Due to a mistake on the "historical you tubes" thread from Triceratops I put as compensation some historical photographs from the American Civil War from a National Geographic site I receive nearly each day:

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/civil-war-photos-traveler/?source=email_places#/civil-war-harpers-ferry_52864_600x450.jpg



Now I realize that it are nowadays photographs from a photographer freak taken with the old methods and apparatus.

http://www.robertszabo.com/yosemite_article_web.pdf

The real one for Yosemite was Carleton Watkins:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_Watkins

And the real photographers of the American Civil War were, as for instance a Timothy O'Sullivan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographers_of_the_American_Civil_War

And further on the historical photographs of that war:

http://www.civil-war.net/cw_images/

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phcw/hd_phcw.htm#slideshow1

http://listverse.com/2008/11/18/top-20-great-us-civil-war-photographs/

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html

My question:

If someone has other historical photographs as for instance the war at the Dardanelles...

Kind regards,

Paul

I made several threads on the BBC messageboards about Albert Kahn and about the Brothers Lumière autochromes and WWI. Tried to find them again via Google Advanced Search but didn't find anything. Searched it again.

http://quitecontinental.net/2012/01/31/world-war-i-in-color-the-autochromes-of-albert-kahn/

http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-color.html

http://www.autochromes.culture.fr/index.php?id=182&L=1

Click on the pictures at the right side to have the whole series...

Kind regards,

Paul.

This web site is replete with aerial photos of Britain 1919 - 1953, perhaps you can help with some of the unidentified ones. http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/
The site was launched today and is struggling under the high volume of traffic so if you have a problem, wait a wee while.

Fox Talbot's photograph of Trafalgar Square, April 1844;

I love the "ghosts" in those old Fox Talbot street scenes. If you look at the advertisements on the hoarding around the building site you can see several on the footpath. London according to Fox's pictures is a city almost devoid of people, just spectres.

Took ages to find the same perspective in a modern view. Not quite modern this one, a postcard from what looks like the 60s or 70s.

Another Fox Talbot ghost, this time of an entire street. His view of Yorkminster in 1845 is up along what was then called Little Blake Street. It was to be only ten years later that all the buildings on the right began to disappear as the Corporation widened this thoroughfare to make what we now know as Duncombe Place. The tall dark building on the extreme left is the presbytery which shielded the Catholic chapel from view (as was the practise at the time). By 1859 the Catholics had become bold enough to develop their property and this (for bearings sake) is now the exact site of St Wilfred's Church.



Edit: I struggled to find a modern view from the same spot. This one is from slightly further back down the street but still illustrates how much demolition the 1850s' widening entailed. St Wilfred's spire can be seen on the left.



Anyone know what school those poor unfortunate children belong to? The board should be lined up and shot!

This is another one that's gone. It's the Hungerford Pedestrian Bridge,designed by Brunel, and in operation from 1845 until it was taken over the the railway and became Charing Cross Bridge.

Photo is again one of Fox Talbot's [from 1845]

I'm not sure but that one hasn't actually improved as a view of late.

The smell will have improved as the old photo was taken before Bazelguette's sewerage system was built,so the river probably stank something terrible.

The earliest known photograph of Abe Lincoln,circa 1846

Antoine Claudet's portrait of the Duke Of Wellington 1844;

This is one of my own favourites - one of the earliest photos of Dublin it shows the then fashionable Hardwick Street framing St George's Church and a few toffs out promenading for the occasion:




And here it is around 2006 - having survived delapidation, being tenement infested, being razed to the ground, being corporation flattened (as they say in Dublin), being a drugs and paramilitary haven, and now on the way back to being a des res part of the city (only a stone's throw from O'Connell Street):

This link is to a collection of photographs of Napoleon's veterans, taken in the 1850s

http://library.brown.edu/collections/askb/veterans.php

This website - so obviously a labour of love on the part of its author, a descendant of the subject - is dedicated to the life of an illiterate painter in Lambeth in the 1800s. The pictures, maps and photos are fascinating.

