cameo appearance (10. 629)

Having previously explored the advent and the economy of the medium, we enjoyed this profile of the work of the nineteenth century travelling portrait artist William Bache, whose extensive portfolio of commissioned and sampler silhouettes not only reveal celebrities in profile but reveal the stories of hitherto anonymous sitters. Moreover at a time when fear and risk of communicable disease was rampant in the Americas and Caribbean, which was inclusive of Bache’s territory, the entrepreneur in the undeveloped industry of keepsake avatars distinguished himself from the competition with a device—since defamed for its association with eugenics for its reputed ability for scientifically-sound racial profiling—the physiognotrace which could create a faithful silhouette contact free. More at Hyperallergic at the link above.

9x9 (10. 600)

shepherds bush’s: a collection of vintage photographs from Peter Marshall  

hold my calls, i’m blogging: the life of the dedicated internet caretakers 

clubhouse goals: the creative compound of the Red Rose Girls of fin de siècle sisterly Philadelphia  

dynamo: labelling suggestions notes art: stunning sketches made in the Notes app—via Things Magazine  

clickbait: sixteen seven companies dominating search results—via ibīdem  

the cheops inclination: unbuilt mortuary monuments of London—see previously—inspired by Egyptomania 

i want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose, drinking fresh mango juice: celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Red Dwarf  

cabmen’s shelter fund: the remaining few historical kiosks constructed so livery wouldn’t need to let unattended—see previously

maschere a gattu (10, 580)

Via the always excellent Everlasting Blört, we are directed towards a photographic tour from Alys Tomlinson of the islands of Sardinia, Sicily and the Veneto discovering and documenting the traditional costumes and masks of local festivals, particularly but not exclusively Carnival processions. Many of the most elaborate outfits are part of the parade of Aidomaggiore, in the centre of Sardinia, garb alternating from white on the Monday before Ash Wednesday to black on the last day before Lent with the Sonaggiaos bedecked with cowbells, followed by the Mumutzones dressed as traditional shepherds with a headdress of cork and animal horns in rites celebrating transhumance syncreted with religious pilgrimage.

8x8 (10. 564)

your heart fits me like a glove: Madonna dream diary 

clickword: a Scrabble-like single-player game—via Miss Cellania  

sideshow bob roberts: Simpsons show-runner Josh Weinstein shares a treasury of easter eggs and little known provenances  

arby’s+: more restaurant franchises are turning to subscription plans 

the düsseldorf patient: a fifth individual is cured of HIV after stem-cell therapy  

jpeg: an image only newsletter with click-through surprises—via Waxy  

aurora borealis—at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within your kitchen: an infinite Steamed Hams generated by AI—see previously, see also

air-brush: popular photographer admits his portraits are synthesised by an neural network

images from the collective unconscious: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s archive of dream archetypes

antechamber (10. 550)

The entrance discovered the previous November with little countenance of what lie beneath, on this day in 1923 with twenty invited witnesses, including the expedition sponsor George Herbert, the archaeological team of Howard Carter broke the seal to the inner chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun—being the first to see the treasures and golden sarcophagus of the pharaoh in over three millennia. Ten days later to spare his excavators from toil in the heat of the harsh summer and resume work in Autumn, Carter arranged to have the doorway blocked by tonnes of sand and rubble. This reburial corresponded with reporting from The New York Times that some two hundred and fifty American tourist, including a congressional delegation had boarded the ocean liner S S Adriatic, bound for Luxor to visit the tomb.

halt—who comes there? (10. 506)

Via Strange Company, we are directed towards the Gentle Author’s visit to the Tower of London and privileged to accompany her taking part in the oldest, unbroken military ceremony in the world, a nightly vigil that has taken place through war and plague for over seven centuries, “The Ceremony of the Keys” executed faithfully by the Yeoman Porter, locking the main gates for the night at ten sharp. Photographed by Martin Usborne, granted a rare license and access since at the request of the sovereign the pomp and protocol has never been filmed,  visit Spitalfields Life for more on this ancient ritual, the repetition kept up without stint or remiss.

