“Animal Logic: Photography and Installation by Richard Barnes presents a mid-career survey of the work of acclaimed New York and San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes. Barnes’s work looks critically at both the natural world and the ways in which we attempt to institutionalize and classify nature within museums.” (from the Cranbrook Art Museum website).

Richard Barnes statement about this series is… coming soon.

Artist statement :

“In my work I have long been concerned with collection, curation and display and in the transition of objects from their original site to the museum and what happens to them along the way in the process. The passage of time affects meaning, adding value to an artifact in some cases and taking it away in others. Plaster casts of the stone tools in this installation heading towards a kind of extinction through the act of being de-accessioned are displayed beneath a photograph of a recently excavated prehistoric skeletal whale in the process of being cast. I am interested in these connections and disconnections.” (read more by visiting the whole series)

About Richard Barnes:

“Richard Barnes divides his time between commissioned work and personal projects. He looks at architecture as artifact and, placing it within the context of archaeology, challenges our conceptions of the way we inhabit and represent the built environment. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Harvard Photographic Archive. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize for 2005-06.” (read a whole lote more)

See the same photo over at the Online Archive of California (host of the Dorothea Lange Collection, 1919-1965).

“Included in the museum’s archive are approximately 2,500 prints and over 2,000 negatives by Lange dated from 1935 to 1939 when she worked for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). […] In the summer of 1935, Lange transferred from SERA to the newly formed Resettlement Administration (RA), established in May 1935 by the executive order of Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. The RA.s mandate was to ease the nation.s rural poverty through programs that included low-interest loans to farmers, land-renewal projects, and the resettlement and rehabilitation of the rural poor. Lange was hired as the only photographer investigator to work for the western regional office in Berkeley and on national assignments as designated. Concurrently, Taylor was appointed as a regional labor advisor in the same office. Together they were responsible for a five-state region including California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico , and Utah.” (more).

“Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.” (learn more about Dorothea Lange on Wikipedia).

About the book:

“Burns is an ophthamlic surgeon, but his true passion is vintage photography. He has assembled a collection of more than half a million images and has authored or coauthored works on memorial photography, medical photography, and hand-colored daguerreotypes. Here he presents 127 images in as many pages and then another 50 or so pages of notes, providing specifics of the photographs and extensive discussion of the condition or medical practices shown. More than a few gruesome images are included, though the warm tones of the printing and the antique dress have an anesthetizing effect on the viewer. There are also a good number of images depicting obsolete mid-19th-century practices. The chronological arrangement does impart a sense of progress as we move from images of horrible deformity through pictures of amputation during the Civil War to photos of reparative surgery following World War I. This stunning documentation of a world-class collection belongs not only where there is an interest in the history of photography but also in medical teaching and history collections.” (Amazon)

About the Wikipedia Knowledge Dump:

“From the bold to the beautiful, from the wicked to the wise, every day the Wikipedia team relegates possibly “inappropriate” submissions to the garbage dump of time. Here, we make selected “potential” rejects immortal and preserve them for posterity. (All of these entries have been nominated for deletion at the time of posting.)”

The site is edited by Cliff Pickover. According to himself, he’s “a prolific author and futurist, having published more than 40 books, translated into over a dozen languages. Exploring topics ranging from computers and creativity to art, mathematics, parallel universes, Einstein, time travel, alien life, religion, dimethyltryptamine elves, and the nature of human genius” (Official website). He’s the author of such books as Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves (2005) and Jews in Hyperspace.

Here’s what you may find while browsing this knowledge dumpster:

• A list of Celebrity Laser Eye Patients
• An article on drunk blogging
• A list of songs about hair
• A list of fictional worms
• An article about the difficulty of having sexual intercourse with a mermaid
• A list of bands beginning with the word “lemon”
• An article about The Chickenology Encyclopedia : a compilation of answers to the question “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
• A list of notable moustaches in art and fiction
• An article about the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln
• An article about human cheese
• A list of Homer Simpson’s lifelong dreams
• Last but not least, let’s not forget the list of people who died in the bathroom.

Discovered via Doctorak, GO!

Learn more about cabinet of curiousities. Think of them as antique tumblelogs.

Artist statement (here):

“Unabomber: Ted Kaczynski, our home grown philosopher/terrorist, serving life in prison for crimes either committed out of dedication to a cause, or madness or both, had not only been extracted from his rural home but the home itself has been incarcerated. The cabin was shipped across the country to be used as evidence in his trial. My work looks at historical and contemporary artifacts (in this case the cabin and its site), and using the imagery and methods of architecture /archaeology it attempts to bridge the gap between the banal and the extraordinary, the cult of celebrity and the seductiveness of the infamous. This work was exhibited at the Henry Urbach Gallery in New York in January 1999, traveled to the Triannual of Photography in Hamburg, Germany in May of 1999 and was the subject of a one person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art in August of 2000.”

This photo is part of the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection hosted by The Library of Congress (perm. link). The collection can be searched by keywords and by subjects.

Overview of the collection: “The Gottscho-Schleisner Collection is comprised of over 29,000 images primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures. Subjects are concentrated chiefly in the northeastern United States, especially the New York City area, and Florida. Included are the homes of notable Americans, such as Raymond Loewy, and of several U.S. presidents, as well as color images of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Many of the photographs were commissioned by architects, designers, owners and architectural publications, and document important achievements in American 20th-century architecture and interior design.”

More about Samuel H. Gottscho: “The Gottscho-Schleisner collection is the work of two architectural photographers, Samuel H. Gottscho [1875 - 1971] and William H Schleisner [1912 - 1962]. Samuel Gottscho acquired his first camera in 1896. From 1896 to 1920 he photographed part time specializing in houses and gardens as he particularly enjoyed nature, country scenes and landscapes.” (read more). Learn more on Wikipedia.