For decades, architectural critic and photographer John Margolies obsessively documented roadside attractions: vernacular architecture, weird sculpture, odd businesses and amusements. By his death in 2016, his collection consisted of more than 11,000 slides (he published books of his favorites, with annotations).
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Tag: photos
Eastern Blocks: photographs of the brutalist towers of the former USSR
Zupagrafika’s new book Eastern Blocks (subtitle: “Concrete Landscapes of the Former Eastern Bloc”) collects more than 100 beautiful photos of the brutalist towers of ex-Soviet nations, “‘Sleeping districts’ of Moscow, Plattenbauten of East Berlin, modernist estates of Warsaw, Kyiv`s Brezhnevki.”
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Kickstarting “The Decline of Mall Civilization,” a sequel to the long-out-of-print “Malls Across America” book
Michael Galinsky’s 2011 photo-book “Malls Across America” went out of print quickly and now sells for upwards of $1000/copy; Galinsky is now kickstarting a sequel, The Decline of Mall Civilization, featuring 112 pages of images of American malls from 1989.
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Photos from MAKE’s 2008 visit to MAD Magazine
Phil Torrone from Adafruit writes, “A million internet years ago in 2008 when I was Senior Editor at MAKE Magazine, Ladyada and I went to DC Comics to meet the MAD Magazine folks for a collaboration issue with MAKE and MAD, it was the Spy vs Spy issue, volume 16 cover by Sam Viviano. Spy vs. Spy is a wordless black and white comic strip that has been published in Mad magazine since 1961. It was created by Antonio Prohias, a Cuban national who fled to the United States in 1960 days before Fidel Castro took over the Cuban free press.”
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The new Creative Commons search engine is out of beta, with more than 300 million images!
I am totally, utterly reliant on Creative Commons images for Boing Boing, and mostly I use Google Image’s mediocre search tool for this purpose, but no more! Creative Commons’s new search engine is out of beta, and contains more than 300,000,000 images, along with tools to make attribution easier! (via Kottke)
A recursive plaque honoring the installation of a plaque honoring the installation of a plaque honoring the installation of…
Hugh writes, “This plaque commemorates its own commemoration.” (Photo by Dr Vicky Forster): “This plaque was commemorated on October 10, 2018,
commemorate its own commemoration. Plaques like this one are an integral part of the campaign to support more plaques like this one. By reading this plaque, you have made a valuable addition to the number of people who have read this plaque. To this day and up to the end of this sentence,
this plaque continues to be read by people like yourself. -Heritage Toronto 2018” (Thanks, Hugh!)
The WPA’s horseback librarians
During the 1930s, the WPA sponsored horseback librarians — all women — to visit rural Americans, bringing them books; the librarians were only allowed to make deliveries in counties that had existing libraries, so schools and other institutions donated materials to establish libraries that would make their counties eligible.
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Distracted Lego boyfriend
Iain Heath writes, “I recreated the ‘distracted boyfriend’ meme using LEGO bricks.” You certainly did, Iain, and very well, too!
Snapshot from the heroic era of mobile computing
MJ Carlson calls this photo from a 1980s computer science textbook “the most glorious stock photo of all time.” She is correct.
Using structured encryption to search protected photos in the cloud
In a recent presentation at the Real World Crypto symposium, researchers affiliated with Brown University and a startup called Pixek presented their work developing an app that encrypts photos at the moment they’re taken and uploads them in encrypted form to a cloud server, in such a way that the keys remain on the user’s device, meaning the service provider can’t view the photos.
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