1. In Defense of Toulouse-Lautrec To celebrate his would-be 150th birthday, radical French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was celebrated in the latest Google Doodle. For those not already familiar with Toulouse-Lautrec, the tech giant’s bleak portrait of the progressive painter, printmaker and illustrator may create the wrong picture. Though he’s known to many for his work at the Moulin Rouge, the Guardian argues that the …
For his master’s thesis at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland, Travis Purrington re-imagined the dated look of US currency. Passing on the iconic images of past presidents, Purrington drew up an entirely new set of images focusing on science and technology, which have always been so closely linked to America. One side of the new bills feature detailed black-and-white drawings of microscopic building-blocks …
Gift a photography enthusiast or collector with these first editions of the early reports on the invention of the daguerrotype—which were published even before Louis Daguerre’s first renditions of the new medium—and you’re set for life. In addition to a fascinating breakdown of the groundbreaking new technique in 1839, the volumes include important commentary from Daguerre’s pioneering compadres like Nicéphore Niépce, Henry Fox Talbot, François …