NYCHA Photo Exhibit

There is a fantastic exhibit of photographs in the New York City Housing Authority Collection up here. It includes images from the 1930s and 40s of new public housing, as well as some invaluable views of the tenements and neighborhoods that were demolished to make room for them. Look for images of back-lot tenements and old-law tenement interiors, in particular.
It seems this has been up for a while, so belated congratulations to the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at Laguardia Community College for posting these fabulous images.

Boston Public Library Historic Photographs on Flickr

Birthplace of John Adams, Quincy, Mass., taken 1929 by Leon Abdalian, originally uploaded by Boston Public Library.

We’ve become spoiled, and a little jaded, perhaps, by great resources like HABS and the New York Public Library’s on-line image collections but there’s a huge amount of newly digitized historic material still being put on the web. Yesterday, the Boston Public Library posted a fabulous collection of historic photographs on Flickr that deserves attention from architectural historians and others. It includes 781 photographs by Leon Abdalian, an Armenian immigrant who photographed sites in and around Boston between the 1910s and early 1950s. It includes a number of wintry landscape views but most images show significant buildings in the region, including the old and new Massachusetts State houses, Faneuil Hall, Richardson’s Trinity Church, and many many others. For anyone interested in the early architecture of eastern Massachusetts, or the colonial revival in New England, they are a marvelous resource.

At the moment, the images are well captioned but not tagged. It would be fantastic to have them geo-tagged, as well, but having them available digitally is a great start.

I’d love to know more about Abdalian himself, and the circumstances of these photographs. His day job was, apparently, driving a trolley but was he paid to make these expensive glass-plate negatives? If he was a hobbyist, shooting what was of interest, how did he choose his subjects? The buildings in the collection include some of the oldest in the Massachusetts Bay area, though he also recorded some sites that seem to have been of greater historical than architectural interest, like Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the photographs in the collection are predominantly of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century buildings. There are very few images of contemporary architecture, which presumably reflects Abdalian’s preferences but perhaps also says something about the building culture of Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. The few early 20th-century buildings in the collection are predominantly Beaux-Arts civic structures. There is also a very nice series of religious buildings, including Old South Church and Temple Israel Synagogue in Boston, and a series of public monuments.

After you’ve looked over the Abdalian images, don’t miss the BPL’s Boston Stereographs collection.

New in How-To

Today I loaded three new pages of How-To material: one on slide scanning, a second on choosing a digital camera, the third on desktop image-management software. All make for gripping reading.

Flickr as image backup

A good friend is a tenured scholar at a small school that does not routinely provide secure network storage space to its faculty. She described art and architecture students keeping their digital work on USB drives and revealed that her second book manuscript resides on her laptop and, occasionally, gets backed up onto a CD. Her digital images live exclusively on her hard drive.

I have gotten so used to debating the merits of tiffs vs jpegs and worrying about the archivability of word-processing and CAD files that I was astounded to learn that there was a degree-granting institution in North America that doesn’t provide even minimal network storage space to its faculty. Am I hopelessly out of touch? Is this, in fact, common? I do know that there are plenty of unaffiliated scholars (and tiny museums) who have to make do without IT support but I had assumed that network space went along with office space as the minimum provision for university-level teachers in 2008.

What do people recommend for those scholars whose work increasingly depends on digital files but who lack the institutional support to maintain them? Here I would include independent scholars, adjuncts, professors at small schools, and graduate students. This problem is especially acute, I suspect, for those of us who work on visual materials and have personal catalogs of digital photographs numbering in the many thousands.

What I suggested to my friend was, first of all, that she email her manuscript to her husband, so a copy gets onto her and his email servers, where it has a fighting chance. Second, I suggested that she start migrating her digital images to Flickr, which offers unlimited storage of image files under 20MB for $25 per year with its pro accounts. I also suggested she might invest a couple hundred dollars in a RAID backup, though this doesn’t get the files off site.

Is anyone else, besides my friend, losing sleep over this? What other solutions are out there?

And yes, I know about hard-disk recovery solutions, like this one, which saved my bacon once to the tune of $2400. But relying on this as a backup strategy is, well, short-sighted.

Photoethnography blog

In rooting around this morning, I found the following blog, by Karen Nakamura, a cultural anthropologist who uses documentary photography as a key component of her fieldwork. Her site has some very useful discussions of equipment and technique that, though geared primarily to making photographs of people, are also relevant to those of us who shoot buildings.

Her photographs, additionally, are very affecting. Those of us whose work centers on the relationship between buildings and people can learn from the way she presents human activity in particular environments. Look here (select “Top Twelve”) for the photograph of a carpenter at work and an old couple outside their house in Shanghai, for starters.

