Queen Elizabeth II passed away today at the age of 96. One of the most photographed humans of the 20th century, her own passion for photography was no secret. The late British monarch was often documented with a camera in hand. In fact, images of her chatting up photographers and inspecting camera gear are plentiful.

To celebrate her life and passion for image-making, we’ve gathered together some of our favorite shots of Queen Elizabeth II, the photographer. Each shows her rocking a different camera, from a golden Rollei 35 to a vintage Kodak home movie camera—these are just some of the standouts from her royal collection.

Note: We couldn’t find any images of the late queen shooting with a digital camera—perhaps she was a film fanatic through and through? Let us know if you come across one, info@popphoto.com.

Leica M3

When it comes to the late queen’s favorite camera, we won’t speculate. But she was most often spotted handling a silver Leica M3 with an accessory lightmeter mounted on top. And for good reason, the M3 is an absolute classic, not to mention, a workhorse. And while trendy celebrities may tote Leicas these days for clout, Queen Elizabeth II was rocking one—and actually using it—decades prior. That’s a true icon.

Leica M6

At some point, though, it appears her majesty traded in the Leica M3 for a more modern Leica M6, which offers a built-in lightmeter, among other upgrades. Perhaps the move was simply a means to simplify her kit? After all, the two cameras share the same basic design. If so, there’s something oddly relatable about that.

Gold Rollei 35

Related: I’m obsessed with the Rollei 35 and haven’t picked anything else up in months

This is by far my favorite camera from her majesty’s collection (that I know of). Not only is the Rollei 35 famous for its design but to have it dripped out in gold is beyond legendary.

For those unfamiliar, this is one of the smallest 35mm film cameras ever made, and though it can be cumbersome to use (delicate fingers are a must), it’s capable of absolutely terrific results—truly a camera lover’s camera.

Canon Sure Shot Tele 80 

I must admit, this is an unexpected one. The above image was captured in May 2000, during an era when digital photography was just starting to give film a run for the money. However, as we now know, the late queen seemed keener on celluloid than silicon. So, rather than grab a state-of-the-art, 3-megapixel Canon Powershot G1, her majesty opted for a more humble Canon Sure Shot Tele 80 film camera.

Rolleiflex TLR

Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t just a 35mm photographer, she also dabbled in medium format. And honestly, I can’t think of a more enjoyable medium format camera to shoot with than a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex (TLR). These are wonderful machines to handle, on par with Leicas, and owning one is a testament to any photographer’s excellent taste in gear.

Kodak 16mm cine camera

Related: Everything you need to know to get started with Super 8 film

Finally, a movie camera: Though stills were clearly the late queen’s passion, she was also apparently fond of moviemaking. Here she is in 1953 shooting with the suitably named Kodak Royal, a 16mm, spring-motor-driven cinema camera.

And here’s another photo of her from 1965 with a different cinema camera. Always on the cutting edge, it’s cathartic to think about the late Queen of England nerding out on the latest tech and upgrading her kit accordingly, not just as a stills shooter but as a video enthusiast too.

From one camera nerd to another, Rest in Peace, Your Majesty.

Note: An earlier version of this article misidentified the format of the queen’s cine camera as 8mm.

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Former White House photographer Shealah Craighead was barred from documenting her boss, then President Donald Trump, while the January 6th Capital insurrection was occurring. The shocking detail was revealed today by the House committee investigating the attacks.

“No photographs”

Related: Of course Donald Trump undercut his former White House photographer

The core role of the White House photographer is to document the president for the sake of history and posterity. And though Craighead’s name wasn’t specifically mentioned by the committee, her surprising lack of official White House photographs on January 6th was.

So what happened? According to Craighead’s testimony to the January 6th committee, she was explicitly told that there would be “no photographs” of the president that day. Now, we don’t know if that order came from Trump directly or someone else. But Craighead went on to say that she wanted to document the president during the attacks because she felt it was “very important” to history. Yet, despite insisting she be allowed to do her job, Craighead was denied.

The bigger picture

This particular tidbit of information was part of a bigger presentation by the committee into not only the lack of official White House photos on January 6th but also a lack of call logs and a blank presidential diary for the day. According to the committee, no calls were recorded as having been received by the president on January 6th from around 11 am to just before 7 pm, which sounds a little suss.

Justice for Our Journey together?

