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January 31, 2008
My stumbling upon the Library of Congress Flickr page is courtesy of Sorrow at Sills Bend, one of the Australian academic bloggers mentioned by Melissa Greg in her draft paper Banal bohemia: Blogging from the ivory tower hot-desk, which I looked at in this post at conversations.
There are images here by some photographers whom I only know by name and from the few black and white images that have been shown or published from the Farm Security Administration archives.
John Vachon, (1914-1975) , Grand Grocery Co., Lincoln, Neb.,1942, colour slide (Flickr
There are 3100 images posted in the Library of Congress' pilot project. The response by the Flickr user community has been overwhelming. This is Web 2 at its best--using historical pictures to broaden and strengthen the public commons of a nation's visual culture. It surely points the way for more historical photo collections to be put on Flickr.
John Vachon, (1914-1975), Worker at carbon black plant, Sunray, Texas,1942, colour transparency (Library of Congress)
Vachon's style of documentary photography is the portrayal of people and places encountered on the street, and judging by the quality of the images, he used a view camera. This is slow, surefooted work based on a window on the world aesthetic that reaches all the way back to Leon Battista Alberti's De pictura (1435), which famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window.
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Gary
this is classy work. Suddenly you see the historical significance of photographic archives.