Have you seen THIS? Found photos + History + Social Network = Discovery
Geoffrey Batchen's essay about the wonderful Lost & Found Project (Japan) can be found HERE. He writes:
"This is also why we look at such pictures, always with fascination, and even when, as here, there is nothing much to see, nothing but a residue of the desires of others. Like them, we too take photographs in order to deny the possibility of death, to stop time in its tracks and us with it. But that very same photograph, by placing us indisputably in the past, is itself a kind of mini-death sentence, a prediction of our ultimate demise at some future time."
Batchen is one of my all time favorites.
Here is a collection of mug shots from TBW books and Paul Schiek.
From website: "The book features 20 duotone plates of men re-photographed from 1950s-era mug shots found by the artist’s friend Mike Brodie in an abandoned Georgia prison. Brodie gifted the mug shots to Schiek, who then edited the original cache of hundreds down to a select few, cropped the images to remove all official documentary references while leaving stains, staple marks, tears and other signs of age, and enlarged the prints on highly reflective chromogenic paper to imbue them with personal and cultural meaning beyond their original purpose."
This is a story about a kid buying a camera and finding a photo of a deceased uncle he never knew. . . The story can be found in the Los Angeles Times HERE. And in the Digital Journal HERE.
"But the more time passes, the more it seems significant. One thing that has also struck me — I put this on my Facebook account, and the people's reaction to it has really kind of been overwhelming. It really moves people, and the more it moves them, I think the more it moves me."
Great quote.
You can order the posters seen in this image from the Lost & Found Project site.
Lost & Found Project is a beautiful site and project salvaging photos lost and damaged in the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan. Take some time reading about the project on the site. Here is a little piece from the introduction:
"We all take photographs. A few special ones are cherished, and the rest forgotten. We take pictures when we are having fun, when we want immortalize a moment shared with another person. The photographs you see here were also taken under those circumstances. The depth of emotion might vary from snap to snap, but each one captures a point in time that somebody wanted to keep.
What are we supposed to feel and think when we look at these pictures?
Should we be happy that they were found at all, or sad that they will never be returned to their owners? Or should we simply mourn for the dead? The more I struggle to find answers, the more missing pieces I seem to find."
I've slowly been amassing photos of women holding cameras. I'm usually interested in photos that do not look like they would go in a snapshot book. What does this mean? I'll be writing more about this.
Happy Birthday Ifoundyourcamera.net. Great advice: from the most recent post (Feb 3) below:
"If you see a set of orphan photos from your city, contact a local reporter so we can work together to gain greater exposure and raise the chances of the photos being returned. Share our website through Facebook or Twitter and other social networking sites. Blog about us. Email the link to friends and family. The more people we have reading, the better we can increase our chances of success."
teacher, grad student
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