This isn’t the first time there’s been some, um, awkwardness between Trump and Craighead. Some may recall that earlier this year, Trump undercut his former photographer by publishing a book of her images (without credit) before she could publish her own, leading Craighead to scrap her project. While I’m sure this unfortunate instance had no bearing on Craighead’s testimony, it does make you think that perhaps some mysterious, justice-enforcing powers are at play here…

Moreover, I’m sure Craighead is probably still a little peeved about losing access to Trump on one of the most consequential days of his presidency. And I don’t blame her. I can only imagine what those behind-the-scenes shots of Trump might look like. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

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Duke Ellington leans over a piano. French colonial troops stand to attention during World War I. Abolitionists, cricket teams, Malcom X, The Jackson 5, a Dior runway show. These images are among the tens of thousands covering over 200 years of Black and African people, places, and events in Getty Images’ new Black History & Culture Collection.

“We acknowledge that the historically dominant cultural structures that have built the photography industry and archives have been grounded in white supremacy dating back to the 19th century and beyond,” the agency shared on the initiative’s website. “This being the case, the Black experience has been often framed from a white gaze, informed by the ideology of white superiority, and associated structural racism. Utilize this collection of rarely seen photographs to enhance and highlight untold stories from the past.”

Getty Images launched the Black History & Culture Collection with the input of historians and educators, including Dr. Deborah Willis of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Jina DuVernay of Clark Atlanta University, and Renée Mussai of the British arts agency Autograph. It is a compilation of roughly 30,000 assets covering many aspects of the African/Black diaspora from the 1800s onward. 

Related: How Getty’s Olympics photos are shot, edited, and sent into the world in just two minutes

Who is the Black History & Culture Collection for?

The Black History & Culture Collection is freely available for non-commercial projects that further the education of the African/Black diaspora. 

“The Black History & Culture Collection was created for non-commercial use to build on existing educational materials, paving the way for a deeper understanding of Black History,” Getty Images writes.

From Serena Williams and Booker T. Washington to the Tuskegee Institute and a West Indies cricket match, the collection takes users through the decades. Those searching for something in particular can sort the findings by categories, which include Black British Culture, entrepreneurship, families, Civil Rights, science and technology, and fashion, just to name a few.

“Everything is not there, however there is sufficient material to begin a process of reordering how we tell stories, why we tell stories. The availability of new content representing black bodies, representing black spaces, representing black history across waters shows that even black people have been part of our history,” says the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, whose specialty is sociology and race relations. Dr. Zuberi helped curate the collection. 

How does it work?

The Black History & Culture Collection consists of content exclusively owned by Getty Images. The agency maintains that the repository is by no means exhaustive, but that it is starting with these assets because it owns the rights and can therefore provide them free of charge.

This excludes content from partners who make their photos available on the platform, but the agency expressed that the other component of this initiative is to fill the gaps in the imagery. It hopes that partners will join it in the endeavor. Those in possession of Black historical content and who wish to contribute can contact the agency.

For those who wish to use the assets in a project, they can request up to 500 images by filling out a request form. The content is free to use as long as it is non-commercial, but once a project moves into the commercial realm (including advertising and broadcasting fees), the images will need to be licensed. 

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Peter van Agtmael has been obsessed with military conflict since childhood. A member of Magnum Photo, his career kicked into high gear at the age of 24 when he began covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an embedded journalist. To this day he continues to document these conflicts and their impact, both in the Middle East and at home. His images are often accompanied by lengthy captions that occasionally take on a personal or narrative tone.

We caught up with Peter, whose recent show at the Bronx Documentary Center, “Look at the US,” spans two decades, and seeks to shine a light on the complexities of the post-9/11 era, which is certainly no easy task.

Here we talk about his initial attraction to war and what keeps bringing him back to conflict zones. We also touch on the current war in Ukraine, the importance of “fixers,” why captioning images is a must, how and when to involve yourself in the coverage or narrative, and why his next project will be (a little bit) on the lighter side.

Peter van Agtmael’s show, “Look at the USA” is up through June 26 at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City. You can also pick up one of his recent photo books, including 2021’s aptly titled “Sorry for the War,” here.

Tell me about your most recent exhibition, “Look At The USA.”

It’s essentially a culmination of the last 16 years of work I’ve been doing, looking at fault lines in the post-9/11 American world order. And it’s a show that’s divided partly chronologically, partly thematically. It’s a tough, big subject to wrestle down. I think there were a few premises when I started making the show; one was how do I tell this history as I understand it? How do I tell the history as I saw it? Where does my personal history serve as a storytelling tool that’s useful and when is it more important to lean on how I perceive the era unfolding?

Beyond that, as I worked throughout these last almost two decades, there came up a lot of questions about not only what this country was becoming in the post-9/11 era, both at home and abroad, but what had led us to this point? What was the character of us as Americans that could allow us to go into these wars, both so recklessly and so ignorantly, and then ultimately still kind of specifically? What impact did that have on the culture, on the society, and what was it about the culture in society that led us to this point? 

