orientaltiger:

Grand Central Station, NYC, 1941. The light does not stream in like this anymore because the buildings around the station are too tall.

“Corinne Vionnet overlays hundreds of tourists’ photos of Tiananmen Square on top of each other to create really cool images. I love this one especially because of how ephemeral all the people look while the portrait of Chairman Mao almost looks in focus.”

spookymrsboo:

In Victorian times, it was a common practice to photograph the dead, particularly at the end of the 19th century. Post-mortem photography was an inexpensive way for the lower classes to immortalize lost loved ones, especially children and infants. Childhood mortality rates were significantly high during the period, and post-mortem portraits were usually the only portraits a child would have. The corpses were usually posed into natural positions such as sitting in a chair or on a couch, and the eyes were opened to give the illusion of life. If the subject were an infant, the mother would often be photographed with the corpse, sometimes even holding the body in their arms. In some circumstances, the corpse’s eyes remained closed, and the corpse was lain in bed, as if they were in a deep sleep.

Disturbing fact: One way to tell who is alive and who isn’t in these photographs is by looking at the blur. People who are blurry are alive because it is hard to sit perfectly still for 5+ minutes (cameras then had quite a long exposure time), but the deceased’s image would come out perfectly clear.

I think the blur thing is pretty cool.

youmightfindyourself:

Rave was America’s last great outlaw musical subculture: created by kids, for kids, designed to be impenetrable to adults. American rave formed its own mutant funhouse approach to existing looks, sounds and ideologies. In the early-to-mid-1990s, it was driven not by stars but a sudden collective sense that, as the Milwaukee rave zine Massive put it in every issue above the masthead, “The underground is massive.”

What better place for such a subculture to flourish than on the Internet?

Rave’s rise mirrors the Web’s in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward “free spaces” with special appeal to geeks and wonks. (It can’t be a coincidence that dance music’s instruments of choice are referred to by their model numbers: 303, 606, 808, 909.) Both took root through the ’80s and emerged in fits and starts through the mid-’90s, at which point both became part of the social fabric. Indeed, one of electronic dance music’s key genres, IDM, was named after an emaillist devoted to “intelligent dance music.”

“Part of the explosion of the whole electronic music scene has been totally tied to the Internet, and the way we can communicate over vast distances,” says Richie Hawtin, who as Plastikman was an early rave icon.

“The Midwest — and maybe national — scene wouldn’t have become so interconnected without the rise of the Web circa 1994-95,” agrees Matt Massive (born Matt Bonde, though we’ll identify him here by his pen name), the publisher of Massive.

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sexgenderbody:

kitchenknivesandcherrybombs:

h8orade:

RECESS. 

boom.

“please take this new history book with a grain of salt, since it focuses primarily on white western males”

WWII Italian resistance fighters

spaceships: invisiblestories:

X-ray of bound feet, China [late 19th century]

unjourdanslavie:

fuckyeahglobetrotters:

Mulberry Street, New York City - Year of 1900

(via reveurs-maladie, musesofhumanity)