This man is named Pinkhus Karlinskii. This color photograph of him was shot when he was 84 years old, in 1909.
Pinkhus Karlinskii, ca. 1909. (Click to enlarge.)
Think that through for a minute. Color photograph of a man born in, most likely, 1825. A contemporary, if just barely, of Beethoven and Jefferson.
He may be the earliest-born person ever photographed in color, and the backstory is this: The photo is one of a series shot by a man named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, using an experimental system that exposed three glass plates through red, green and blue filters. Project those three onscreen at once, or combine scans of them digitally, and you’ve got a superb additive-color image. Prokudin-Gorskii used his system for ethnography, shooting in the provinces that eventually became parts of the Soviet Union, documenting native life, and those plates are now held by the Library of Congress. They are fantastic social records, as much as they are technological tours de force. Here’s another one, of a Bukharan emir in full resplendent dress (click for full size):
28 Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan), ca. 1910.
A big set of them appears here.
Not earth-shattering technology, I grant you. But an extremely nifty little object: the Polaroid Instant Tripod, Model 2328, offered as an accessory in SX-70’s heyday. There’s a hanging loop, presumably in case some poor benighted soul chooses to keep it dangling from his belt. The head is a ball-and-socket arrangement, tightened and loosened by turning the key-like loop. Logotype is in News Gothic, of course, though the type’s a little squished, and, in smaller letters, it says “Made in Japan.” When closed, the whole thing is about the size of a pencil case, or one of those extra-compact automatic umbrellas.
The umbrella analogy is apt, in fact, because when you press a little silver button near one end…
… three pronglike legs spring out with a snap, and you’ve got yourself a nifty tabletop tripod. Very stable and rigid, because the legs are fixed.
Fourteen bucks on eBay, and it’s money well spent, if you ask me. I spent a solid five minutes yesterday just popping the thing open and closing it back up. Also, it’s small enough to fit inside the camera case I often carry, or my work bag if I am traveling light.
From (as the Car Talk guys say) the Shameless Commerce division: I’ve added a Buy the Book link on this page, over at the right side. Preorders welcome! Official release is October 3.
I’m also excited about the two endorsements on the book jacket, which also appear on the Amazon page. I am extremely grateful to these two gents for the kind words:
“Edwin Land was one of Steve Jobs’s first heroes, and this book shows why. He created a startup in a garage that grew into a company that stood at the intersection of creativity and technology. This is a fascinating saga, both inspiring and cautionary, about innovation and visionary leadership.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
“When I was little, long before personal computers, let alone Instagram-enabled digital camera-phones, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. By far the most uncanny, sexy, insanely great piece of technological magic in our household was my parents’ Polaroid. Chris Bonanos’ smart, thoughtful, charming chronicle of that iconic invention and its remarkable inventor is a delight.”
—Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers and Heyday, host of public radio’s Studio 360
Another Polaroid-a-day site, and a good one. It’s a Tumblr based in the Czech Republic, and it’s all waist-up Polaroid shots, shirtless (though not necessarily nude), shot on Fuji/Polaroid pack film. The proprietor (unnamed, mysterious) posts one per day. Most are sexy but not NSFW (though a few may cross the line, depending on what your IT department approves of). No names, no locations, just faces and torsos. Site is here; send submissions to if you’d like to be considered for a portrait, e-mail portraitdaily@gmail.com. They have a Facebook page, too, and I enjoy seeing the daily hit in my News Feed.
Yes, I am a huge Polaroid geek. And I am also a typography geek, so I need no excuse to offer up a little celebration of Polaroid’s longtime logo typeface: News Gothic.
A 1977 rendering of Polaroid’s logo, via Paul Giambarba’s blog (link below).
It was created by the great type designer Morris Fuller Benton in 1908 for ATF, and its clean crisp lines were probably most popular in the mid-century modern era, before Helvetica swamped the design world. I happen to like it better than Helvetica: the lowercase, especially, looks more graceful to me, and the slightly narrowed letters mean you can fit more text on a line. Here’s the sample provided by Wikipedia:
When Paul Giambarba used it for Polaroid’s new logo in 1957, he chose it, he says, because it was “the only decent sans-serif face available to us at the time.” (In that predigital era, a font was a big expensive pile of steel matrices and lead slugs, and designers had far fewer faces available than your average Macintosh now offers.) It was a vast improvement on the messed-up Memphis logo that preceded it, that’s for sure. Bill Field, the master of Polaroid’s design work in the 1960s and early 1970s, used News Gothic in a thousand ways, and, with help from Giambarba, made it a central part of the SX-70 product identity.
For some reason, though, the lettering that’s front-and-center on the SX-70 camera itself is Helvetica. That’s a weird choice, since it was so prominent, and I think I know why. Field often battled small fiefdoms within Polaroid that didn’t want to give up nonstandard letterheads and the like, and I suspect that’s what happened here.
News Gothic is once again somewhat fashionable, after a couple of decades under the radar. It’s in the logotype of Morgan Stanley, seen here in Times Square:
And in Michael Bierut’s visual identity for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, seen here on BAM’s Website:
And it lingers on the façade of St. Vincent’s Hospital, recently closed, in Greenwich Village:
And shows up on the covers of two albums by Patti Smith, one of which has a title that I suspect is no coincidence:
And let us not forget maybe the most visible moment News Gothic ever had, when it appeared on movie screens in 1977 (and forever after):
Plus, of course, it appears in the logotype at the top of this very Web page. It has a significant presence in my book, too (visuals to be revealed shortly).
Polaroid’s designers slowly evolved away from News Gothic in the late seventies, first for more Helvetica and eventually for a new custom logo whose typeface is unclear. It’s custom-drawn, maybe (according to some online speculation) based on a typeface called Frutiger.
It’s not bad, either, but the old one still looks cooler to me.
Fidel, con Polaroid. (Click to enlarge.)
A few days ago, I posted this awesome photo of Fidel Castro con Polaroid, asking if anyone could identify it. (Eelco Wolf, a former Polaroid executive, has been trying to ID the source.)
Well: Marion Birringer, from the Impossible Project’s European offices, tweeted the photo for me, and one of her followers spotted a reference on a German Website that showed a similar photo in an issue of National Geographic. I tracked down the issue itself (January 1977), which had the photographer’s name and agency listed, and that was that. The man with the camera was a writer-photographer named Fred Ward, who went to Cuba for NatGeo and delivered a really good extensive story, and later expanded it into a book. Today, if I read my Google results right, he’s cultivated a new specialty: luscious close-up photographs of gems. (Castro must’ve left him feeling pro-capitalist.) I can’t reproduce the NatGeo story here, for reasons of copyright, but if you happen to be in the library one day soon, it’s worth pulling it off the shelf.
Here’s a site where you can buy fine-art prints of his Castro pictures.
BUY THE BOOK
Available in many bookstores, online and off-. Click the photo to order from my local, the Strand Book Store.
BUY THE OTHER BOOK
WATCH THE TRAILER
On Vimeo: click the image to view.