How did this project start?

When I started this work in 2006, I was 24 and there was no plan, really. I didn’t anticipate what this would become. I started with the simple idea of wanting to go to cover the war in Iraq, which I saw as one of the formative moments of my generation. It followed in the wake of 9/11, which had a deep effect on me personally, just witnessing the world change and the world get shattered, or at least the world as I knew it. I just started with the simplest of plans; I thought it was going to be the formative war in my generation the way the Vietnam War was the formative war of my parent’s generation. [I was] not quite connecting the dots that when you are in a society that has an all-volunteer army, [one] that generally draws from the margins of society, actually, most people were just going to move on [from the war] very quickly. And so in some ways, it became that.

Related: Antigone Kourakou’s surreal exploration of nature & humanity, plus other photo books for summer

And the process essentially became that. What started with this simple idea, I want to cover this war, became [more about] who are we fighting and what’s the character of the Iraqi and Afghan people? What are these cultures? Where are these societies? Who are the people fighting these wars from the American perspective? Where do they come from? Then that raises questions about geography, which raises questions about class, which raises questions about race, and then all that intertwines with nationalism and militarism and politics and myth-making, and also this idea of manifest destiny and our history as an empire, both domestically and abroad. Long story short, I guess it’s a very simple question that led to a lot of very, very complicated questions. Questions that are difficult under the best of circumstances to reconcile—and maybe particularly difficult to visually reconcile.

So simultaneous to the taking of the pictures, writing and words became important, both to offer a context for what was happening and a personal context of why I was doing this thing. This became an exercise in questioning myself and laying out my own vulnerabilities and uncertainties, partly because I don’t believe in the authoritativeness of either photography or journalism. In talking about one’s own experiences and the flaws of moving through that experience, I guess I could trust myself better to try and tell the story [that way].

That being said, I tried to tell the story carefully. So, by using myself as a storytelling vehicle, I could go deeper into the history of these events as I saw them. Also, right around the events, [I could add context to] the things that can’t be photographed. What comes before? What comes after? What sometimes is happening can’t get condensed properly down to, one or two split seconds. In the end, it’s a show of hundreds of odd pictures. The books are a few hundred pictures in total, but what those amount to is really only a few seconds of time.

I know you’ve spent time embedded, were you with only the U.S. military or the Iraqi and Afgan militaries too?

I’ve spent more time embedded with the U.S. military for sure, but I’ve done small embeds with the Iraqi army and the Afghan army as well. But by the time [I was able to embed with them], I was turning my attention more towards the Iraqi and Afghan [citizens]—I was more interested in the civilian perspective than the military perspective. So I didn’t spend as much time with those militaries directly. I spent a lot of time with them when they were with the Americans because those militaries were very tied to one another. The American military was training the Iraqi and Afghan militaries throughout these wars. So I’d be with Iraq or Afghanistan military, but with the American army alongside them.

How did those embed experiences compare? What was it like being with the U.S. military?

The experience differs in so far as the American military, in general, is pretty bureaucratic and there was a system connected to embedding where you fill out certain forms and you email the right people on the chain of command, and you could get access to units on the battlefield for a certain amount of time.

From the early days of the war until about 2009, 2010 or so, the military was very open about their access. You could kind of get dropped off at a unit somewhere for a month or six weeks and they pick you up at the end. Until then, you’d have access to everything that unit was doing, as long as their commanding officer was on board with having an embedded journalist. Usually, they would put you with a company commander or platoon commander who was cool with the media.

But that access to the U.S. military didn’t last?

At some point, then those embed rules changed. They basically shut off all access to the battlefield, and especially to pictures of injured or wounded soldiers. That was a pretty dramatic choice and it really affected coverage. It would’ve, in theory, caused a controversy. But at that point, no one cared about the wars anymore. So while it was a big deal in the journalism community to some degree, because the war coverage had largely ended and people had moved on, it just kind of happened and that was that. Access was more or less cut off. Or if you got access, you’d get one or two days of access and you’d be escorted everywhere.

You couldn’t see the things one would necessarily want to see. Then when I did those embeds still, those pictures became to some degree about trying to find the cracks and the holes in the way the message was being controlled. 

What was it like being embedded with the Iraqi and Afghan militaries?