Faking Pictures in Photoshop

Skeptics about the merits of digital photgraphy for architectural documentation have noted the ease with which images can be manipulated in Photoshop. The classic complaint is that if it’s so easy to remove things like power lines, how can we trust that any digital image is an accurate representation of a building? Well, I suppose we can’t, if somebody is especially determined to pull the wool over our eyes.

This is, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a much larger problem in the sciences, where journal editors, working with the Federal Office of Research Integrity have developed software tools to detect digital fakery in submitted evidence.

I’m reminded of the widespread concern in the 19th century over spirit photography, which cast much doubt over the veracity of photography in general, because its images of ghostly figures seemed so real. The New York trial of William Mumler was an attempt to rescue photography from the stain of fakery and to establish its status as a truthful form of representation and a legitimate, scientific tool (see Michael Leja’s Looking Askance for a full and nuanced account of the Mumler trial and its context) .

For the purposes of documentary architectural photography, it is certainly legitimate to ask what the appropriate limits are to digital manipulation. Is it alright to remove dust spots? What about adjusting color balance? What about cropping and stretching to remove parallax? All of these are easily done (though sometimes time consuming) within Photoshop, which includes tools specifically for this purpose. The “Magic Healing Brush” allows a user to select a spot–a piece of dust in an otherwise spotless blue sky, or a bird, say–and remove it with one click. The crop tool includes a perspective adjustment, which makes it simple to turn buildings that are afflicted with parallax distortion (ie, they look like trapezoids) into perfect upright rectangles. This is to say nothing about adjusting exposure and contrast, or adding sharpening, or creating panoramas, or assembling high-dynamic-range composites.

So what are the acceptable limits to image manipulation for documentary photography (here i refer to images shot digitally, not scans of slides or prints, which require a different, much tighter standard)? Clearly, insisting on preserving the image just as it came from the camera makes little sense. No one has any problem with a film photographer’s choosing a particular film for its highly saturated colors, or a particular chemical bath, or for using a high or low-contrast paper for processing, etc. So clearly, we should be comfortable with a certain amount of manipulation that allows the photographer to present the image as he or she intended to capture it.

I, for one, routinely tweak exposure settings slightly, as well as contrast, and frequently color balance, at least on interior shots, where multiple light sources (flash, incandescent, daylight) complicate color considerably. Since I always shoot in raw format, which produces a soft image, I add some judicious sharpening as well. Sometimes I find that, despite my best efforts to get vertical lines to be vertical, that I have some parallax distortion, as well, and I need to do some minor perspective adjustments. For a discussion of the merits of and means to perspective correction in Photoshop, see this discussion. Finally, when I had a relatively cheap lens, I found that it was almost always necessary, when photographing buildings, to remove pincushion or barrel distortion, a task that is automated by the marvelous ptlens tool (if you need it, get it. There’s nothing better).

That’s really about it. I don’t fiddle around trying to remove power lines, or cars, or people. Every now and then, I might burn in and blur someone’s face but on the whole, I try to get the shot right in the camera, framing my views carefully and adjusting exposure in the field. Here’s one where I was in too much of a hurry and didn’t get it framed right. Cropping the lines out would have removed too much sky, so needless to say, I was sorely tempted to try to zap them. Sometimes, of course, there’s nothing you can do. And a lot of people, it turns out, are actually interested in photographs of power lines.

I should emphasize that all of the adjustments I make tend to be subtle. It quickly becomes obvious when you fuss with an image a lot, and even when manipulations are well done, they tend to call attention to the technique, as opposed to the building. I don’t do perspective adjustments that require distortions of more than 10%, and I try not to do them at all (as David Ames advises, it’s always preferable, when trying to capture a tall building, to frame your shot vertically, but sometimes that’s not enough). Exposure adjustments above about one stop start to reveal and emphasize noise. And trying get rid of people, cars, etc. convincingly is a fool’s errand, unless you’ve got tons of time on your hands (digital image manipulation in the context of architectural documentation is seriously subject to the law of diminishing returns).

So yes, it’s technically possible to fake a photograph of a building, and photorealistic images are now possible of buildings that don’t even exist, thanks to high-end CAD and rendering software, but wouldn’t you rather spend your time doing research, or in the field? I would.

Edit: For what it’s worth, in the most recent New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones discusses Auto-Tune, one of many goodies in the modern music-producer’s tool box, in terms that are analogous to the documentary photographer’s use of Photoshop. The photograph is always a transformation of a thing, in the same way that a recording, even of a live performance, is a transformation. The degree and nature of that transformation varies, but photographs, like recordings, are always mediated.