A black and white photograph shot using a large-format camera often has a depth and stillness to it that is nearly indescribable. Some images are so sharp, the people so real, I fool myself into thinking I can sense what it would be like to be there—like a time machine.
Shorpy.com is one of my all-time favorite websites. It is a photo archive, founded and maintained by Ken Booth and David Hall, named for a child worker photographed by Lewis Wickes Hine in 1910— Shorpy Higginbotham. It includes thousands of images, many of which are reproduced and cleaned up from large format camera negatives. For example, look at the inset detail of the image above—click here to see the original in all its glory.
More wonderful examples…
Pittsburgh 1940: Long stairway in the mill district…
Washington, D.C. 1920 or 1921: People’s Drug Store…
February 5, 1865: Abraham Lincoln…
Washington, D.C. 1921: Now playing: The serial “Invisible Ray”…
About the Shorpy.com namesake…
You can purchase prints through Shorpy’s own Juniper Gallery…
From Time Magazine: The Past Comes Alive: History in High-Definition…
The challenge I pose to you is this: how can you and I apply this type of photographic storytelling to our design work?
Posted in OCTOBER 2017 / Chuck Green is the principal of Logic Arts, a design and marketing firm, a contributor to numerous magazines and websites, and the author of books published by Random House, Peachpit Press, and Rockport Publishers. Contact.
I too am a fan of the large format images. I haven’t shot any since high school and that was with their equipment but always loved the detail you can achieve.
One way to use this type of image is with large spreads and only a few words; letting the image do the work.
I don’t know if you are familiar with the “red one” camera [www.red.com ] but it is capable of very high resolutions and the cine footage is as good as film if not better. They are rumored to be working on a still camera as well. It’s being road tested by Peter Jackson, Lord of The Rings
Director and hopefully they will be in full production in the near future.
I am still plugging ideabook every chance I get; I seem to be in the role of instructor rather than designer these days…. scary thought 🙂
Best Regards as always,
Everyone wears a hat.
Reminds me of an old, old joke by the consummate nightclub comedian Myron Cohen. He would say (in a heavy Yiddish accent), “A Jewish grandmother is watching her grandchild playing on the beach when a huge wave comes and takes him out to sea. She pleads, ‘Please, God, save my only grandson. I beg of you, bring him back.’ And a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. She looks up to heaven and says, ‘He had a hat!'”
Haha… we all know that person.