It's a full-color day in NYC, tourists swarming Lower Manhattan with digital cameras. You can barely make it across Wall Street without blocking someone's shot. I don't mind it, though; working down here (or anywhere else these days) I pretty much assume I'm being filmed constantly.
Last night PBS aired a documentary on director George Stevens, featuring some amazing color footage he shot overseas during WWII. I find color film from that period so moving -- I remember sitting rapt in front of an earlier PBS doc solely devoted to the subject, half-hoping to see my grandfather among the soldiers. It sounds dopey to say this, I know, but everyone looks so real in color. Concentration camp footage certainly has a different resonance. A quick Google search suggests that I could spend my whole rainy weekend looking at old color photos of periods more frequently associated with black-and-white -- for now, the Library of Congress has an "American Memory" archive where you can find great shots like the one above.
On a lighter note, I love this guy's 80s NYC photos -- skinny ties, subway graffitti, baby-faced Bronx toughs (via).
Off to read an informative history of photography in color, after I touch up my red lipstick.
Wow -- look at that subway graffitti. Amazing.
I wonder how our pictures we take everyday (from our phones, no less) will look in 20 years. Quaint? Ridiculous? Musty?
You know?
Posted by: amy | April 24, 2006 at 03:19 PM
Exactly! There's always (at least for me) the sense that the photos I'm taking are *the* truest possible representation of *right now* and forever shall be. But photos even 10-20 years old already seem to have a certain tint or tone that marks them -- aside from the fashions of the day -- as being distinctly *of the past*.
Combine this with the scientific fact (I've read somewhere but lost it) that the quality of light itself may be changing slightly through the ages due to environmental influences, etc. -- and it seems that no matter how sophisticated the technology gets, all photos are destined to seem quaint and faraway after enough time has passed.
Posted by: CM | April 24, 2006 at 04:02 PM