 Brooklyn Museum |
 New York Public Library |
Are you a Commons fan living in New York? Join the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library to celebrate The Commons at their Common Ground event in Brooklyn this weekend, part of the Target First Saturdays series.
Flickr Commons uploads include many historical images–and historical images include many awesome hats–hats as costume, hats as uniform, hats as protective gear, and hats as fashion. Here are some of the finest examples.
| This one at least looks lighweight–straw and flowers. |  George Eastman House |
| The classic Australian hat–Aussie Olympic teams still wear this style in the opening ceremonies some years. |  Australian War Memorial |
| A palmetto hat she made herself–probably a very practical solution to the need for cool headwear in Florida. |  State Library and Archives of Florida |
| Evelyn Nesbit’s eyes, and the photo itself, all seem focused on that extravagant plume. |  Library of Congress |
| The sideways cap–it isn’t just for 1980s rapper wannabes. |  Library of Virginia |
| The pin on this 1930s headwrap commemorates the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. |  State Library of New South Wales |
| Mrs. Burleson’s huge hat marks her as a special leader of the suffrage parade. But the other women have some fine millinery too. |  Library of Congress |
| The frayed edges of this hat match the frayed layers of Cody’s outfit. |  George Eastman House |
| Feather plumes like these endangered several species of birds. |  Library of Congress |
| Russell was an artist, but that’s no beret. |  Smithsonian Institution |
| The exuberant hat matches Mrs. Stulle’s smile and attitude–she ran a matchmaking service for widows and widowers. |  Library of Congress |
| Gardner’s hat marks him as a Nantucket eccentric, even while his suit and expression are quite sober. |  Nantucket Historical Association |
| European immigrant women at Ellis Island sometimes brought with them the elaborate headwear of their home regions. |  New York Public Library |
| Helene Dutrieu was the fourth woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license; she also raced cars and motorcycles. This makeshift helmet seems to have extra layers of felt for ear protection. |  Library of Congress |
| A ballet dancer’s costume, heavily beaded and embroidered. |  State Library of New South Wales |
| The clean lines of the sailor’s cap match the Portuguese actress’s trademark bangs and eyebrows. |  Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian |
| Today, we generally only see boater hats at political conventions–but they were once ordinary daywear for men, especially on hot summer days in Tennesee. |  Smithsonian Institution |
| One of the most popular and commented photos in the Commons features a serious boy wearing a serious hat. |  Library of Congress |
The Smithsonian Institution’s brand-new Secretary, Wayne Clough, discusses the prospects of the 163-year-old largest museum and research complex in the world — including the long-term future of science and education.
The Smithsonian asked last week if the tweeples following them on Twitter could identify these newborns. They did!
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo welcomed two burrowing owl chicks Aug. 2—the first hatching of this species at the Zoo in 30 years. The chicks’ parents, a 5-year-old male and 4-year-old female, have been at the Zoo since June 2006.
The last time burrowing owls successfully bred at the National Zoo was in the late 1970s. A recent population-management plan recommended breeding the Zoo’s current adult pair. The chicks are with their parents in the Zoo’s Bird House. Currently, there is semi-transparent filter paper covering their exhibit, providing the chicks with privacy. As they become more comfortable with their new surroundings, the paper will slowly be removed.
Archival footage brought to you by the Walt Disney Imagineers. Hat tip to the Getty Museum for this great web find. I got sucked into watching the whole series just now of time-lapse photography of the building of Disneyland in Southern California, circa the 1950s.
This is your weekly update of important events and notes about the institutions that partake in the Flickr Commons.
Need more baby animals fix? Look no farther than Flickr and the National Zoo’s photostream.
01 August – My Fair Lady at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House, a Lerner and Loewe classic.
Now through 18 October – In Focus: Making a Scene at the Getty Museum. Theatricality and photography: “the images in this exhibition are inspired by art history, literature, religion, and mainstream media.”
13 August – The New York Public Library partners with the NYC chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association to host screenings of HBO’s series on Alzheimer’s Disease.
One of my favorite sets in The Commons is the New York Public Library’s Japan / Kusakabe Kimbei, one hundred hand-colored albumen prints from around the 1880s. It covers a wide range of classic tourist scenes of Japan, and has provided me long hours of research entertainment since last December when the NYPL joined the Flickr Commons. On a recent trip to Tokyo I was happy to upload a few more photos of the scenes “now,” and excitedly visited an exhibition of a Kimbei album held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Travel photography spread out from Europe in the mid-1800s, reaching Japan with the arrival of Felice Beato in 1863. Beato leveraged highly skilled colorists from Japan’s domestic printing and advertising industry to add life to his black and white prints, creating works of art unique from other parts of the world. His apprentices spun off their own studios. One of these was Kusakabe Kimbei, who opened up shop in 1881. Within a few years, Kusakabe had a large array of photographs available by catalog: individually or in large, lacquer-bound volumes. The volumes offered a sampling of scenes from around Japan. These volumes remain in private and museum collections around the world, and NYPL has a fine example.
