The Day the Black Cats Invaded Hollywood

I’m not really a fan of cats per say (because they’re totally evil creatures unlike dogs) but I think these photos taken at a black cat audition in Hollywood in 1963 are just brilliant. They also raise many questions concerning the sanity of cat-owners in the sixties.

The Forgotten Villas of Italy

Thomas Jorion has been exploring abandoned buildings since he was a child and he’s one of those lucky people who managed to make a career out of it. His series, Forgotten Palaces, is mostly comprised of extraordinary villas taken in northern Italy which have been left to decay for a variety of reasons from financial ruin and…

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The “Unknown” Photographer who Documented the Cool Kats of Mid-Century Mali

At a New York art exhibition in the early 90s, three black & white photographs hung on the white walls, credited to a photographer “Unknown“. The portraits of fashionably dressed people and families taken between 1940 and the early sixties were actually the work of a nationally renowned photographer in Mali. Outside of his country however, Seydou Keita…

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Search for the 235 Anonymous Souls of Studio “Foto Americain”

Ernst Lalleman doesn’t make friends like the rest of us. “I was mesmerized by the quality, as if I could hear the voices of these people talking to me from the past,” he told us about the collection of 235 portrait negatives he found so many years ago, and have been his silent companions ever…

A Bohemian’s Guide to Greenwich Village, New York, a Century Ago

I‘ve been digging through my fair share of New York’s archives while researching Don’t be a Tourist in New York and fell upon the photographs of a woman who, almost 100 years ago exactly, was doing the very same thing as I: seeking out the city’s local and off-beat gems. Oh ho, let’s go to…

A Hidden Suffragists Portrait Studio Discovered in a New York Attic

In a forgotten attic, sealed up for decades, the life’s work of a photographer for the Suffragist movement has been found, and it all started with the changing of a lightbulb. David J. Whitcomb, 43 year-old lawyer bought a building in Geneva, New York for his practice and was doing some electrical maintenance when he…

The Uncomfortable Art of Falling

You can almost feel the pain from this picture, can’t you? Perhaps an uncomfortable reminder of some close calls of your own in the shower. This is a photograph we’ve seen doing the rounds over the years on the internet, lingering uncredited in the depths of Tumblr and pasted onto memes over and over. Without…

The Man who Documented the First Americans

His lifework documenting the North American native was once hailed as “the most ambitious enterprise in publishing since the production of the King James Bible.” Today I found his photographs deep in the Flickr’s archives. At the height of Edward Curtis’s career, he had one of the most powerful bankers of his era, J.P. Morgan, personally financing him.…

Before Photoshop, There Was the Disturbing Art of Spirit Photography

Ever since technology has allowed people to capture pictures, photographers have been using photo-editing techniques to trick people. One of the most fascinating early examples is spirit photography. William Hope (c) National Media Museum Spirit photography was a trend in which a photographer edited pictures to make ghosts or spirit-like figures appear alongside the human…

Living in a Digital Castle with our Photographer du Jour

Once upon a time, there was a secret realm in the depths of the Web. A world of Y2K Joan of Arcs, medieval steeds and mysterious realms. A kingdom born from the brain of Swedish digital collage artist Helena Blomqvist that feels both ethereal and familiar, but where women are not longer damsels in distress…