1337 (10. 408)

A cache of behind-the-scenes Polaroid photographs from the 1995 crime thriller starring Angelina Jolie, Lorraine Bracco and Matthew Lillard film Hackers has been making the internet rounds again recently and is responsible for a whole range of nostalgia, like its debut that corresponded with the rise of the medium itself in the public consciousness and the manifesto of this new frontier authored a decade prior quoted at length: “This is our world now—the world of the electron and the switch… We exist without skin colour, without nationality, without religious bias and yet you call us criminals,” with the admission of guilt for the transgression of curiosity. These snapshots really capture a moment.  Much more at the link above.

6x6 (10. 403)

picket lines: Sunak’s cabinet to implement anti-strike laws to enforce basic services during stoppages  

⭕️ 💯: draw a perfect circle   

camera obscura: the fantastic, “historical” photography apparatuses of Mathieu Stern

all maps at once: interesting and interactive cartographical overlays with the open-source viewing standard  

murphy desk: the flow wall workspace designed by Robert van Embricqs 

this is the sound of a gavel: a litany of concessions in exchange for the House Speakership

cupoty (10. 391)

Courtesy of Kottke, we are enjoying perusing the top one hundred entries for the Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition. There were too many outstanding images to choose from but we especially appreciated those who took the time to consider the toadstool, up-close and intimate, like Barry Webb’s huddle of Cribraria, a type of slime mould. The contest for 2023 opens already in March so plenty of time to get tiny.

7x7 (10. 368)

press pool: NPR station photographers swap memorable images from 2022    

opus cæmenticium: make concrete the Roman way—see also    

pre-bunking: intelligence agencies should engage in more public outreach to fight disinformation    

mallory gallery: top exhibitions of the year    

golden eye: reindeer retinas change colours with the seasons—via Nag on the Lake   

fido: dogs with human names—via Waxy     

mmxxii: year in review—news and journalists

schnappschüsse vom krieg (10. 346)

Born this day in 1922 and still taking pictures, Michelantonio “Tony” Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro immigrated back to the US to avoid being conscripted in Italy and despite already having an impressive photographic portfolio just out of high school his first draft assignment as a photo-documentarian with the Army Signal Corps didn’t pan out and was instead assigned as a scout, fighting in Normandy, Luxembourg and Germany—though still affording opportunities to shoot images, evocative impressions of the front captured in 1944 and 1945. After being discharged, Vaccaro remained in Germany, contributing to the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes and recording life post-war in Frankfurt. Returning to America in the early 1950s, Vaccaro took assignments with Look, Life and Flair magazines as a society photographer, marrying a model for fashion house Marimekko, and after a decades’-long stint teaching at Cooper Union published a selection of his extensive wartime archive, under the imprint Entering Germany: Photographs 1944 – 1949. Click here for a gallery of Vaccaro’s diverse subjects.

8x8 (10. 372)

low-poly: needlepoint designs based on vintage video games—see previously 

ghost mall: visiting a virtually abandoned yet very much open for business shopping centre in New Jersey 

zenosyne: from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (previously here and here)—that feeling that time is getting faster  

digichromatography: a survey of the seconds, the raw files, of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s documentation of the Russian Empire is a study in the development of colour photography—see also  

the pandoravirus: the melting Siberian permafrost is reviving long dormant but viable germs  

q-zone: a racing timeline of the most popular social media from 2003 to the present  

살: South Korea will abandon traditional age-reckoning in favour of an international recognised counting method beginning next year 

akka-arrh: Atari reprises a 1982 arcade game that was never released commercially as it proved too challenging for test-audiences

blue marble (10. 368)

Photographed by one of the crew, likely Harrison Schmitt or Gene Cernan but ever member took turns taking pictures with the Hasselblad camera, of the Apollo XVII mission on its way to the Moon from a distance of just under thirty thousand kilometers on this day in 1972. Backlit and slightly rounded—gibbous and hence the name—from the astronauts’ perspective and after Earthrise only the second whole planet image captured by a human photographer, the Blue Marble is among the most widely reproduced and circulated images in existence, it was received by the public at a moment of increased environmental activism and awareness and helped focus the movement by framing Earth’s uniqueness and vulnerability set against the endless expanse of space. Although recreated by satellite imagining, there have been no crewed excursions since that taken us high enough aloft—yet—to fit the entire planet in the view-finder.