Added to Flickr Commons, NYPL’s uniquely provide a great public window on Japanese tourism history. They were taken at popular travel destinations such as Nikko or Kyoto, in remote locations along the Tokaido road, and in and around the foreign settlement at Yokohama. With a bit of web searching and cross-referencing — especially with the wonderfully annotated collection at Nagasaki University — more precise dates and locations can be provided for many of the photographs, and they can moreover be understood in context with each other.
For example, this photo of the Grand Hotel on Yokohama’s waterfront:
The clues in online archives at Nagasaki University and the University of Washington, as well as photos hosted by Mitsubishi Electric and the Kanagawa Museum of Cultural History, send the camera spinning around the hotel and up the canal over a span of years. Finally, this leads to not only the location of the hotel, which is described on many Japanese sites, but to the actual positioning of the camera in the NYPL photo.
It’s a treacherous sport that can take several hours per photograph, but is rewarding more often than not. Recently a commenter in one Yokohama photograph wondered where it might have been taken. A quick look at a David Rumsey map of Yokohama and a Nagasaki University image provided the name of the bridge in the photo. Back and forth with other folks on Flickr leads to an understanding of where to take the photo today, and what it might look like.
Creating a “now and then” coupling of photos is truly satisfying, and always educational. Hunting down a photo that someone else has taken is great fun. But the true way to honor these travel photographs is to visit the spots yourself, and perhaps take a “now” shot, as I discovered this on a recent trip to Tokyo:
(This one’s not a Kusakabe photograph.)
The discussion of the Yokohama photo happened after I got back, so it’s on the list to visit next time.
Coincidentally, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is running a series of exhibits this summer titled Traveling Photography (Tabi suru Shashin). The first installment features, among other images, 50 Kusakabe Kimbei prints from an album in the museum’s collection. I thought it would be nice to see them in person and look for images I recognize from NYPL, Nagasaki, and other collections. What I didn’t expect, though, was how utterly stunning they look. Compared with scanned, digital copies, the beauty of museum’s physical artifacts was brilliant. They shimmered with life, and their colors had a luminosity missing from normal developed film, and certainly from reproductions made for the exhibit book and even the hard-bound biography printed in 2006.
Now I’m hungry for more, and I hope everyone else is too. I’d love to see a traveling exhibit of Japanese travel photography, akin to the one in Tokyo but paired with “Now” photos from Flickr (I volunteer to take missing photographs, if there’s grant money lying around). It would feature holdings by many institutions — among Flickr Commons participants, at least George Eastman House, the Smithsonian, and the NYPL hold Kimbei photographs, and more likely have other old photos of Japan like the NYPL’s. These works of art need to get on the road, and be gawked at as they were originally intended!
Among the joys of browsing the Commons is finding those photos whose dates are more specific that “circa 1920″ or even “1920″. Here, in celebration of the middle of summer — or winter, as the case may be — are photos from across the Commons, from Julys past …
| Cyclists climb over a closed railway crossing. July 1932, the Tour de France. |
 Nationaal Archief |
| “Revolutionary uprisings in Persia and Mexico threaten civil rebellion”. July 5, 1908, the New York Tribune. |
 The Library of Congress |
| The Dudley Cantrell Band plays at Grace Bros. July 15, 1937, Sydney, Australia. |
 State Library of New South Wales |
| A young bride is prepared by her bridesmaids. July 11, 1970, Nantucket, Massachusetts. |
 Nantucket Historical Association |
| Tom Walton plays the guitar. July 4, 1982, White Springs, Florida. |
 State Library and Archives of Florida |
| The Langley Flyer superstructure is loaded onto a houseboat. July 1903, Widewater, Virginia. |
 DC Public Library |
| Berenice Abbott captures one moment in the city. July 16, 1936, Union Square, New York City. |
 New York Public Library |
| Seven testifying scientists pose for a photographer during the Scopes Trial. July 1925, Tennessee. |
 Smithsonian Institution |
| American manufacturers parade on Independence Day. July 4, 1893, Chicago. |
 Brooklyn Museum |
| And Mme Gadriol goes for a ride. July 9, 1899, Luchon, France. |
 Bibliothèque de Toulouse |
Cyanotype is among the earliest of photographic processes, and the examples of its use found in the Commons are all also early. Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype in 1842, and Anna Atkins was its first active practitioner — and perhaps the first female photographer as well. The New York Public Library photograph below is among many of hers held at the NYPL and available in the Commons on Flickr.
You can read a basic description of the cyanotype process on Wikipedia . Mike Ware is among modern improvers on the process. The Flickr group Cyanotypes is devoted to new examples of this very old technique.
| Himanthalia lorea (1843-53) |  New York Public Library |
| Elevated view of the flooded river and West End, Brisbane, 1893 |  State Library of Queensland, Australia |
| People indoors, Lysekil, Sweden (1880s) |  Swedish National Heritage Board |
| Jetties Beach, c. 1890s |  Nantucket Historical Association |
Finding cyanotypes — or photographs of any particular type or process — in the Commons, particularly as it grows larger, depends on terminology being in the photographs descriptions or tags … in the language you look for it in. If you’re browsing the Commons or commenting on a Commons photograph, take a moment to add search terms to tags.
