#ALAN LEE LAMA PICTURES HOW TO#
#ALAN LEE LAMA PICTURES ARCHIVE#
#ALAN LEE LAMA PICTURES FREE#

Even so, it took six months – and six months of lost images – for the photo editors to figure out how to use it.

#ALAN LEE LAMA PICTURES ARCHIVE#

The Globe was the first newspaper in Canada to set up a digital archive to store the swelling tsunami of digital pics. She also shared much of the research that made this collection possible. “Digital is when the volume of photographs increased exponentially,” Paula Wilson, The Globe’s photo archivist, will tell you. Digital technology made taking photographs easier, but controlling the ensuing flood of images was a nightmare. So did digital photography, which Globe photographers were converting to by the late 1990s. The prospect of using colour photographs gave The Globe pause: some people thought colour was cheesy. The best photojournalists have resisted those pressures, and many others. The camera itself started out as a toy for rich people, but quickly revealed itself as a kind of universal, morally neutral tool one capable of documenting reality, on the one hand, but also of creating propaganda and furthering the interests of warmongers and ideologues and capitalists alike. The photographic image was invented in the 1830s by either Louis Daguerre or Henry Fox Talbot, depending on your point of view. It might be a good idea to indulge our desire to see ourselves through the eyes of dispassionate professionals while we can. News of the Allied victory in Europe triggers one of the biggest mass celebrations in Toronto’s history. Newspaper photographers have always fed our deepest if slightly embarrassing hunger: to look at ourselves, to see who we were and who we have become, as a human community. But whatever these photographs are about, whatever they are meant to connote and denote, they are first and foremost about looking. No subject is beyond consideration: clothes, jobs, bodies, race, buildings, food, leaders, losers, crime, sport, the heat, the cold (winter is ubiquitous), vacations, vanity, the rich and famous (more often than the poor and destitute, alas), shopping, children, hope and despair, sorrow and glee. Their photographs are infused as a result with what philosopher Walter Benjamin once called “unprejudiced observation.” It’s a grabby kind of energy. Photographers have always traded in human attention, the most coveted commodity we have and now the scarcest. But they are never only beautiful: their main goal, always, is to grab the attention of the reader and make a connection with them or her or him by depicting something that is happening in the now of that moment. They are often beautiful, in spite of their subjects: clean, sharp, filled with movement and light. The photographs don’t moralize they blame everyone and no one at once. This work, in other words, is evidence of our progress and our backsliding, a material record of social change. One woman was killed and three injured when two motor cars collided at one of Toronto’s most dangerous corners, Barton Street and Manning Avenue. They were “proof” that life was increasingly mechanical and dangerous, and therefore moving beyond our control.

#ALAN LEE LAMA PICTURES FREE#

(Traffic in Toronto doesn’t seem to have improved.) There are multiple pictures of car crashes from the 1920s to the 1960s because, along with fires, those were the most common free spectacles of their day. There are lots of cars, because cars have changed the way we live, then as now. There are happy pictures of diversions (agricultural fairs and hockey games and beauty contests and ballets, among others) and war pictures of pain and destruction and death. There are pictures of cities going up (railway tunnels are bored, streetcar tracks are laid, buildings are erected) as that rural country becomes more connected and urban. It was not so long ago that crowds were an unusual sight in a mostly rural country, and the pictures reflect that excitement. There are a lot of pictures of crowds in this selection, which has been culled from the millions of images Globe photojournalists have taken over the past 100 years. If you string them together and look at them long enough, patterns start to emerge. An archive like this – a century, as of this month, of photographs taken by Globe and Mail staff photographers – thereby becomes a succession of stopped moments. They freeze a moment of the present so that the moment can be examined more closely in the future.

Alan lee lama pictures