September 2009 Archives
Tom's Shoes has received a lot of well-deserved attention for its buy-one-give-one strategy, but it's far from the first store to use charity as a branding strategy.
Above: an ad for the Omar Effendi department store from 1946. I'll let the original uploader and a commenter explain what's up:
Kodak Agfa, uploader: An old [ad] for Omar Effendi department store in 1946, praising King Farouk and the Bare feet project, where the rich launced a compagin to gather donation to the low classes in Egypt , it took that name , because some of these classes then did not afford buy something to wear in their feet and thus the name.
I think it was a stupid provoking name.
Commenter: No it is a proof that they were sensitive about the human condition by that time after 1952 they made us eat our shoes.
Today was one of those days where I had old media on my mind, so I took my camera and tracked the dotted lines to snap images of things I'd noticed on my daily walks.
The video above is something I've wanted to try for a while. On the repurposed Hudson River pier just south of Pier 54, there are some old installed binoculars with dusty interior lenses. I noticed that the my camera would fit in an eyepiece, and I thought the resulting image just might look like some of the old photos & films I've seen from the nineteenth & early twentieth centuries.
Et voila. Circular diffusion, gauzy images, faded color and harsh sound--it's several decades of early photographic experimentation distilled into one thirty-five second movie.
Below: a look back at the City from the Hudson in 1903. The piers below--those that survive--have been or will be remade into recreational areas, with playgrounds, greenspace, seating or entertainment complexes.
Here's a fascinating set of photos documenting Asgarda, a group of women who have formed their own alternate society "based on the the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology."
Jezebel has an excellent roundup of information regarding Asgarda, including this excellent first-person account from the photographer.
An iron fence on W. 21st St. in New York depicts the classic image of a rocket crashing into the Man in the Moon from Melies' 1902 pioneering science fiction film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The fence is across from the Clinton School of the Arts, and I happened to snap this photo during lunch break. After I was done shooting about 10 or so photos, I noticed that a crowd of kids had surrounded me and continued talking about the image as I walked away.
Soooo, educator that I am, I went back and asked if any of them knew what it was. None of them did, but they agreed that it was "awesome" and wondered if the thing in his eye might be a bullet. I explained about the Melies film, its history, and what the image was supposed to be, all of which the kids said was even more awesome, so they asked me to repeat the title so they could watch the film on Youtube.
Highlight of my day, that.
Barclays Bank is a multibillion dollar multinational financial institution. Above: a group of employees dance on the streets to raise money for charity.
Click through to read the text from this 1962 ad, which touts the social benefit of nonprofit consumer-owned electricity co-ops. The word "forgotten" as used here has a fascinating lineage, from "forgotten men" as a descriptor of the homeless/jobless during the Depression to "forgotten Americans" in rural America. Nixon & the Republicans would pick up on this rhetoric in 1968, decrying how mainstream America had been forgotten by urban elites.
Woodcuts have a long tradition of use as means of promoting social justice. They were a particularly popular organizational tool in the early twentieth century. As Thomas Mann observed in his introduction to Frans Masereel's Passionate Journey, the wordless woodcut served as a universal language, capable of uniting people in thought and action across otherwise impermeable cultural boundaries.
The image above is from Lynd Ward's Wild Pilgrimage, a classic meditation on the pursuit of social justice for ordinary workers. In this woodcut, the story's protagonist struggles against factory guards at a labor rally.
David Berona and Peter Kuper offer a useful overview of this tradition in Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels.