I cam across a couple of interesting news items related to photographs. The first, is newly released images of the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fire that destroyed the city of San Francisco. The six images were taken by photography innovator Frederick Ives several months after the April quake.
Ives took the slides as part of an invention that would allow you to see the images in 3D. The “Kromgram” came out in 1907 and cost about $1000 in today’s dollars. The device never caught on, but the Smithsonian believes are some of the first true color images of the disaster. Ives is credited with inventing the half-tone process used by newspapers. Another article says,
The process he used to produce colour images, creating separate slides for each primary colour in the light spectrum, required a long exposure and therefore was not conducive to capturing people and objects in motion.
You can see more images in this Telegraph article.
The next news item, I thought had to do with a Lady Gaga song.
It comes from a CNN article about a blog called “Born This Way“. Los Angeles-based DJ Paul V. asked friends to submit childhood pictures that display their gay or lesbian tendencies. He then compiled the images in the blog and accepts submissions. In fact, the banner on the blog states:
A photo/essay project for gay adults (of all genders) to submit childhood pictures and stories (roughly ages 2 to 12), reflecting memories & early beginnings of their innate LGBTQ selves
I thought this was interesting. Do you think a child’s behavior or even a pose in a photograph can or will determine if that child is gay or will become a gay adult? If a boy puts on his mother’s shoes or a tom-boy dresses in boy’s clothes…does that mean they might be gay? I’ll leave this open to your comments…
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