I am officially dumb-founded by the incredible images in this video.
Click on the "x" to enjoy this in full screen.
Brad Goldpoint combines over 7000 images to create this work of art.
Here's his website.
http://goldpaintphotography.com/
Great images of the Milky Way and the Aurora Borealis, plus mysterious lights which streak across the screen. Meteorites? Airplanes? UFO's? Car headlights? Satellites?
Yesterday I went to eBay and searched on the string "vintage photo." I got 417,368 hits. The first item in that catalog is reproduced above. So many of the subsequent ones were almost as bizarre.
Happy viewing! Please report back here in the Comments with your own best finds!
This photo, with the accompanying caption, ran in papers back in July 1952.
Self-Portrait of a Suicide
A love of photography and a dislike of mice caused a London photographer to rig this trap that caused a mouse to take his own picture and his life at the same time. The trap was wired to the camera so that tripping of the trap mechanism also tripped the camera shutter. The killing spring is about to come down on the neck of the rodent here as its first nibble at the cheese sprung the trap.
In the early 1950s, German photographer Leif Geiges created a series of abstract images in order to try to portray "exactly what the mescaline subject sees and hears during the course of his artificial psychosis" — as Newsweek put it, which ran his images in its Feb 23, 1953 issue. This was before mescaline was made illegal, back when psychiatrists still believed that the experience of taking mescaline approximated the mental state of a schizophrenic and therefore could be of great experimental value.
As for the mescaline imagery itself, Newsweek explained:
On taking mescaline, first there is nausea, but this is soon followed by a derangement of the brain centers of sight and sound, which causes a constant stream of scenes of incredible beauty, color, grandeur, and variety. The contents of the hallucinations always jibe with past experiences; they are wish-fulfilling fantasies (an air pilot sees mechanical dream cities; an ex-archeologist, mythological people and monsters). The form most frequently perceived is a tapestry, such as a wall-paper pattern that breaks into grotesque shapes. Other familiar forms are (1) lattice work of checkerboards, (2) spirals, (3) tunnels, funnels, alleys, and cones. The mescaline action begins 30 minutes after taking and lasts from ten to twelve hours.
"Wallpaper patterns come to life, change to demoniac caricatures, threaten immediate destruction"
Back in June 2010, Chuck posted about a blind photographer, Rosita McKenzie, who was having her work shown at the Edinburgh Art Festival. But apparently Rosita is not unique. There's quite a few blind photographers. Enough for there to be a website devoted to the community of blind photographers, blindphotographers.org. Although the site expands its coverage to include visually-impaired photographers.
There's also an accompanying flickr group: blind photographers. I suspect most of the photos were taken by people who are merely visually impaired. That is, maybe they wear glasses. Because the photos are simply too well composed to have been taken by people who can't see at all what they're doing.
Back in the Civil War era, going to a photographer's studio and getting your portrait taken wasn't cheap. People made sure they were dressed in their finest clothes and looked their best. So why did these men choose to pose with a chicken? It appears to be the same chicken in both shots. Was it a prize chicken? Or just a favorite pet? Unfortunately the backstory to these photos has been lost to time. (via Photo_History on Flickr)
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.