This unique Fuji Polaroid photo is a production item from the making of the 1995 Bridget Hall Calendar. It was used by the calendar’s famous fashion photographer, Gilles Bensimon, to test the lighting before the formal shooting. Due to their instant self-developing nature, Polaroids were natural for on location tests and were often used as such.
Hamerweit Books’ description: “A follow up to 2014 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist Return Trip, Strange Beauty is a further look at aesthetic and artistic biases, information processing and the limits of human knowledge. The short 74 pages book is written in the author’s unique chopped up, non-linear style mixing academic insight with humor and offbeat subjects. As he wrote in Return Trip, “My job as a writer isn’t to make the hard easy. It’s to make the hard hard.” Cycleback is an art historian and award-winning author who has written extensively in the areas of art history and authentication, cognitive science and philosophy. He was a 2013 Eric Award Finalist for his book Conceits: Cognition and Perception, and his guides Judging the Authenticity of Prints by the Masters and Judging the Authenticity of Photographs were the first comprehensive books on the subjects published in China.”
The book can be purchased at amazon.com
or downloaded for free in pdf format here: strange beauty ebook
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Ken Wel was a well known vintage baseball glove manufacturer. They issued a number of attractive glove advertisements, the best known featuring Lou Gehrig. Cardboard reprints of the signs are common on the market, but many are simple to identify. The most common reprints have little metal rimmed eyelets near the top—metal rimmed holes for hanging . The simple to remember equation is: metal eyelet = modern reprint. You can make out the eyelet at the top of the sign here.
Samuel Morse is famous today as an inventor of the electric telegraph and Morse code. But his day job was professor of painting and sculpture at New York University. Shown here is one of his paintings.
German painter and artist Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) is ranked as one of history’s master printmakers, perhaps the most technically skilled in Western art. During his time, his etchings, engravings and woodcuts were emulated and glorified, and owned by kings. To help prevent his works from being counterfeited or plagiarized, Durer made his prints so detailed and expertly crafted that no one else had the talent to copy them. Realize that back then there were no such things as Xeroxes, photocopiers or computer scanners. To recreate a print the copier had to do the whole thing over by hand. Pictured is Durer’s circa 1497 woodcut ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” showing incredible detail for the laborious woodcut process.
Many are surprised when they learn that many 1800s photographs were not paper, but glass and metal. The pictured 1800s opalotype has the image on milky white glass and has a foil frame. Opalotypes were sometimes hand tinted or colored.
