Monday, August 23, 2010

Amazing art stuff through time

Recently, two kind of amazing articles and accompanying pictures have kind of totally blown my mind.  There is a pretty massive period of time between each of them, but art is something we've always done.


They discovered ancient cave paintings in Petra.  2,000 years old, hidden for ages beneath, well, 2,000 years of crap.  There is a lovely article at the Guardian that delves into the history of the artists, the Nabataeans, who created this.  There is only one picture, which is so sad, I want to see more!


Speaking of pictures, fast forward just under 2,000 years. and wiggle over towards Russia.  It's 1909-1912, and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took some crazy color pictures.  I know, color pictures?  I've seen some of these images before, but Boston.com's Big Picture feature has pulled together a ton of them, and they are seriously phenomenal.  To quote the article about how on earth they got such amazing pics:




 He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.   



Seriously, go look at the pictures, they are fucking amazing.

1 comment:

  1. wow those are really cool. I especially liked the seated portrait of the Khans and Emir.

    ReplyDelete

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