James Partleton

This is the entrance to London Docks - through which generations of hopefuls walked daily by the thousand, the majority never knowing whether they would actually be hired to work or not that day. (Note the masts in the background).



By 1980 the area was as derelict as the lives of those who for so long the docks sustained.



And by 2012 had been subsumed into our modern version of hope versus reality. (Note the "To Let" signs in the background).

The Partleton story is fascinating, well worth the effort that must have gone into it.

This is a youtube of stills from the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Some have been colourised;

Arguably the most famous war photograph ever taken, Joe Rosenthal's picture of US Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima;

Hadrian's Arch and the Temple of Zeus, Athens 1845



And today. Couldn't find one taken from exactly the same spot but it is close enough. You can see the old 1896 Olympic Staduim just behind and to the left of the Temple, which is also missing in the first.

Depression era photographer, Lewis Hine, came up with this famous photo during the construction of the Empire State Building

While we're doing historical photos then these two must be included. The first, by Joseph Nicephore Niepce from 1826, is regarded as the first true photograph. His "View From the Window at Le Gras" used an eight hour exposure (hence the sunlight hitting the buildings on both sides) and was taken using a camera obscura directing light onto a pewter plate coated with "Bitumen of Judea", a petroleum derivative.



The second, "Boulevard de Temple" and taken by Daguerre in 1838, is regarded as the first ever photograph of a human being. While the street itself was busy with traffic and people, the 10 minute exposure rendered everyone all but invisible and it therefore looks deserted. The exception, if you look closely, was that man on the footpath at the street corner in the foreground who was getting his shoes polished and stayed still long enough to be seen.

Whereas this one, Robert Cornelius's "Self Portrait" from 1839, is regarded as the first ever intentional image of a human being. Cornelius worked in his father's silver plating and polishing business, and as a young man set about refining the daguerrotype process so that it could be used commercially. He took this outside his father's shop as an experiment in exposure times.



Cornelius was encouraged enough by the results to open two of the world's first photographic studios specialising in portraiture, but he soon tired of the whole thing and spent the rest of his life making a fortune after having converted his dad's business into one of America's first gas companies.

Might it be argued that the Turin Shroud is the first evidence of a photographic process?

Heliographic imaging was a well known technique prior to photography and for centuries people had experimented with different substances which could be used to achieve the effect. Photography, which captures the image in positive form, either through a double or direct process, combined the known results obtained from some of these substances and materials with the principle of directing and focusing light, a camera obscura technique.

Much is written about the Turin Shroud, but the technique of selective bleaching through a natural interaction between sunlight and selectively coated materials using combinations of reactive and inert agents (heliographic imaging) was around and well understood at the time the shroud seems likely to have been produced.

The first aerial photographs were taken by the Frenchman, Felix Nadar [ Gaspard-Felix Tournachon] over Paris in 1858. Unfortunately, none of them have survived. The earliest aerial photograph still in existence was taken from a tethered balloon at a height of 630 metres over Boston on the 13th October 1860 by J W Black and S A King

A disconsolate looking Winston Churchill, standing on the right slightly apart from the others, after being taken prisoner during the Boer War;



and who's this cheeky chappy;



it's Gefreiter Adolf Schickelgruber, before he had a Charlie Chaplin moustache

Meanwhile in Russia, Uncle Joe gets picked up by the Okrhana;

Going off to war?........revolutionary activities?.........not for me, I've just graduated from Harvard, says FDR;



Another corporal planning a career in politics......wrong choice, Benito, should have gone into the pizza business;

9th August 1942, the Battle of Savo Island, an unusual photo showing a ship [USS Quincy] trapped in searchlights;

There is still a controversy as to whether this photograph, "The Falling Soldier" by Robert Capa, was faked or not;

This one, however, certainly isn't faked. It is only one of eleven [out of 106 taken] of Capa's D-Day photographs to survive.. the others being lost by an over anxious lab tech;



Soldiers of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st US Division, taking shelter behind a "hedgehog" on Omaha Beach

Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of General Nguyen Loan executing Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem on 1st February 1968;

nordmann wrote:

I love the "ghosts" in those old Fox Talbot street scenes..... London according to Fox's pictures is a city almost devoid of people, just spectres.

