“Welcome to the Comic Blog Elite toplist, a resource for fans, creators, retailers, and publishers to identify the very best comic blogs on the net — based on actual site hits”

The Comic Blog Elite is moderated by Matt Bergin from Division 18:

“Matt has been making comics all his life… but mostly in crayon on construction paper, and later in the margins of notebooks when he should’ve been studying. Eventually, Matt started working as an editor in the health communications industry (fun!), but managed to squeeze in time during the 9 to 5 grind to work on his comics, make more talented friends, and, ultimately, make comics with those more talented friends. He was even able to fit in contributing to the comics website PopCultureShock.com, where he hooked up with the Silent Devil crew. Thus, through blatant professional misconduct, Division 18 and a genuine comics career were born.”(more)

“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)