Curio Cabinet / Photo Curio

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Every August 6th, thousands of Japanese and international mourners attend a memorial service for those lost in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. As seen in the image above of the 1995 ceremony, they release paper lanterns into the Motoyasu River—the site of detonation. As the candle-lit lanterns follow the river's current, they are said to guide the spirits of ancestors to peace in the afterlife. The ancient custom is a called Toro Nagashi, and since the bombing, it has come to symbolize global solidarity in the face of nuclear proliferation. The bombing, authorized by then president Harry Truman, killed nearly 200,000 people, either immediately in the blast, or with slow and grisly radiation poisoning. In 2012, Truman's grandson Clifton Truman Daniel attended the memorial to pay his respects. When asked whether his grandfather made the right choice, Daniel declined to comment, but said, "I'm two generations down the line. It's now my responsibility to do all I can to make sure we never use nuclear weapons again." It's certainly easier to be optimistic about tomorrow after hearing Daniel's determined words and beholding the view of tranquil lanterns floating by.
 

Below: Hiroshima after the atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" detonated in 1945.
 

Image credit & copyright: Philip Jones Griffiths
 

Has an alien invasion come at last? This recent photo from scientist and photographer Stephen Hummel might look like it was taken from War of the Worlds, but it's actually a weather phenomenon known as a red jellyfish sprite—a type of ultra-fast lightning in the upper atmosphere, at least 37 miles high. Tentacle-like bolts of red lightning shoot down from what appears to be a single nebulous body, hovering in a dark sky, similar to a jellyfish's tentacled body. Sprites like this one are notoriously difficult to photograph, as they only last for tenths of a second. Hummel, who works at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, captured his photos from a ridge on Mount Locke. In an interview with Business Insider, Hummel pointed out that "sprites usually appear to the eye as very brief, dim, grey structures. You need to be looking for them to spot them, and oftentimes I am not certain I actually saw one until I check the camera footage to confirm." Thank goodness for split-second photography!
 

Below: another of Hummel's red sprite photos.
 

Image credit & copyright: Stephen Hummel
 

Japan really isn't lion about its big end-of-summer festivities. The elaborately-costumed shishi-mai, or lion dance, is just one part of the Hassaku-sai festival held at the beginning of September for the last 130 years, in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. In the photo above, two dancers perform the shishi-mai with accompanying streamers at the Hachiko Shrine on Mount Haguro. Their bright green costume creates the illusion that the dancers are a four-legged animal with an open mouth and yellow mane. The Hassaku-sai festival is held by the agricultural community of Dewa Sanzan. In addition to dancing, it features special foods, a women-only mikoshi (a ceremony where Shinto followers carry a palanquin between shrines) and a special performance by Yamabushi—an order of Japanese ascetic hermits. At the start of the festival Yamabushi gather at the Prince Hachiko Shrine to light a bonfire called a Daisaitogoma. They then dance and pray for a good harvest, as the festival is held around the time when rice crops are most vulnerable to being blown down in bad weather. If only those rice crops had the flexibility of the shishi-mai lion dancers!
 

Below: a photo of the Hassaku-sai festival's woman-only mikoshi and Yamabushi at Prince Hachiko Shrine.
 

Image credit & copyright: Timothy Bunting/Oh! Matsuri

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives in honor of the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's passing on September 18, 1970.
 

Wild thing, we need to take a load off. In between wowing audiences with his overdriven amps and kissing the sky, guitar master Jimi Hendrix collapsed on an old recliner and gathered his senses. British fashion photographer Terence Donovan snapped this intimate view of Hendrix at the musician's temporary London home at Number 9, 43 Upper Berkeley Street, W1. Hendrix sports his usual paisley, mandalas, and florals, just weeks after he immolated his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival in California. It was late August of 1967—the Summer of Love—and his newest gig was supposed to be opening for the Monkees. But his feedback-heavy sound and shamanistic stage performances perplexed the teenybopper audiences. Hendrix left the tour and pounced on the opportunity to head home and curl up in his favorite textiles, which he hulled from apartment to apartment. Tour or no tour, he would release his second album, Axis: Bold as Love, and be named the World's Number 1 musician by Melody Maker later that year.
 

