The History of Russia in 70,000 Photos: New Photo Archive Presents Russian History from 1860 to 1999
Posted on September 3, 2016 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage	.
Back in college, I took a survey class on Russian history, taught by one of these people who take up the profession in their active retirement after a career spent working in the field. This particular professor had gone to work for the State Department after graduate school and served in various posts in Soviet Russia for several decades. The format of his class seemed unremarkable on paper. One standard syllabus, one bulky, expensive textbook. But the classes themselves consisted of long, fascinating stories about personal encounters with Brezhnev and Gorbachev, or journeys into ancient Kiev, or to the outer reaches of the Steppes.
All that was missing from those vivid recollections was a comparable photo essay to tell the story visually. This has been remedied and then some by the "The History of Russia," an enormous joint archive project from Moscow's Multimedia Art Museum and Yandex, Russia's largest search engine. The archive contains over 70,000 photos, gathered from "more than 40 institutions and collections," writes Hyperallergic, and representing "over 150 years of photographs capturing all sorts of scenes of Russian life."
Non-Russian speakers can load the site in Google Chrome and have it translated into English. Additionally, "a timeline allows you to browse by date, a map enables location-based searches, and preset categories filter the images by theme." Russian speakers can enter specific keywords into the site's search engine. Currently, the archive features an exhibition on the August Putsch, the 1991 coup attempt on the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, staged by hard-line Communist Party Members opposed to reform. See one iconic photo of that historical event above, and many more at the virtual exhibition.
The late 1980s and 90s may be a period of particular interest for students and writers of Russian history, like David Remnick, and for good reason. But every decade in the archive holds its own fascination. Stately portraits from the 1860s, like that at the top of the post, show us the society of Tolstoy in the decade he serialized War and Peace. Photos from the 20s, like the satirical display in Red Square, further down, show us the days of Lenin's rule and the early years of the Soviet Union. Images from the 50s give us unique insider views—often impossible at the time—of ordinary Soviet life at the height of the Cold War, such as the Christmas tree in the Luzhniki Stadium, above, or the man leading an elephant from the Red Army Theater, below.
The 60s in particular look like a Life magazine spread, with dramatic photos of Olympic athletes in training, statesmen posed with wives and children, and hundreds of arresting pictures from everyday life, like that of two boys boxing below. The huge galleries can be a little cumbersome to navigate and require some patience on the part of the non-Russian-speaking user. But that patience is richly rewarded with photograph after photograph of a country we rarely hear spoken of in less than inflammatory terms. We encounter, of course, the odd portrait of Stalin and other well-worn propaganda images, but for the most part, the photos look and feel candid, and for good reason.
"According to a release," Hyperallergic writes, "many of the photographs are published here for the first time, partly because the portal invites users to upload, describe, and tag images from personal archives. It has the feel of a museum collection"—and also of a family photo album stretching back generations. "The History of Russia" archive offers occasional context in addition to the dates, names, and locations of subjects. But informative text appears rarely, and in nearly unreadable translations for us non-speakers. Nonetheless, a few hours lost in these galleries feel like a near total immersion in Russian history. You can enter the archive here.
via Hyperallergic
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The History of Russia in 70,000 Photos: New Photo Archive Presents Russian History from 1860 to 1999 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
Tags: 1860, 1999, 70000, Archive, from, History, Photo, Photos, Presents, Russia, Russian	.
The Digital Transgender Archive Features Books, Magazines & Photos Telling the History of Transgender Culture
Posted on August 4, 2016 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage	.
Transgender issues have entered the public conversation in a big way. To those without much direct connection to them, they might all seem to have come up suddenly, with little precedent, within the past few years. But most phenomena that seem to have achieved instant prominence have a rich, if long-hidden, history behind them. In this case, you can now discover a great deal of the history at the new Digital Transgender Archive, an "international collaboration among more than twenty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections" aiming to create "a generative point of entry into the fascinating and expansive world of trans history."
Hyperallergic's Claire Voh has more on the site's origins, including words from the project's leader, College of the Holy Cross English professor K.J Rawson. Its impetus came from the problem that "a lot of trans-related materials were held in dissipated collections, and it wasn't really clear who had what, why they had it, how it related to other collections, and how it was accessible to researchers." The Digital Transgender Archive replaces some of the unnecessary arduousness under which those researchers used to labor, providing them with a simple search box or, an ability to browse by collection, institution, geographic location, genre, or topic.
Ranked by the number of the items in the archive, that topic list gives a vivid overview of the sorts of social practices and categories best represented there: crossdressers and crossdressing rank first and second, respectively, followed by the rest of a top-twenty, including drag queens, photography, activists, and actors.
Given the importance of the visual to transgender culture, it should come as no surprise that the Digital Transgender Archive's growing collection of documents, photographs, periodicals, and "ephemera," organized all together for the first time, offers plenty of striking material to look at — as well as to introduce the history of a world about which few could openly communicate before now.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He's at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books' Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Digital Transgender Archive Features Books, Magazines & Photos Telling the History of Transgender Culture is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
Tags: Archive, Books, Culture, Digital, Features, History, Magazines, Photos, Telling, Transgender	.