mardi 11 mars 2014

Michael Shindler






















Using a 19th century photography process called wet-plate collodion, Michael Shindler creates arresting tintype portraits of anyone who happens to wander into his studio Photobooth. Located on Valencia Street in San Francisco, Photobooth is the world's only tintype portrait studio. About his open door policy, Shindler says, "I do not choose who I photograph, and I like the exercise of being constantly confronted with new people and having to figure out what I find interesting about them."
Shindler spent six years learning and perfecting the wet-plate collodion process that requires the photographic material (in the case of tintypes, an enameled metal plate) to be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes. The resulting image, which is technically a negative, is made up of extremely fine silver particles that are creamy-white in color and give the photograph a rich, milky-metallic quality.
Each tintype is prepared by hand to create a single exposure. The image is then processed immediately so the subject can walk out the door with their photograph. Each plate is unique and only one copy of the image exists, which makes sitting for a tintype portrait a very special and rewarding experience.
After nearly three years and over 4,000 tintypes, Shindler will be moving on to new projects and Photobooth will be closing on March 30, 2014.

mardi 21 janvier 2014

Martin Luther King

(Wikimedia Commons Photo)

When Martin Luther King accepted his Nobel Prize, he delivered a speech that has been unfairly ignored because his delivery was so muted. Read 50 years later, it is electrifying.
—Martin Luther King’s gifts were manifest. He was an inspired leader, a galvanizing orator, and a brilliant polemicist and prose writer. But more than anything, he knew how to rise to an occasion.
Martin Luther King Jr. held his acceptance speech in the auditorium of the University of Oslo on 10 December 1964.
See a Video of the Acceptance Speech here.

Hear Martin Luther King’s inspiring 1958 speech in an Illinois synagogue some 6 years before his famous I Have A Dream Speech. Very moving. Here.

An Alfred Hitchcock documentary on the Nazi Holocaust



The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hitchcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by "the real thing". 
Lire la suite sur le site de The Independent