Metaboston

Finding Photos of Hiroshima in Watertown

When the owner of the Deluxe Town Diner found an old suitcase on the street he opened it and found some surprising images.

Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that they ended up in a pile of garbage?

The man who found the photographs, Don Levy (no relation) lives and works in Watertown, a working-class suburb of Boston. Levy owns and operates the Deluxe Town Diner. It’s almost two o’clock in the afternoon and the lunch crowd is thinning out. He sits down for the first time that day and tucks into a Reuben sandwich, fries and a glass of water. He is wearing brown corduroy trousers, a dark blue pullover and horn rimmed glasses. His grey hair is cut short, with a fashionable tuft sticking straight up on top.

“When I opened the suitcase that night I knew what I was looking at almost right away,” he says softly. “Some of the prints had 'Hiro', short for Hiroshima, written on their edges.” He takes a bite of the sandwich. “I felt pleased to have found them but at the same time I was saddened by what I was looking at.”  (Image:  International Center for Photography) (via Kottke)

Audubon's Early Drawings

Harvard has its collection of early drawings by John James Audubon online as he worked toward becoming the artist he is now known to be.  The drawings are also available in the book Audubon: Early Drawings.

Buy:  Audubon: Early Drawings.  (Image:  Crested Mergansers by Audubon from the Harvard collection).

Photographing East Somerville

Somerville is interested in images of East Somerville to be featured in Interpreting East Somerville:  A Community Photographic Exhibition. You can enter up until October 20.

You are invited to be part of an exciting new photographic art experiment!

Interpreting East Somerville takes one neighborhood as it's subject, and invites you to bring your perspective (and your camera!) and interpret what you see and how you see it. The possibilities are as wide as your eye.

people • discoveries • houses • changes • streets • gardens
motion • family • celebrations • shapes • lights • mysteries
colors • miracles • sidewalks • problems • signs • secrets
friends • lines • events • windows • you • them • interpretations

Show the world. Show your world. Deadline to enter is October 20, 2008.

Chosen entries will be exhibited throughout Somerville City Hall as part of a group show beginning November 6, 2008.

Hingham Wild Turkeys

Nice photos by Scott Alpert of wild turkeys at World's End in Hingham.  (Image:  Scott Alpert)

Eileansiar's Photos of Harvard Square

Eileansiar has a huge and interesting collection of images in and around Harvard Square with great little details of the neighborhood.

Videos too.  (Above, cool time lapse video of people lining up in Harvard Yard for a ritualistic touch of the John Harvard statue's toe).

Don't Photograph H.P. Lovecraft's Tomb!

While Providence's North Burial Ground has opened up to an art exhibit, as we wrote about recently, Providence's Swan Point Cemetery is not a friendly spot for visitors coming to see horror writer and Providence native H. P. Lovecraft's monument and perhaps photograph it.

“Matt sez, "One of my favorite writers, Caitlin R. Kiernan, was the subject of verbal abuse, profanity and homophobic remarks from some sort of security guard when she and her companion went to visit H.P. Lovecraft's grave. The guard attempted to make them delete all of the photographs they had taken, despite the absence of any policy forbidding it. Are cameras like catnip for abusive, power-mad rent-a-cops now?"

((Image: H.P. Lovecraft's grave:  Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike photo: StrangeInterlude, Flickr).

Disappearance of Polaroid Film Sparks Dismay and Hyperbole Among Photographers

The extinction of Polaroid film by the once-great Cambridge (now Waltham) company sparked dismay in photographers who loved the film like John Waters "who’s shot a Polaroid of each person who’s come into his apartment since 1992—friends, interviewers, deliverymen, everyone."   

And it also drove at least one photographer to a somewhat extreme comparison:  "It’s the worst disaster since Hiroshima,” shouts Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who shoots large-format Polaroid Type 809." 

Those photos of Paris Hilton or Katie Couric  just won't be the same.  That is a disaster.  Like Hiroshima.

'The Soiling of Old Glory,' Stanley Forman and Busing in Boston

A fascinating story on a photograph by Stanley Forman that epitomized the bad old Boston in the days of busing.

"On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston's Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977."

The article connects the photo to other iconic photographs.  Another interesting aspect, this isn't even Forman's most disturbing picture.

A Fitting Memorial to Gary Gygax at MIT

MIT students erected a giant black 20-sided die in memorial to recently deceased Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax.  This contemplative shot by Eric Shmiedl in MIT's newspaper seems like an illustration of the importance of personal passion and the temptations of the mainstream world.  MIT should really have a permanent 20-sided die memorial installed there.

Appreciating the Polaroid Legacy As Polaroid Fades Away

A nice appreciation of Polaroid as a local and cultural institution.  Best of all:  the photo story above by Waltham photographer Michael Blanchard that lets the employees talk about what the company meant to them.

Polaroid has had a long, daunting decline since its glory days in the '60s and '70s. Yet even now, seven years after declaring bankruptcy, there are those who remember when it was the Apple of its day: feisty, ubiquitous, pioneering. The Polaroid Land Camera was like the Mac, with all other consumer cameras PCs. There was the same sense of engineering superiority and cultural cachet...

The then-Cambridge-based Polaroid uniquely stood at the intersection of science, business, and art. Its founder, Edwin Land, held 533 patents, second only to Thomas Alva Edison in US history.

***

The company had a knack for innovative marketing. Sir Laurence Olivier was signed up to introduce its SX-70 camera. A series of 300 ads in the late '70s and early '80s that featured James Garner and Mariette Hartley was in everything but name the best sitcom on network television between the end of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and the arrival of "Seinfeld."

Polaroid film disappears in an age of digital images

Polaroid film disappears in an age of digital images.  The magic of almost-instant photographs has faded with the digital camera's screen and the film for Polaroid cameras will soon become a rare commodity.

" Polaroid, based in Waltham, Mass., is shutting down factories in the United States and abroad as the company abandons the technology that made the instant photo possible, the Boston Globe reported yesterday. The company will cease production of its film by next year."

Boston-themed coaster and merchandise store debuts in Harvard Square

While used bookstores are facing problems in Davis Square, an entrepreneur with a new Harvard Square store, Boston Coasters, focused on Boston-centered drink coasters and other Boston-themed mugs, mouse pads, and other items is more optimistic.

'"Coasters are what started everything," Brian Beaucher says, his arms outstretched in his five-week-old store meticulously lined with Boston-emblazoned merch. "The idea just came out of the blue." Coasters and their smooth-surfaced brethren cleanly sport photos by area artists, including Mike Ritter and Saul Blumenthal, with strikingly familiar locales like MBTA signage, views of Fenway Park or an antique map of Jamaica Plain."

Coasters may have paved the way but the messenger bags, particularly this one with a Back Bay station sign modified with grafitti, are what caught our eyes.

Maps of Boston exhibit at the BPL

Maps of Boston exhibit at the BPL.  The maps come from the donated collection of Norman Leventhal, developer of the Boston Harbor Hotel,  including this map that shows the effects of the 1872 fire.

"In this journalistic presentation, the city is viewed from the east with the burned district highlighted by shading. The designated area includes that portion of today's Financial District bordered roughly by Summer, Washington, Milk, and Broad Streets. The most destructive of several great fires that occurred in Boston, the disaster engulfed more than 60 acres of some of the most valuable real estate in the city, destroying 930 businesses valued at approximately $100,000,000 (about $3.5 to $4 billion in current dollars)."

Photographs of the "old" Harvard Square

Photographs of the "old" Harvard Square from the early 1980s. People miss the Tasty but the Mug n Muffin sounds good (image Andy Lee) (via GirlHacker's Random Log)