Look at Me

These photos were either lost, forgotten, or thrown away. The images now are nameless, without connection to the people they show, or the photographer who took them. Maybe someone died and a relative threw away their photographs; maybe someone thought they were trash.

Some of the photos were found on the street. Some were stacked in a box, bought cheap at a flea market. Showing off or embarrassed, smug, sometimes happy, the people in these photos are strangers to us. They can't help but be interesting, as stories with only an introduction.
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thanks to BookNotes

I had once a job like this web site. It was 1972 and I was working night shift at a photo lab. I was running the copy camera — I would spend the night putting pictures up on the easel, adjusting the lights, making the exposure, advancing the film, and taking the picture down. It was my dance of voyeurism. My favorites were the snapshots of people — just like the ones in this site. Pictures of important events — to the people in the picture. Mysteries. I loved them.

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Small Town America
Stereoscopic Views from the Robert Dennis Collection

A few big cities -- and many more small towns -- long ago made the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut one of the most densely populated regions in North America. This website presents 12,000 photographs of those three states as they were captured in stereoscopic views from the 1850s to the 1910s. In addition to showing buildings and street scenes in cities, towns, and villages the photographs show farming, industry, transportation, homes, businesses, local celebrations, natural disasters, people, and costumes. The photographs belong to the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views in the Photography Collection, Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs at The New York Public Library.
[read more]

thanks to consumptive.org

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The above collection is part of a larger site with some other goodies.

The New York Public Library
Photographic Services & Permissions

A vast array of images from the thirteenth century to the present can be found at The New York Public Library. Thousands of original photographs, color transparencies and book images from the Research Libraries are available for reproduction and for research/scholarly/commercial use. Only a small portion of the Library’s visual holdings are online.
[read more]

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One of my favorite photographers is a part of the New York Library collection...

Berenice Abbott
CHANGING NEW YORK 1935-1938

American master photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is probably best known for Changing New York, her 1935-1938 Federal Art Project documentation of the city's rapidly changing built environment. Abbott became interested in photographing New York in 1929 when, as a fashionable portrait photographer, she visited the city after a nearly a decade in Paris and saw that the nineteenth century city she had once called home was becoming almost overnight a leading metropolis. Allied intellectually with modernist European photography, she was nonetheless eager for a new arena in which to exploit her developing aesthetic. Re- established in New York, her solid international reputation as a classical portraitist generated commercial assignments from Fortune and elsewhere, and in 1932 she took up an 8 x 10 inch view camera, destined to become her standard equipment for nearly the rest of her career.

However, by the mid-1930s the Depression had forced the federal government to include artists and related workers among the recipients of unemployment relief. Abbott successfully applied to the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration to carry out Changing New York and in the fall of 1935 began the program that occupied her for the next three years.
[read more]

These images are also available in the book New York in the Thirties (Formerly Titled: Changing New York

ARTIST PROFILE
Berenice Abbott

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Abbott's pictures are amazing but she is also known for discovering and rescuing the pictures of the Parisian photographer Eugene Atget — who was also a very big influence on her New York pictures. Atget isn't part of the New York Library collection but here he is anyway.

EUGENE ATGET (1856 - 1927)

Eugene Atget photographed Paris for thirty years. With a singleness of purpose rarely excelled, he made his incredible monument to a city. When he died in 1927 he left approximately 2000 eight by ten inches glass plates and almost 10,000 prints, not counting the plates deposited in the Palais Royale archives. Here is one of the most extraordinary achievements of photography. Yet we know almost nothing of Atget as a person and less of Atget as a photographer. His history is to be read in his work.
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Atget's Paris pictures are in a remarkable book that I have wanted for several years now — Atget Paris. It's in my Amazon wish list. Anyone who wants to make me really really happy could buy it for me. I would be your best friend.

While looking for Atget links I found this amazing site...

The Atget Rephotographic Project

The photographs displayed here are the result of an ongoing project begun by students in the first Paris program group in 1987, the rephotography of sites photographed by the French photographer Eugene Atget who, between 1900 and 1926, made approximate 6,000 photographs of Paris. Using reproductions of Atget’s photographs, students attempted to locate his “tripod holes” and to replicate the exact view and framing of his original scene. The result is a comparison which affords us an experience not unlike that of the time traveler in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” for whom a fixed point in space becomes the focus of one’s historical imagination.
[read more]

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Back to the New York Library collection — they also have two excellent Lewis Wickes Hine collections.

Lewis Wickes Hine's "Work Portraits"

Lewis Wickes Hine
The Construction of the Empire State Building, 1930-1931

Biography of
Lewis Hine

HIs Empire State Building pictures are in the book The Empire State Building. Also check out Men at Work : Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines