The British Journal of Photography is reporting today that Geoffrey Crawley — the world-renowned photographer who debunked the Cottingley Fairies hoax in the 1980′s — has died. The hoax began in 1917 when two cousins named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths (aged 16 and 10, respectively) claimed to have discovered fairies and, after borrowing a camera, produced photos to prove it. The controversial photographs captured the world’s attention for decades and even deceived Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before finally being debunked by Crawley in a series of articles published in the early ’80s. In 1983 the cousins admitted that the photos were faked using cardboard cutouts.

It’s interesting seeing how little it took to fool people with photographs in the early days of photography.
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This is a Kodak advertisement that ran in the The Saturday Evening Post 100 years ago, on April 30th, 1910, and shows how people back then gave their children a taste of photography.

(via The Online Photographer)

This photograph of Boulevard du Temple in Paris was made in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, the brilliant guy that invented the daguerreotype process of photography. Aside from its distinction of being a super early photograph, it’s also the first photograph to ever include a human being. Because the image required an exposure time of over ten minutes, all the people, carriages, and other moving things disappear from the scene. However, in the bottom left hand corner is a man who just so happened to stay somewhat still during the shot — he was having his shoes shined.
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Here’s a scan of a Mechanix Illustrated magazine article from 1941 teaching readers how to get creative with their prints by creating “Shadowgraphs”, a technique that uses photographs for photograms:

In reprinting your negative with a shadowgraph border, you first insert the negative into the enlarger film carrier and project the image on the easel. With the red safety filter in position, place the printing paper on the easel and lay your shaving props directly on the printing paper, arranging them in neat order around the center of interest. Expose for one-third the normal time after which, without moving the paper, shift the positions of the razor blades slightly, and then expose for the second third of the normal time. The last third of the exposure is given with all the props removed from the paper.

Sadly (not maybe not), in the modern world of photography adding ghostly paper clips and razor blades to photos is no longer in vogue. Check out the full article here with more example photos.

(via Make)

In 1983 the BBC aired a series called “Master Photographers” in which they interviewed some of the biggest names in photography at the time, including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The series can’t be found anywhere on DVD, but luckily many of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube. If you’re at all interested in learning how historical greats worked and thought, this is a video series you have to bookmark and chew through.
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I came across an interesting post over at The Guardian a while back that discussed whether Google’s ranking algorithms are good at gauging art, and whether the top result for an artist accurately reflects the artist’s “best work”.

I decided to do the same experiment with famous historical photographers. The following images are the top results when typing the photographers’ names into Google’s image search:

Berenice Abbott

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Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app that overlays historical photographs over live views of the location.

If you don’t live in London, you can play around with the same concept using Historypin, a website that allows you to pin historical photographs onto Google’s Street View. The screenshot above shows a photograph of London bikers in 1926. Even though the views aren’t “live” like with the iPhone app, it’s still neat to see old photos in the context of present day images.

Streetmuseum is a new (and free) augmented reality iPhone app created by the Museum of London that allows you to browse historical photographs in various parts of the city.

The app leads you to various locations around London using either the map or GPS. Once you’re there, click the “3D View” button, and the app will recognize the location and overlay the historical photograph over the live video feed of the real world, giving you a brief glimpse into how the past looked.

We’ve seen projects that overlaid historical photos over modern ones, but this is the first time we’ve seen an augmented reality app do it for you in real time. Here are a few more examples:

If only this were available in every big city around the world.

Museum of London – Street Museum (via Creative Review)

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse is a historical consultant in Amsterdam who loves making photographs in the same locations as historical photos.

These amazing photographs were created by shooting new photos of old locations, and mixing them with the old photographs she finds:

Teeuwisse tells us,

I got the idea when I tried to find out more about some photos I found on a flea market. Trying to discover where they were taken I looked around my city, found the locations and took photos to compare then and now. Mixing them was just a experiment and because I was happy with the result I decided to do the same with other historical photos.

I am a historical consultant for film, tv, authors, museums, etc. and I even have a 1930s lifestyle. History is part of my daily life, I can’t help but see the shadows of the past.

To see more of Teeuwisse’s work, check out this set on Flickr.

Image credits: Photographs by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse and used with permission

SepiaTown is a website that lets you view historical imagery of particular locations using Google maps.

If you have historical imagery, you can contribute to the project by uploading them to a particular location as well. Since the project is just getting started, finding historical imagery in smaller cities or towns may be difficult, but larger cities like San Francisco, London, Paris, or Moscow are filled with interesting photographs.

As the SepiaTown collection comes to encompass thousands of locations throughout the globe it will allow people to interact with history and geography in a new and exciting way; to tour the landscapes, cityscapes and events of history with a scope and breadth never before possible.

This type of “street view” historical imagery seems like something Google might want to integrate into their applications as well.