Category Archives: Photography

Historic Aerial Photography – Soil Conservation Service

Posted on June 16, 2012 by LaDale Winling

Next up in blogging the book project is a return to aerial photography. Background: during the New Deal, agriculture was a key priority, and soil a specific component of that — see, for example, Don Worster’s The Dust Bowl. So … Continue reading →

Posted in Chicago, Cities, Digital History, History, New Deal, Photography, Research, University of Chicago | Leave a comment

Historic Photography

Posted on January 18, 2012 by LaDale Winling

A photo project I’ve recently seen passed around Facebook is the Detroit re-photography project by David Jordano. A Chicago-based photographer, in 1973 Jordano was a Detroiter and conducted a photo survey of his city. He recently revisited those sites and … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Cities, Film, History, Photography | Leave a comment

Cincinnati Riverfront Daguerreotype

Posted on December 2, 2011 by LaDale Winling

The Smithsonian twitter feed brought the Cincinnati riverfront daguerreotypes to my attention the other day. Above is part of one of the 8 images taken from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River in 1848. I was surprised and annoyed … Continue reading →

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National Building Museum

Posted on August 21, 2011 by LaDale Winling

This image I took of the Great Hall of the National Building Museum last year was posted on Reddit and got a flood of views, so perhaps its worth a bit of explanation. This building, designed by Montgomery Meigs and … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Internet, Photography | Leave a comment

People-Powered Digital History

Posted on February 2, 2011 by LaDale Winling

A great example of the kind of democratic historical work drawing on knowledgeable amateurs that is increasingly possible with digital tools like wikis and web content management systems — Camera-wiki.org. An old site, camerapedia (now on wikia), was the go-to … Continue reading →

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Kodachrome: Over

Posted on January 31, 2011 by LaDale Winling

Vanity Fair has the images from Steve McCurry’s last roll of Kodachrome off the presses, including this one. Way back when I promised images of my own last roll of Kodachrome. It took me a while to get them shot … Continue reading →

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Vivian Maier

Posted on January 8, 2011 by LaDale Winling

Every image from street photographer Vivian Maier seems to improve on the last. 40 years of negatives — maybe 100,000, and we’ve only seen a handful from her. Walker Evans comes to mind, but I’d say Maier’s work is generally … Continue reading →

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Timothy O’Sullivan

Posted on April 28, 2010 by LaDale Winling

Recently I went to a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit on Timothy O’Sullivan, a photographer with several geological surveys of the west in the 1860s and 1870s. I was pretty excited about this because I have read about O’Sullivan’s work … Continue reading →

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University of Chicago Sit-In, 1962

Posted on April 13, 2010 by LaDale Winling

I thought it worth re-visiting this find from a while back at the request of Angus Johnston. In my dissertation, “Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, University Development, and the Politics of Urban Space,” I research the development of American … Continue reading →

Posted in Chicago, Higher Education, History, Housing, Media, Photography, Politics, Research, Self-referential, University of Chicago | Leave a comment

Slow Photography

Posted on May 18, 2009 by LaDale Winling

NYT: Fast is fine, but slow can be much better. Digital photography and the ascent of the Web have quickened our jobs. Instead of one deadline a day, we now have continual deadlines, bringing exponentially increasing speed to what we … Continue reading →

Posted in Media, Photography | Leave a comment