re reluctant to step inside the world of 19th century junkies, I suggest you close the door and choose something a little lighter and brighter from our menu. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here myself, stockpiling antique photographs that have survived from the Opium Age…

The Vault

Found Photographs of Perfect American Road Trips, Fifty Years Too Late

Trailer parks just don’t look like this anymore! What I wouldn’t give to go back 50 years and re-do the American road trip just like I picture it in my mid-century kodachrome dreams. Today I found a fabulous Flickr account full of old slides and photographs found at estate sales and garage sales by a nostalgic…

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The Forgotten LGBT Queen of Paris and Her Secret Masonic Temple

She was the kind of woman who never belonged to anyone but herself. At least, when it came to love. But for Natalie Clifford Barney, life overflowed with colour, creativity, and passion in Paris’ Left Bank during one of city’s most romantic periods. Think of her as a lesser-known Gertrude Stein, albeit one who curated…

A Photographer’s Forgotten Muse on the French Riviera

There was definitely something about Renée. When the legendary French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue met her while strolling the streets of Paris in 1930, he fell in love instantly. Tall, chic and hiding coquettishly under a wide elegant hat, he nicknamed her the ‘parasol’. Together they embarked on what Lartigue remembers as an “eternal vacation”, a dreamlike two-year holiday in the…