With the Iraqis and Afghans, it was much less formal, in a way. It was a question of who you knew and if you had a good fixer who knew some colonel who was willing to take journalists on. You could just kind of post up with them and they’d take you along. In those cases, you could kind of go as deep as you had the stomach for. But tactically, the U.S. military relies much more on force protection. They’re trying to fight, but they’re also trying not to die. So, the tactics are based around creating, in many ways, as low a risk situation as possible. Iraqis and Afghans are pretty different in that regard, tactically sometimes. It was a little bit more precarious, by and large. So I wasn’t doing tons of time [with those militaries] probably for that reason, because the risk level was high. By the time that option was open to me, I was also less interested in covering the front lines of the wars.

You’ve made many trips to the Middle East to cover the conflicts there. Tell me about what keeps bringing you back?

The Middle East? I mean, it’s a hard question. Partly, I’ve always been drawn to war since I was a child. I think a lot of young men, young boys, have an attraction to the military and the notion of war, but few pursue that path. Most people grow out of it in one way or another, or other priorities take form. For me, it was something that just…it always persisted. I really felt strongly, from an early age, and then with increasing intensity. It was something that, for whatever kind of dark and naive reasons, I needed to see for myself. Once I did see and experience it, I wanted more of it in a way, and that was, partly for ideological and political reasons, why I was good at this work. I believed in the task and the power of journalism and believed that it had something to contribute and something to say. Also, because I was a good fit, it made me feel like the person I thought I was supposed to be.

I was good at it. I’d never received that kind of, in a weird way, positive feedback; positive for something so troubling, and that was seductive. But over time, it took its toll emotionally and spiritually, and intellectually to some degree too, in the sense that I also started to get a little bored of it at some point. I was taking these enormous risks, but not getting this kind of… it wasn’t moving me forward in the photography or storytelling anymore. 

So, over time, I started easing out of it. Some bad experiences, near-death experiences, helped usher that along the way. I think it’s always going to be part of my life. I still cover conflicts to some degree, but not as aggressively on the front lines as I used to.

It’s always one of the unanswerable questions. What draws one again and again? I’ve never been able to sufficiently answer that for myself. It was something that was deep in me and now luckily is not nearly as deep in me as it was.

So, at a certain point, you transitioned from covering war to covering its impact. Can you tell me more about that transition?

Well, it was a transition, but it was always back and forth in a way, too. What I became interested in just kept expanding. As covering things at home became more and more interesting to me, the war part got slowly squeezed out. Then I would go back. At times it felt necessary to the work I was doing. 

I tried desperately to get in during the withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer. I’ll go back to Afghanistan finally in a month or so to finish the work I wanted to do then. During the withdrawal itself, that was a very, very dangerous time to go. I wasn’t particularly keen to be taking those sorts of risks but it was such an important, historical moment. The trajectory of these wars and my coverage of them, it seemed like a risk that I could justify taking for myself and my loved ones. Going to a place like Ukraine right now does not fit into that for me, because I have no history of covering that conflict.

If I had been covering it for the last eight years, it’d be one thing. I’d want to probably continue the work I’d already been doing. But I haven’t been. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to go and take those kinds of risks if I didn’t have a story I really deeply needed to tell. But the temptation is always there. Not to oversimplify it but I think it’s like the way someone who’s an alcoholic or a drug addict feels, a little bit like you can quit the thing but there’s always going to be a little devil whispering on your shoulder.

You mentioned Ukraine. Can you provide some insight, as much as you feel comfortable, about what it’s like to be a working photographer in an active war zone?

Every war has its own character to it. Embedding with the U.S. Military, for example, was very different than, say, embedding with Iraqi soldiers or doing stories about Iraqi or Afghan civilians, right? And sometimes, some places are, despite it being war, quite safe. Others are extremely dangerous. Sometimes that difference is just some invisible barrier you can’t even see. But the thing that holds true in all of them is that you have to know exactly what you’re getting into, where you’re going and who you’re going there with, essentially.

This is where fixers become the critical part of any journalist’s work. You really have to partner with someone on the ground who’s knowledgeable and not risk-averse, but also not a sort of reckless risk-taker, and who deeply knows the lay of the land. Hopefully, [with a fixer’s help] the powers that be can grant you more access because so much of photography is really about access.

Your photos tend to have an almost absurdly disorienting visual quality to them. And I mean that in the coolest way possible. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re looking for when making pictures?

Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I don’t know if I’m looking for anything specific in a way. I’m definitely attracted to the absurd. I’m attracted to resolving chaos within a frame. The more the years go by, the more I’m attracted to complex images that say several things at once, sometimes things that seem to be in opposition to one another. I think I’m attracted to the challenge of resolving a complicated event into a coherent frame. It’s just difficult to do visually. It also offers a certain kind of spontaneity.

