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Posted: 05-03-2013 21:07 Post subject:

Years ago, I assisted an organist friend who wanted to rescue some of the pipes from a church organ. That church was being demolished and he was motivated by a newspaper photograph of the organ's keyboard with a demolition-man's axe through it.

Taking an eight-foot wooden pipe across town was a slightly surreal adventure. Needless to say, bus conductors refused us entry, citing the Transport of Organs Act, 1939. Or something.

My school-chum amassed several of these pipes, which he stored in a shed at his suburban home. The way some people take in cats, I suppose.

Just a crazy memory stirred by this story. Spiny

edit 21st March. Pronoun preferred to repetition of "keyboard" in first paragraph.

Posted: 21-03-2013 20:32 Post subject:

A nice little news item from Australia about an old cinema as time-capsule.

Last Picture Show

It seems to be from last year and marked the disposal of items which, until then, had remained in the locked projection-booth of what is now a store. I'm sure they went to loving homes but a shame they were dispersed. Smile

Posted: 15-04-2013 08:09 Post subject:

An unusual case:

Overturned inflatable sparks Lizard lifeboat search
3:00pm Sunday 14th April 2013 in News

A drifting rigid inflatable boat led to the volunteer crew of the Lizard lifeboat being launched, over fears the boat may have capsized.
A report came in at 3pm last Thursday that the RIB had been seen 11 miles south east of The Lizard by a merchant ship.

After nearly an hour of searching, the RIB was found by the crew of seven, who quickly realised that it was unmanned due to the engine covers being untouched.
It had most likely been attached to a larger vessel before getting washed away.

Second mechanic Johnny Bray said: “We were amazed that we located the craft so quickly.
“The sea conditions were quite choppy with lots of white water and to spot a small craft which was white and grey in colour and upside down was fantastic.”

On arrival back at the Lizard lifeboat station the sea conditions were too rough to get the RIB up into the boathouse, so it was taken to Falmouth and handed over to the town’s coastguard rescue team.

Falmouth Coastguard later confirmed that the boat had been lost in the Solent just over three weeks ago and that the owner would be contacted.

...

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/10352116.Overturned_inflatable_sparks_Lizard_lifeboat_search/?ref=la

I'm amazed it hadn't been rammed and sunk after all that time adrift.

Posted: 15-04-2013 16:44 Post subject:

A vintage lost & found, with a mystery attached.

Posted: 16-04-2013 00:17 Post subject:

I reckon his wallet realised it was no use staying in Cyprus as the banks are skint & returned home where it could fulfil it's purpose.

Posted: 29-04-2013 21:34 Post subject:

1,400 Stolen Books Returned to Lambeth Palace

They knew of sixty that had gone missing but had no idea of the extent of the pilfering by someone "associated with the library."

Did the deathbed confession assure him of anonymity? Some damage was done, as if the thief intended to disguise the origin of his (assuming it was a he) haul but no attempt was made to try to sell them.

All very odd. Cool

Posted: 15-05-2013 11:26 Post subject:

Revealed: Eerie new images show forgotten French apartment that was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II and left untouched for 70 years

Posted: 15-05-2013 13:22 Post subject:

I saw that yesterday, staticgirl. Gorgeous.

Posted: 15-05-2013 20:17 Post subject:

Wonder why she never returned...perhaps she had other properties. confused

Posted: 31-05-2013 11:01 Post subject:

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Posted: 25-06-2013 22:28 Post subject:

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Posted: 25-06-2013 22:36 Post subject:

Vivian Maier: lost art of an urban photographer
By Jill Nicholls, Director, BBC One imagine

[Video: A web-exclusive clip in which Vivian Maier's French friend Nelly Raymond talks about Vivian's outcast, impoverished grandfather and about their youthful friendship.]

She's been called 'the greatest photographer you've never heard of'... the mysterious Vivian Maier, a nanny based in Chicago who took about 150,000 photographs in her lifetime and stashed them away, not showing them to anyone.
She left thousands not even developed, and most as negatives from which she never made prints. Shocked

It was sheer accident that her life's work was discovered.
Two years before she died in 2009, Vivian Maier stopped paying the rent on five storage lockers in Chicago. Without her knowledge the contents were sold.
At locker sales, you have to stand at the door and buy without touching. So auctioneer Roger Gunderson saw only a jumble of boxes and suitcases:
"A Paris sticker on one trunk caught my eye. I thought maybe there's going to be some perfume or jewellery."
Gunderson bought the lot for $250 - "a truck and a half load of stuff", he says: papers, magazines and thousands upon thousands of photographs.

People who then bought them at auction posted a few online. Before long, Vivian Maier went viral. Now her prints sell for thousands of dollars a piece.

But what prints are we talking about?
In her lifetime Vivian Maier had perhaps 5,000 prints made. Some she made in the bathrooms of her lodgings - moving from family to family, she never had a home of her own.
Some were made at drugstores where she had negatives developed.

