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Stay home, keep calm, & have some fun

Stay home, keep calm, & have some fun

As we struggle with social distancing and quarantine, Blind takes a look at ways of taking our minds off of the pandemic and exploring the world of art. We have hand-picked online activities for all the photography lovers out there!

 Access articles on the history of the camera on Google Arts & Culture

Virtual tours

Whether you are interested in the history of the medium or wish to take a peek behind the scenes, the internet is your gateway to photography around the world., George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, features an online exhibition of Cameras + Fashion, while Street View will take you into the mansion’s historical roomshigh-tech labs (level B1), and the camera vault (level B2).

Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris presents several interactive online exhibitions. Dive into the Dionisio Gonzalez show and prepare to be blown away by the oversized shots of surreal structures in Busan, S. Korea, whimsical edifices in Halong, Vietnam, or eruptions of futuristic architecture in Renaissance Venice. As the labyrinth of galleries comes to a dead-end, don’t miss the screening room! And if you haven’t had enough, prolong your visit on the artist’s website.


The Maison Européenne de la Photographie offers virtual tours 

Photography galleries

Even though brick-and-mortar venues are temporarily closed to visitors, many art galleries can be visited online. For example, Les Douches The Gallery in Paris invites you to discover the exhibition of Ray K. Metzker’s work accompanied by an article by the curator.

His photographs evoke the bustling streets of Chicago, New York, even as they are now empty and deserted.

Brighten your day with a quick trip to California: the photographer Sage Sohier, whose work is on view at the Joseph Bellows Gallery, will bring a smile to your face with her portraits of domestic pets and their antics.


Online exhibition of Ray K. Metzker’s work at Les Douches The Gallery 

Museum collections 

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has some two hundred thousand works online, including over 17,000 photographs.

You can build your own collection of images by your favorite artist or from a specific period in art history by scouring the photography collections of the Chicago Art Institute, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or the Walther Collection.

If you would rather explore the world of vernacular photography, start by searching among thousands of images in Wellesley College’s Davis Museum collection.


The Walther collection has an extensive catalogue

Learn something new

Unless one has a specific project, browsing through piles of images can get tedious. Why not explore Ted Talks on Photography: given in English, they come with subtitles in several languages.

During this difficult time, MoMA is offering free enrollment in its week-long seminar, “Seeing Through Photographs,” which starts March 22 (English only).

Francophone photography lovers will enjoy revisiting a series of lectures with Jean-Christophe Bailly given at the Jeu de Paume in 2019 on the topical theme of the coming time (“Voir le temps venir”). English speakers are invited to peruse transcripts of interviews tackling different aspects of the photographic image. 


The archives of the FOAM magazine are freely accessible for 30 days.

Magazines

FOAM in Amsterdam invites everyone stuck at home to sign up for 30 days of free access to FOAM Magazine archives: explore two decades of articles, interviews, and artist spotlights. 

If you want to plunge deeper into history, browse through the full run of LIFE Magazine on Google Books.


An example of a search in the MoMA catalogue

By Ela Kotkowska

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