Image credit & copyright: Terence Donovan
 

Sometimes big things come in small packages. It's Anne Geddes birthday this week, and we're taking a look at a whole different side of the famous baby photographer of the '90s. While Geddes blew up after an Oprah appearance, she claims sales of her work have slowed down due to the changing online market for photography. Since about 2015, she has focused on behind-the-scenes Patreon work, and her role as an ambassador for the March of Dimes, a global project which supports prematurely-born babies. Above is Jack Holding Maneesha, an image Geddes took in 1993 and used as promotional material for the 2014 World Prematurity Day. Little Maneesha was finally going home after a long stay in the hospital when Geddes captured the image of the sleeping little girl in her father's strong hands. The tenderness, fragility, and beauty of Jack Holding Maneesha is a testament to Geddes' impeccable eye for understanding her subjects: "[We need to teach children] the values of harmony, love, understanding, tolerance, and an appreciation of other cultures now,'' she once said. "Because every newborn baby represents our eternal chance at new beginnings."
Image credit & copyright: Anne Geddes / March of Dimes

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Few people could capture the small grandeurs of New York in the 1930s quite like Berenice Abbott. But the road—or should we say, subway rail—to the above photo entitled "El" Second and Third Avenue Lines; Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan, was a long one, filled with important artistic lessons for Abbott. Earlier in the century, her career as a sculptor in the U.S. didn't take off as she'd expected; a move to Paris, France in 1921 landed her a gig as the darkroom assistant to surrealist photographer Man Ray. Under his tutelage, Abbott began taking her own portraits of other avant garde artists. As her skills grew, she eventually became a curator for Eugene Atget's work, whose silver gelatins of France at the turn of the century inspired her to capture the Big Apple with the same sense of awe and timeliness in the series Changing New York. For Abbott the subway rails were more than a novelty. Like the city's burgeoning skyscrapers, they defined the many ways in which the city was stepping into the 20th century.
 

Below: more of Abbott's views of New York: Newsstand, East 32nd Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan, Manhattan Bridge, and Central Park Plaza, from Fifth Avenue at 58th Street.
 

Image credit & copyright: Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics, Smithsonian American Art Museum
 

Nobody said it was easy to be good neigh-bors in the wild. Domestic horses are usually docile, but wild ones sometimes live up to their title—as this image by Russian wildlife photographer Andrey Gudkov shows. Gudkov is used to danger, though. He's gained a reputation for journeying deep into jungles, mountains, and war-torn countries to photograph animals in their natural environments. In the image above, two wild, white horses rear onto their hind legs and fight one another, grappling and biting against stark blue water. According to Gudkov, there is an important point to the risks he takes to get his photos: conservation. He told Bored Panda, "Over the past few years, I’ve visited many remote spots on our planet where nature still preserves its primordial beauty, untouched by omnipresent technical progress and globalization… but the world around us is changing catastrophically fast and a wildlife photographer’s mission is to attempt to show and impress upon people the disappearing, rare beauty and multiplicity of life forms that modern humanity can still meet with in the world." A worthwhile goal, indeed.
 

Below: two more of Gudkov's wildlife photos.
 

Image credit & copyright: Andrey Gudkov
 

Yikes, don't look down! Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, taken in September 1932, is one of the most iconic images of the 20th Century. For its ubiquitous appeal, few actually know the story—or rather the mystery—behind it. In the photo, 11 construction workers sit casually atop a skyscraper beam at New York City's Rockefeller Center. The men casually talk, smoke, and read newspapers while their legs dangle miles above the city. Although Lunch Atop a Skyscraper gained instant fame upon its debut in the New York Herald-Tribune, it was published without photographer credit, meaning that no one knew who had taken it! It wasn't until 2003 that the conundrum was solved. Charles C. Ebbets, who was known for taking photos of New Yorker's everyday lives, was finally credited as the photographer when his estate was sold. Among the evidence were original work orders showing invoices to Rockefeller Center at the time the photo was published, letters of recommendation from his work at Rockefeller Center, and a copy of the original article from the NY Herald Tribune in his own scrapbook of his work. It's always nice to give credit where credit is due, even if it's 70 years late!

Below: a video about the history behind the famous photo.
 

Elton John wasn't the only one to memorialize "England's rose." In this photo, taken on September 1, 1997, dozens of mourners paid their respects in roses to Diana, Princess of Wales, the day after she was killed in a car crash. In the aftermath of the beloved royal's death, British mourners began leaving heaps of flowers at royal residences and places Diana frequented across England. In the photo above, a young mourner, in casual clothing, looks for a place to set his bouquet of red flowers, outside the black and gold gate of Buckingham Palace in London. It's estimated that, in the weeks following this photo, around 60 million flowers, weighing between 10 to 15 tons total, were left for Diana. Workers at Kensington and Buckingham palaces began removing the blooms from the gates every two days, only for them to be replaced with fresh flowers almost immediately. Talk about love and devotion.
 

Below: Diana's memorial flowers outside Kensington Palace, as seen from above.
 

Image credit & copyright: AP Photo/Jerome Delay/Getty Images
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

As the kids head back to school, one has to wonder why they had so much time off in the first place. This 1939 image by Marion Post Wolcott shows a group of children walking home from school in rural North Carolina. For much of American history, the nine-month school year has been attributed to the agrarian calendar. Even public officials like former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cite farming families as the reason for the school year as we know it. In recent years, it's become clear this idea is a misconception. Turns out rural families needed kids to help plant crops in the spring and harvest them in the fall; wealthy urban families were, in fact, the ones less likely to have their kids in school during the summer because they traditionally vacationed then to escape the city heat. Some community leaders also discouraged summer schooling out of concern about disease spreading in overheated city classrooms. In the early 1900s, rural schools started getting their calendars in line with urban school districts, and we've stuck to that schedule ever since. Next time the kids complain about heading back to school, remind them they don't have to harvest barley or corn come October.
 

Image credit: Library of Congress

That's not the Sun coming up, it's the Earth! On August 23, 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1, the first American robotic spacecraft to orbit the moon, took this stunning photo of Earth rising above the lunar surface, partially obscured by shadow. It was the first photo of Earth taken on the Moon, and one can make out individual continents, swirls of clouds, and the vast oceans on our planet's surface. Unfortunately, while the black and white, aptly-titled Earthrise was by far the best photo of Earth taken from space at the time, it's pretty low-resolution by modern standards. NASA had a plan: in 2008, they launched the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, meant to recover the image's full resolution from Lunar Orbiter 1. First, NASA obtained the original (and last surviving) FR-900 data tapes from the mission. They then restored the tape drives using a mix of 1960s and modern equipment. The result is a high-definition image of our planet from over 200,000 miles away. Guess this proves that it's never too late to dust up an old photo and make it shine like new!
 

Below: another image from Lunar Orbiter 1, before restoration.
 

Image credit & copyright: NASA
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

This August marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in elections. The fight to get the vote wasn't an easy one, though; for example, in January of 1917, the National Woman's Party began picketing the White House in a six-month-long effort to rally for a woman's right to vote. Holding purple, white, and gold banners, women from various social backgrounds gathered to call out President Woodrow Wilson, who effectively broke through the picket line without acknowledging the protesters during his March 4th inauguration. The demonstrations were seen as an embarrassment to the nation during World War I, when principles of freedom and democracy were being fought for abroad, but repressed at home. Photos taken at this time are described by the Library of Congress as images from the first White House picket line, and are evidence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's powerful words: that "the history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality."
 

Below: Another view of the suffragettes picket line outside the White House.
 

Image credit & copyright: Library of Congress
 

When it came to the U.S. suffragist movement, Alice Paul was a superstar! Her activism had a large hand in the crafting of the 19th Amendment, which allowed women to vote and was ratified on this day in 1920. In the weeks leading up, Paul developed a ritual: every time a state voted in favor of the amendment, she sewed a star to the banner which flew outside the National Women's Party headquarters, in Washington, D.C. In the photo above, Paul (far left) triumphantly sews the 36th star on the banner, surrounded by other members of the National Women's Party. That star represented Tennessee, the final state needed to ratify the amendment with a three-fourths majority. It also represented over 100 years of work by activists advocating for women's voting rights. Prior to this photo, Paul had been arrested for picketing on the White House lawn, and beaten for engaging in hunger strikes while imprisoned. Her home was even attacked at one point, forcing her to move. Thanks to her tireless dedication, though, women's rights won out in the end!
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Everybody deserves a fighting chance. That could have easily been the theme of Wayne Miller's photo essay for Magnum Photos, The Way of Life of the Northern Negro. Working with two Guggenheim grants, Miller set out on a three-year effort to document the lives of African Americans living in Chicago's South Side from 1946 to 1948. Many of his subjects had fled the South during the Great Migration in order to escape lynchings and find industrial jobs in the North—only to discover they would once again become subject to the effects of segregation. Miller's ultimate goal with his black and white portraits was "to explain man to man," which led him to take this one, of a boy practicing boxing. The ring was located at Eddie Nichols Gymnasium at 50th and State, a spot where "The Brown Bomber" and world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis worked out. It was a fitting way to show that even though Miller's subjects lived under difficult circumstances, throwing in the towel on their stories was not an option.
 

Below: more photos from Miller's photo essay on Chicago's Black Belt: a girl reads Ebony magazine, huddling together in a pool hall for warmth, and shoveling scrap metal.
 

Image credit & copyright: Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos
 

Like many facilities around the world, the Ballesol Puig i Fabra nursing home in Barcelona, Spain, is tentatively reopening to visitors during COVID-19, but with a new normal: plastic sheets through which residents can hug their loved ones. The couple in this photo, Augustina Cañamero and Pascual Pérez, her husband of 59 years, embrace through the plastic cover, dressed in long gloves and face masks that allow them to safely "kiss" through the screen. Cañamero and Pérez have become somewhat famous since their photo was included in AP photographer Emilio Morenatti's series from the nursing home. The couple had been separated for 102 days during the worst of Spain's COVID-19 outbreak, with Cañamero living at home and Pérez living in the nursing home. It was the longest they had ever spent apart—so no one could argue that they didn't earn their PDA!

 

Below: two more photos of embracing loved ones by Emilio Morenatti.
 

Image credit & copyright: Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters
 

"Spit spreads death!" read the signs on Philadelphia streetcars in 1918. Under the grip of a deadly influenza breakout that killed over 50 million people globally, across the nation lawmakers initiated campaigns to encourage everyday citizens to wear preventive masks. The above photo was taken in the U.S. Navy hospital in Mare Island, California, where Corpsmen made preparations to attend to the ill. Earlier that year, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article calling those who refused to wear masks "dangerous [slackers]," the same language used for those who refused to support World War I efforts. From baseball players to telephone operators, people considered it their patriotic duty to protect their health and that of others. In spite of some gripes about closing down schools and large sporting events at the time, masks that were properly produced and worn did slow the spread of influenza at the time. We even get our habits of sneezing and coughing into handkerchiefs from this era! It seems good manners, good hygiene, and goodwill towards others go hand in hand during any pandemic.
 

Below: more photos of mask-wearing citizens in 1918 from around the world.
 

Image credit & copyright: U.S. Navy, Underwood And Underwood, Bettmann Archive, National Archives, Getty Images
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Splish, splash, SPLOSH! In 2011, 9,000 Kentucky University students gathered to pelt each other with 175,000 water balloons, but sadly, balloon-o-phile Edward Horsford missed out on the big one. The high-speed photographer specializes in suspending the gravity-defying moment when a water balloon's membrane retracts and releases its blobby bowels—but the secret to Horsford's photography technique lies not in H2O, but in lighting. For the photo above, he waited until nightfall before aiming two intersected lights over his hand, so even his fingers showed as no more than silhouettes. And as for the impeccable timing, Horsford set his camera for a one-to-two-second increment of exposure and rigged it to a microphone, so it flashed right as it detected the audio from the balloon's pop. But let's get to brass tacks: how does Horsford choose to gush his rubber globules? With the classic needle method, of course. Now that we think about it, maybe it's for the best that a needle-wielding, balloon-stabbing Horsford missed the Kentuckian balloon brawl after all!
 

Below: more of Horsford's unraveling balloons.
 

Image credit & copyright: Edward Horsford
 

Wait, are fish flying over those mountains? This aquascape was designed and photographed in an aquarium by famed Japanese landscape photographer Takashi Amano, who passed away on this day in 2015. Here, rocks and small plants have been arranged to resemble mountains, trees, and bushes. Even the photo's lighting, which includes a bright focal point near the top of the frame, mimics the sun in the sky. The school of grey fish, with their long fins slightly blurred, could also be mistaken for a flock of birds. Amano was a famously meticulous photographer: his images were captured with large-format cameras and films (up to 8x20 inches). The film would then be vacuumed to maintain flatness and prevent blurring. The room environments surrounding the tanks were often covered in black, to prevent unintentional lighting. In addition to forming the aquarium company Aqua Design Amano, which sells supplies for creating aquascapes, Amano the photographer forever changed ideas about how nature photography could and should look. People even refer to one species of shrimp as "Amano shrimp", because of how often Amano photographed them. Talk about leaving a mark in your field (or aquarium)!
 

Below: a video in which Amano describes creating his largest aquascape, Primeval Forest, plus two more of his aquascape photos.
 

Image credit & copyright: Takashi Amano
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

We could have sworn this strange creature just landed on our planet. Turns out it's homegrown! Spanish photographer Javier Rupérez uses macro photography to create these unsettling images of jumping spiders in his hometown of Almáchar, Spain. Jumping spiders have eight eyes, the two in front being the largest. An iridescent layer behind their eyes makes it easier to see in the dark and hunt for food at night. Rupérez noticed how bizarre their eyes looked and captured them with an unusual technique: he took several images of each spider, moving his camera a tiny amount each time. The images were then merged digitally, the end result a three-dimensional feel that does these eerie creatures justice. These alien look-a-likes will help us bide our time until first contact!
 

Below: More of Rupérez's startling spider images.
 

Image credit & copyright: Javier Rupérez/Solent News and Photography