She put some of these prints into albums. Ron Slattery, who bought boxes of her work at auction, has a beautiful album with small prints of the extraordinary world tour she went on, all alone, in 1959.

At least one print she framed and hung on her wall
It must have been one that she particularly liked. And the fascinating thing is that this print - like most prints she made - is cropped.
Like many of her photos, it looks stylish, framed on minimalist apartment walls.

But in her cluttered apartment (right), she would never have seen her pictures looking like that.

Vivian Maier had several cameras, most with rectangular negatives. But her favourite camera, the Rolleiflex, has a large, square negative.
She started to use the Rolleiflex in 1952, and in time this camera became her trademark. Looking down into its viewfinder, Vivian would see her picture in colour, and square.

Nowadays, the black and white photos she took on the Rolleiflex are being printed large and square.
Richard Cahan co-edited Out of the Shadows, a book of Vivian's photographs. He was unaware that she ever cropped her photos.
"Photographers are either square or horizontal people", he said, "and Vivian was a square person."
His co-editor Michael Williams added: "When you see her other work where she did use a 35mmm rectangle, it's just not quite there."

Pamela Bannos, distinguished senior lecturer at Northwestern University in Illinois, says Vivian herself frequently cropped.
She would have seen the image square in the viewfinder, and her composition within the square is unfailingly beautiful. Yet when she printed, she would crop the sides of the square to highlight the human drama in the centre of the frame.

We can't show the negative from which Vivian made this print as it is in the collection of John Maloof, who did not want us to use his pictures. (The print is owned by Jeff Goldstein, who did give us access to his collection, as did Ron Slattery.)

Pamela Bannos calls this "Vivian Maier's fractured archive", which makes research into her work so very difficult.
But you will find a square print of this image on John Maloof's website. The comparison is amazing - Vivian trimmed the sides to focus on the confrontation.

In other words she cut off the passing human life that viewers now so admire and adore - that sense that W.H. Auden writes about in Musée des Beaux Arts:

About suffering they were never wrong

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Icarus falls from the sky but people just pass on by, busy with their own preoccupations, not even noticing.

In another photograph highlighted by Pamela Bannos, Vivian captures a down-and-out being taken away by police, while a well-dressed woman passes by.
We love that juxtaposition of worlds. But Vivian didn't print that shot - it has been chosen for her.

In another frame that she DID choose to print, she was close up on the old man at the police van, working more like a photojournalist than a poet of the human condition. In fact she cropped it to get even closer to the action. Quite likely a photojournalist is what she aspired to be.

Of course it would be presumptuous of owners and editors now to crop her photos, even if they wanted to, which they don't.

Richard Cahan said, "We've never cropped any of her pictures. Two reasons: one, it's a little unseemly to decide 50 years later what should be cropped, and two, they don't need it. I've looked at hundreds of her negatives and can't think of one I would really like to crop."

People are perfectly justified - as in our film for BBC One's imagine - in presenting Vivian's images square. Maybe, just maybe, 'we' know her strengths better than she knew them herself...

But it's a great example of what has happened in the strange case of this unknowable woman, who quite deliberately and conscientiously kept both her life and her work a secret, away from the public gaze.

As Michael Williams put it, "Everything that we can learn about her is going to come from the pictures. We really are just left with the images."
Which is true, and wonderful they are, even if they are being presented not quite as she would have done herself….

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/0/23007897

Posted: 25-06-2013 23:18 Post subject:

The story above resonates with me. I too have many photos, and I wonder how best to pass them on where they'll be appreciated when I'm gone.

I have, for example, many sailing photos from the 60s onwards, but when I offered them to the National Maritime Museum Cornwall they were very sniffy and uninterested, even though I know that the pictures document interesting developments in the sailing scene that started shortly after WWII.

As for my more recent pics, a small selection of them is available on my websites:
http://haylenewbridge.weebly.com/index.html
http://cornwalltidesreach.weebly.com/index.html

But these are in the The Cloud, and how long will that last?
(And those images aren't full-size anyway.)

But there are many more pics. I have them all backed up on CDs and DVDs, but how long will they last? They may all be thrown in a skip after I die, when the council clears out my flat.

I've tried to pass copies to my remaining family, but I get the feeling they'll be as disinterested as the NMMC after I'm gone. Sad

Posted: 26-06-2013 09:02 Post subject:

I have a similar problem. My father was a chef and patissiere, and he used to cater for weddings on the side. I have dozens of wedding photographs he took or which were sent to him, and which show his cakes, some of which I helped to decorate, but also of course show fashions etc. in wedding dress and so on. None of my family are the slightest bit interested, and no doubt they will throw them away when I die, but surely they are of interest to social historians and so on? If not, I might as well chuck them now. I've no idea who the families in the pictures are.

Don't know what to do.