If there’s a lot going on in a picture, you could never be ahead of the action in a way. You just have to get yourself to that place and keep clicking and hope for the best. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but I like the moments in photography that force me to let go of my control of visualizing the scene. Those types of images that you mentioned are the kinds that really do that, where I’m never fully in control of what I’m photographing. But that being said, I think I like simple images as much as complex ones. I think that as one evolves as a photographer, as I’ve evolved as a photographer, I’ve gone from not being able to take complicated pictures to developing the skillset to do so.

But the thing that drew me to photography—the singular moment, the singular detail—it still attracts me equally to this day. There are many ways to tell a story in pictures and sometimes that relies on complicated images and sometimes [it’s] simple images. Pictures are very emotional. Sometimes they’re a little detached. Sometimes they’re absurd. Sometimes they’re for tasks. Sometimes you’re showing a big scene. Sometimes you’re just showing the details of somebody’s lips or hands. The more I dive into photography, the more I want to expand my visual language because ultimately, it’s all in the service of storytelling. I think complicated storytelling that nonetheless has a clear through-line, that’s the kind of storyteller I want to be doing and keep pushing forward.

You mentioned you’re headed back to Afghanistan in a month or so. Can you just give us a little peek into what you’re working on next? Do you have any other projects coming up?

I’ve been working on a book throughout the year with my partner that really looks at a lighter subject on the surface. It’s about the relationship in the U.S. between food and culture, and history and society. And so we’ve been finding a lot of little stories related to American food that speak to the larger questions of American identity. It’s a way of looking at a big picture question that always interested me, who and what are we as a nation, but coming at it from an angle that’s a little more accessible. 

I think part of the frustration with the more serious work—I mean, I think this work is serious too—is it has less appeal to someone who might not be a photographer. Ultimately, I’m chipping away at these dark stories over the last 16 years. I fear that when I try and pull them all together on my own terms, through the books and shows like this, they’re inevitably only reaching a very narrow audience. And so [this new project] is partly a storytelling tool to try and bring a broader audience into the things that I think are worth communicating. 

And then the Afghanistan trip is sort of the logical end in a way to this post-9/11 work that I’ve been doing, on some level. The post-9/11 era, it’s here to stay. It was an inflection point in history that everything kind of emanates out of. But with the end of the war in Afghanistan, I think a certain phase of this era did end, and a new one is now beginning to unfold. But with the Taliban back in control of the country and the ruins of what was left behind, it kind of seems to be a symbolic end of the work.

That’s why I want to go back.

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In confirmation of a growing interest in Surrealism, Man Ray’s photograph, “Le Violon d’Ingres,” brought in a whopping $12.4 million over the weekend at Christie’s New York showroom, more than $5 million over the projected valuation.

The piece is a part of the collection, “The Surrealist World of Rosalind Gersten Jacobs and Melvin Jacobs,” which collectively garnered just over $42 million from the auction. Ray’s work showed up alongside that of Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and Marcel Duchamp, among others in the couple’s collection. The Jacobs made their name (and fortune) as successful fashion retailers and befriended many Surrealists during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The sale of “Le Violon d’Ingres” makes it the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. It trumps “Rhein II” by German photographer Andreas Gursky, which sold for $4.3 million in 2011.

“Photography has been the invention and medium quietly underpinning and influencing much of the art and popular culture of the 20th century,” Darius Himes, Christie’s International Head of Photographs told Artlyst. “ Long seen as an icon of 20th-century art, this purely photographic work is truly unrivaled and, appearing on the market for the very first time in its history, has now smashed all records for any photographic piece at auction, vintage or contemporary, as well as all Man Ray auction records in any medium.” 

What is the Violon d’Ingres?

The famous photograph depicts actress, singer, and model Kiki de Montparnasse with “F-holes” running down her back in an evocation of the curves of a violin.

The title of the image is a reference to Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, a French neoclassical painter, who was also known to play the instrument. Thus, the phrase “violon d’Ingres,” is used in reference to an artist’s secondary hobby.

“Le Violon d’Ingres” could have also been seen as a play on the fact that de Montparnasse was both Ray’s lover and model. 

“Surrealism as an artistic movement has seeped into our consciousness over the course of 100 years now, and no work more so than Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres,” Himes told Artnet News. “There are no other photographs that have proven to have the lasting power and playful eroticism that define the Surrealists of the 1920s. It ranks among the most influential works of art—let alone photographs—of the 20th century.”

The gelatin silver print was made directly in the darkroom, with the violin marks having been burned on via overexposure. It is one of just two in existence—the other resides at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 

Who is Man Ray?

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890, Man Ray moved to Paris in 1921, and remained there all his life, with a brief interlude in Los Angeles during World War II. He moved in the same circles as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, and Picasso—to name just a few.