Ah, but not all early photos contain "just spectres". Here's a very well attended Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, taken in April 1848 by William Kilburn (b&w but hand tinted). Judging by the lack of spectres and a general abscence of blurring I'm guessing an exposure time of about only one second at most. I find that quite impressive for an open air "panoramic" photo taken in 1848.

So that's why London was empty. Everyone was down at the Common!

Indeed. And for a gathering of "revolutionaries" it is rather surprising to see them all - at least the men anyway - neatly turned out in top hats and frock coats!

How times have changed - the revolting masses just aren't what they used to be, eh?

I'm a bit surprised to see a camera crew from Norway's TV2 station in amongst them!

What's interesting is the large crowd in the far distance who seem to be assembled spectating rather than participating in the event. Or was it that Kennington Common ran a schedule of monster rallies and that these are those waiting to welcome the victorious Team GB back from Much Wenlock and waiting for their 3 o'clock slot? (The Chartists appear to have their hired busses ready and waiting in the foreground to "chart" them off to their next rally through the deserted streets to Hyde Park).

15 August 1961, border guard Conrad Schumann jumps the barbed wire that made up the Berlin Wall at this point;

Conrad lived to see the reunification of his country and died tragically in the lovely little village of Oberemmendorf, near Regensburg where I once lived, in 1998. His suicide, some said, was the result of depression which started when he realised upon returning home in 1989 for the first time since his defection that there were many old friends and relatives who were still openly critical of his action and refused to have anything to do with him.

Interesting that some  East Germans thought he was in the wrong.


This is another Pulitzer winner, taken by Kevin Carter in a Sudan Refugee Camp in March 1993;

Everybody will remember this one, taken by Jeff Widener of Associated Press in Tiananmen Square, 1989;

This year being the centenary of Scott's last expedition to the Antarctic;



from the left,standing, Oates,Scott and Evans: sitting,Bowers and Wilson

Missed the anniversary by a couple of days, Warsaw Pact forces move into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, ending the Prague Spring;

Oh Trike, that brings back memories. Indeed it's probably my first real memory of current events outside my own cosy childhood world. I was in the garage helping my dad and I remember clearly my mother rushing in to say she'd just heard on the wireless that Russia had invaded Csechoslovakia. My father said something like: "oh no here we go again, it's just like with Hitler". And I, although just eight years old, picked up on their sense of dismay and, knowing how they had both suffered in the second war, promptly burst into tears!

Another one we missed :

22 August 1485 - The Battle of Bosworth, when, depending on your loyalties, either that usurper King Richard III was defeated by the rightful King Henry VII.... or that usurper King Henry VII defeated the rightful King Richard III.

Oops I think that should be in the "On this day", thread... I got carried away reminiscencing ... although Bosworth Field? No, I'm not that old, honestly.

Meles, I've got a vague memory of seeing an interview with Robert Vaughn around this time. He had been in Czechoslovakia filming The Bridge at Remagen when the Warsaw Pact armies suddenly arrived and the cast and crew had to bolt back West. The Soviets probably blamed them for invading!!!

Bit short on photos of Dick III

These got completely missed as well;




Hiroshima on the left, Nagasaki on the right

I'm spoilt for choice among this lot
http://www.retronaut.co/category/1800s/
but I can't can't resist this suggestion for A halloween costume. 40 guineas! surely not?

Thanks a lot for this URL with photographs, Ferval.

I saw them all.

Cheers, Paul.

The Ghosts of History, a collection of then and now photographs

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hab3045/collections/72157629378669812/

24 October 1946, a V2 rocket, launched from the White Sands base, takes the first photograph of Earth from space;

Photographs of early 20C Egypt bought to life in colour

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-rare-images-egypt-1849-brought-life-color

Islanddawn,

thank you very much for these photographs. When you click on the "sources" underneath the series there is a lot of information more as about the magic lantern as for instance from the Victorian age...

Kind regards from your friend,

Paul.