GeekBox

Massive Photo Archive

I've been meaning to post about this since I first saw it.

Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.

Indiana University's Digital Library Program and the Indiana University Archives invite you to explore what Cushman saw. Here you can view his photographs as well as read contextual information about Cushman's life and work.

Definitely start with their highlights section. You can also search through the collection using a fairly extensive set of metadata about the slides or browse by location etc.

What is interesting is that even though he wasn't necessarily the most impressive photographer from an artistic or technical standpoint, he did start using color slide film fairly early, he consistently took a lot of pictures and he documented them better than most people. The photos sat around for a while in the university's archives for many years. It's only with some historical distance that these seemingly pedestrian photos started to take on some significance.

From a personal perspective, I like looking at the pictures of places that I've been to or lived in - it is fascinating to see what life looked like to an ordinary person. We start to remember the past through movies and books of professionally taken images. This is the past unfiltered. Search for "haight" and look at the pictures of "hippies" on the Haight in 1967. While there is certainly a ce plus ça change, ce plus c'est le même chose feeling for anyone who has visited the Haight in the last 35 years, I do notice that the shoes are different. It's a small detail, but despite all the kids that want to dress like it is still the '60s or the '70s, they wouldn't get that detail right. Movies from that time period tended to over-exaggerate the outfits.

The collection isn't exhaustive enough to really represent the whole of what was - in this case there are only 29 pictures in the series - but it does provide a glimpse that is inarguably representative of a particular day and place, in a way that a staged movie or carefully composed professional photo never is.

[via MetaFilter]

More on Shirky

I'm sure that I must have come across Clay Shirky a few times in the past, but I've suddenly realized in a big way that he understands the growth and death of communities on the net better than most people. Well actually he just understands people and technology, period, better than most people. I recently wrote an entry here about an essay by Tom Coates called (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything.... Looking back I see that he was playing off on an earlier essay by Shirky called Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing.

After having read a dozen or so more of Shirky's essays, I have to say that this man gets it more than most people ever will. He simply looks at what has happened and reasons what will happen from that. Not what should happen. History repeats itself over and over. Human nature is surprisingly consistent. If you pay attention to it, you will notice patterns and be able to predict what will happen. The problem comes from people predicting what they want to happen, which often flies in the face of human nature.

His opinions on VoIP, grid computing, the music industry, and the size of communities are all very worthwhile. Actually everything of his that I've read so far clicks with this sort of sense of something that you've understood intuitively but maybe haven't put into words. At worst, some of it merely seems well reasoned, but not necessarily earth-shattering.

Highly recommended.