Though he is best known for his manipulated images and avant-garde photography, Ray was also a filmmaker, painter, and object artist. He worked with photograms, which he dubbed “rayographs,” in which a subject was exposed in front of a piece of photo paper, with no camera used. The resulting images were a study of light and shadow.

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An original print of Dorothea Lange’s famous—and somewhat controversial—Migrant Mother photo from the Great Depression will be auctioned off next/this month by Hindman, a fine art auction house. The 19.125 x 14.75-inch silver gelatin print was made by Lange or under her direct supervision some time in the 1950s. 

Florence Owens Thompson, the Migrant Mother

Migrant Mother was shot by Lange in Nipomo, California, in 1936 while on an assignment documenting the plight of impoverished farmers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

In a 1960 interview with this publication, Lange explained:

 I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She and her children had been living on frozen vegetables from the field and wild birds the children caught. The pea crop had frozen; there was no work. Yet they could not move on, for she had just sold the tires from the car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

The image was widely circulated throughout the US after it was shot. The unnamed Migrant Mother was seen as a role model for the poor and dispossessed, and, according to Hindman, established Lange as a “socially-conscious and uncompromising photojournalist.”

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the identity of the subject was widely known. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson, born Florence Leona Christie. 

An unwilling subject?

Thompson contested Lange’s depiction of her story—the family says they never sold the car tires—or that they were “stereotypical Dust Bowl refugees”. Although portrayed as white, Thompson was a Cherokee. She and her first husband, who died in 1931, had been living in California for almost a decade when the photograph was taken. 

Thompson, apparently, also felt exploited by Lange’s portrait. According to the LA Review of Books, she wrote U.S. Camera Magazine saying:

This photo since has been displayed in the Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco, also two years ago it was called to my attention that it appeared in Look Magazine […and] in U. S. Camera. […] Since I have not been consulted […] I request you recall all the unsold magazines. […] You would do Dorothea Lange a great favor by sending me her address that I may inform her that should the picture appear in any magazine again I and my three daughters shall be forced to protect our rights. Trusting that it will not be necessary to use drastic means to force you to remove the magazine from circulation without due permission to use my picture in your publication I remain.

Respectfully,

Florence Thompson

By that time the photo had entered the public domain so there wasn’t a lot that could be done (and also, unfortunately for Thompson, whatever Lange’s representations, she was on the wrong side of copyright law). 

An icon for auction

In spite of the contested and murky story of its creation, Migrant Mother is incontrovertibly one of the most powerful and recognizable American images of the 20th Century. Although an original print from Lange’s workshop, the image has been manipulated. In the earliest 1930s prints, Thompson’s thumb can be seen in the left foreground. In 1939, Lange instructed an assistant to airbrush it out. All later prints have a noticeable blurry smudge instead.

The print being auctioned off by Hindman on May 12th was made at some point in the 1950s. It was owned by Lange’s family until 2009 when it was acquired by a gallery in New York. It is expected to fetch between $50,000 and $70,000.

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This week, the legendary Polaroid SX-70 turns the big 5-0. On April 25, 1972, owner and inventor Edwin H. Land introduced it to the world. And now, half a century later, Polaroid and French fashion house Saint Laurent have collaborated to release a snazzy line of seven limited edition cameras and a pack of limited edition film. 

Calling all fashion(able) photographers

The bevy of cameras on offer range from one featuring the classic SX-70 look, which retails for a bit less than the other six models ($730), to ones bedazzled and swathed in such luxury and decoration as only an haute couture house could do (for $1,230 apiece). And what do we mean by that?

We’re talking fashion-forward leopard print, splashy and star-spangled, and zebra, just for starters. This camera calls out to all the fashionable photographers who have a good chunk of pocket change.

The specs

Aside from the Saint Laurent logo emblazoned onto the camera and decorative touches, the specs remain the same, and it’s the SX-70 Land Camera Model 2 (~$390) many know and love. Steel bodies that fold into compact bricks fit easily inside a generous pocket. The shutter, focusing distance, and exposure knobs are all there. It takes the usual film manufactured by Polaroid, of course.

Related: 5 affordable films we love—and why we love them

They’re selling out

If you’re wanting to be a part of this fashion-forward photographic escapade, you’d best hurry. The classic model is already sold out, as well as the zebra and checkered patterns. That leaves the leopard- and star- prints left for the trend-setters, plus an option in intense black leather for the inconspicuous connoisseur. 