7x7 (10. 325)

99.9% of people will never get to experience what you will: NASA's social media guidelines for astronauts—via tmn  

cosmic christmas: an animated short from the studio of Nelvana, contracted to do interstitials for The Star Wars Holiday Special

the kiss: the first filmed act of intimacy by pioneer Eadweard Muybridge—see previously  

all systems go: Orion orbiter begins its loop around the Moon  

photobomb: finalists from the seventh annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards––previously—via the Everlasting Blört  

before there was hope in the galaxy, there was andor: Rogue One prequel presented as a mid-70s television series—spoiler alerts—see previously 

edge of space: a maritime cosmodrome with a carbon neutral balloon for rides into the stratosphere—via tmn

gemini xii (10. 296)

On the second day of the final crewed mission of the programme demonstrating that astronauts can work effectively outside spacecraft and making commencement of the Apollo project possible, on this day in 1966, during his first space walk (extravehicular activity—see also here and here), Edwin E “Buzz” Aldrin Junior snapped the first selfie in orbit––see also. This proof-of-concept training exercise included two additional excursions, a rendezvous and a docking (see above) and piloted an automated reentry sequence.

kelpie (10. 295)

Whilst not as iconic or famous as the so called “surgeon’s photograph” of the 1934 since exposed as an elaborate hoax, the first captured image allegedly showing the cryptid of Loch Ness (previously here and here) was snapped on this day by local Hugh Gray in 1933. Recounting himself he was walking his dog along the shore that morning, many interpret the blurry image as Gray’s Labrador fetching a stick from the water, or otherwise a swan or an otter rolling in a characteristic fashion at the water’s surface.

eagle eye (10.240)

JWST released a fresh, incredibly detailed image of the Pillars of Creation (previously), columns of densehydrogen gas and dust in the stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula some sixty-five hundred light years away in the constellation Serpens. The resolution is so sharp thanks to the telescope’s infrared vision and able to filter through some of the errant particles of the clouds and peer into the new stars forming within. The astrophotography of JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, taken in 1995 and 2004—see above, propelled the distant vista, likely formed in the wake of a shockwave of a super nova into the popular imagination and made the iconic image, surely long since eroded and dispersed, part of our shared culture.

7x7 (10. 216)

negroni sbagliato: your guide to the new hot adult beverage  

naked eye: a gallery of some of the best images of microscopic photography from the past year 

aunt jess: a celebration of the life and career of Dame Angela Lansbury—see previously  

little big world: a tilt-shift tour of München and Oktoberfest

if pigs could fly: iconic Battersea Power Station reopens to the public as a luxury property development–via Things Magazine

mutual of omaha: superlative wildlife photography  

ss23: backless menswear suits seem to be here to stay

8x8 (10. 187)

vendedores ambulantes: the sonic landscape and signature cries (see also) of the street vendors of Ciudad de México—via tmn  

from erdapfel to equator: a globemaker’s glossary of cartographic terms—via the Map Room  

queenhithe: photographer Frank Merton captures London’s churches in the mid-1950s  

anti-cyclone: a proposal to tow a barge laden with jet engines blasting to dissipate the strength of an oncoming hurricane  

hyla orientalis: black tree frogs in Chernobyl demonstrate evolution in real time—via Slashdot 

blogoversary: a belated congratulations to Diamond Geezer on twenty years of posting   

the feral atlas: a journey of discovery and triangulation through our made environments from Stanford University and via Web Curios  

tlaltecuhtli: the iconography of the Aztec pantheon

♆ (10. 166)

Capturing the best images of that last known planet, king Neptune, before plunging into the endlessly, inky interstellar void that we’ve been witness to in the past three decades since Voyager 2’s 1989 fly-by, through the JWST we discover that there is a lot happening in this distant, icy constellation. Far distant from the shepherding satellites that keep the brilliant ring in place, the seemingly bright star is the rogue moon Triton, appearing so dazzling due to the highly reflective composition of its surface. Much more to explore at Bad Astronomy with Phil Platt at the link up top.