Limited edition film

The Polaroid x Saint Laurent collaboration also includes packs of limited edition film, featuring an all-black frame, for $70, or $8.75 a shot. Our hot tip? If you want to do this on a budget (though, are you really if you’re going with Saint Laurent?), go with standard Polaroid SX-70 film. Unless you’re totally in love with the exclusive black frame for the fashion house, you can save roughly $50 by sticking with the classic white. 

Now, excuse me while I go dig up my leopard pants.

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Earlier this week, Om Digital Solutions launched the OM System OM-1 Micro Four Thirds camera, the final camera ever to carry the Olympus badge. But wait, how did we get here? Last year, Olympus sold off its imaging division to Japan Industrial Partners, who then launched OM Digital Solutions with the intention of keeping the Olympus camera tradition alive. 

And while we’re happy to see the DNA of the brand live on, this is a bittersweet moment. Olympus began manufacturing cameras all the way back in 1936 (one year before the first issue of Popular Photography magazine landed on newsstands). And in the time since, there have been countless Olympus cameras worth celebrating for their innovations and/or sheer awesomeness. 

What follows are nine of our all-time favorite models, from the half-frame Pen F to the Micro Four Thirds OM-D E-M1. 

Olympus Pen F

Released in 1963, the original Pen F looks like something you’d expect to see Don Draper from Mad Men toss in his bag along with his booze stash. At the time, the Pen F was the smallest 35mm system camera, in large part because it only shoots frames that are half the size of a normal 35mm image. Load a 36-exposure roll of film into the camera and it will produce 72 vertically oriented photos that measure 24mm tall by 18mm wide. 

There’s no pentaprism hump on top of the camera for a viewfinder. Instead, Olympus built a system of mirrors inside the camera in order to keep the top of the body flat. The original version requires two strokes of the advance lever in order to go to the next frame, similar to the original Leica M3. The Pen F feels old school because it is and that’s what we love about it. With film prices what they are now, we can also appreciate getting twice the frames per roll.

Olympus OM-1

Pick up an original Olympus OM-1 from the early 1970s and you’ll quickly notice some subtle differences between it and some of the other popular film SLRs of the time. Both the aperture and shutter speed controls reside on the lens, so there’s no shutter dial on the compact, well-laid-out body. 

Fire the shutter and you’ll also notice how quick and quiet the sound is. Olympus built an air damping system into the shutter mechanism to cushion the impact from the mirror box as it flips up and down every time you take a photo. 

It even allows photographers to swap out the focusing screens through the lens mount, which means you don’t have to disassemble the camera to get a different view through the finder. 

Scour the secondary market today and you’ll still find a ton of OM-1s out there, fully functional and ready to shoot, which is a testament to Olympus’s efforts to make a durable, compact, and relatively affordable camera that would last decades with just a little bit of TLC.

Olympus XA 

The Olympus XA is a compact, aperture priority-only film rangefinder that debuted in 1979. One of the stranger cameras in the Olympus catalog, it features an all-plastic design centered around a sharp 35mm f/2.8 lens paired with a 4-blade aperture. A sliding lens cover protects the camera when not in use and doubles as an on/off switch.

A vertical slider along the front of the body allows users to adjust the aperture—a needle display in the viewfinder shows the camera’s corresponding shutter speed. And a side-mounting flash unit adds to the XA’s versatility.  The only exposure override is a small lever on the bottom of the camera that adds +1.5EV to an exposure. 

According to the brand, this was the first “full-featured” Olympus camera to make use of a mostly plastic construction. Still, these cameras are built tough and can easily be found in working condition, for not much coin, today. 

In fact, they’re a great option for those seeking a tiny and robust, yet highly-cable manual focus camera. They’re also fantastic cameras for “shooting from the hip,” due to the unique design of the shutter release. But sausage fingers be warned, the controls can be a bit fiddly. 

Olympus OM-10

Off the shelf, the OM-10 is a fairly straightforward film SLR that, like the Nikon EM, only operates in aperture priority mode with a few exceptions for flash syncing and bulb exposures. A port on the front of the camera, however, allows users to attach a small dongle with a shutter speed dial that converts the camera into a full manual body. 

It’s not quite as refined or durable as the single-digit OM bodies, but Olympus made a ton of these cameras, so you can still find them on the secondary market, today, for much cheaper than many of its more popular counterparts. We own several and have never paid more than $30 for one. Ultimately, it’s a clever little camera that deserves more credit than it got.

 Olympus OM-4Ti

In 1989, Olympus released the last and most advanced version of the OM-series film SLRs. The OM-4Ti is lighter and more compact than the Leica M6. Plus, the OM-4Ti’s top and bottom plates utilized titanium (hence the name) to add durability and save weight. 

Functionally, it feels a lot like the OM SLRs that came before it, but it had a few very notable upgrades. It was the first 35mm camera with a film plane shutter to sync with a flash, at any shutter speed. 

You can still find OM-4TI bodies on the secondary market, but you can expect to pay a premium for them. The relatively high price is due in part to their rarity, but also due to the fact that they’re built for longevity. And hey, they’re still a lot cheaper than a Leica.

Olympus Stylus/mju & Stylus Epic/mju-II

The Olympus Stylus/mju and its high-coveted younger sibling, the Stylus Epic/mju-II—also known as “the soap bar” for its unique shape— are pocketable, plastic, point-and-shoot film cameras sporting super-sharp 35mm lenses and straightforward functionality. The former features a 35mm f/3.5 lens, the latter a 35mm f/2.8. 

Both of these cameras debuted in the 1990s. The original Stylus was a huge success, with over 5 million units manufactured. The Stylus Epic, which debuted in 1997, was also incredibly successful. And these days, both sell for a premium on the used market.

A sliding door acts both as an on/off switch and a lens cover. And both cameras offer a multitude of flash modes, reliable metering, and accurate autofocusing. Which is to say, they’re as easy to use as they are capable. No wonder you’ll find so analog-loving street and candid photographers working with them. 

Olympus E-1

Back in 2003, Olympus kicked off its foray into DSLRs with a camera and lens system built specifically for digital photography. The sensor inside the Olympus E-1 was a Kodak-sourced CCD (which was common before CMOS came and made it obsolete) that measured 18mm x 13.5mm. Olympus stuck with that size, which was known as Four Thirds for the extent of its DSLR run during which it created some really excellent and compact lenses. 

Even back then, Olympus emphasized toughness and durability in its cameras. The E-1’s magnesium alloy body came with burly weather sealing to help it survive in the wild. While the camera’s specs look ancient at this point, it was novel for the time and represented a big commitment from Olympus to its advanced digital offerings.

Olympus PEN E-P1

The Olympus PEN E-P1, announced in 2009, was named after the legendary Olympus Pen 35mm half-frame camera that debuted 50 years prior. It was also the first Olympus interchangeable lens camera to be compliant with the then-new Micro Four Thirds standard.

But it doesn’t just share a name with its distant 35mm relative, it also conveys a similar look, feel, and design to the classic Pen. The angular body is built from aluminum and features a 3-inch LCD on the back—there’s no viewfinder, but an optional optical finder was sold alongside it.

At the time of its launch, the E-P1 was one of only two Micro Four Thirds cameras on the market, offering a pleasant contrast to the Panasonic G1, an SLR-shaped camera with a built-in electronic viewfinder, and mostly plastic construction. 

The E-P1’s 12-megapixel sensor was lauded in its day for punchy JPEGs and solid detail capture. And the camera as a whole was celebrated for its retro-tastic design, something Olympus would continue to lean into for future digital PEN models.

Olympus OM-D E-M1

The OM-D E-M1 is arguably Olympus’ most important digital camera ever. Launched in 2013, this flagship Micro Four Thirds camera packs a highly-capable 16-megapixel sensor into a supremely compact and lightweight body with a tank-like construction—including robust dust and weather-sealing—and plenty of direct controls.

A comfortable camera to shoot with, the E-M1 also offered a sizable, high-resolution electronic viewfinder for it its time. And the camera’s 5-axis in-body image stabilization system was also at the top of the class for this era. 

Now in its third iteration, the latest OM-D E-M1 Mark III hasn’t strayed far from the design and ethos of the original. In fact, the new flagship OM System OM-1 is essentially a distant sibling of the original E-M1. Moreover, the E-M1 is still a camera we’d gladly pick up and shoot with right now, despite its 9-year-old status. 

Do you have a favorite Olympus camera we missed? Shout it out in the comments below.

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To proclaim something ‘the first,’ or to fit it under any superlative as makers of internet today are wont to do, inevitably will ruffle some feathers. And in the photo world, few things are as contentious as the limits, definition, and assessment of street photography. On the one hand, the label may be used to elevate an ordinary snapshot taken within the public sphere into something that speaks more about the human condition at large. On the other, it may reduce an otherwise perfectly good ‘documentary’ photograph into something more specifically about a solipsistic pursuit.

For Street Week here at American Photo, we’re showcasing portfolios that push the traditional limits of the genre—images that are posed, made in suburbia, or rely heavily on artificial light. To me it seems that modern street photography doesn’t even necessarily need to be made on the streets to qualify. Notable series shot underground in the subways of New York by photographers Bruce Davidson and Christopher Morris are also kind of exemplary of the genre, suggesting that perhaps it’s more about an aesthetic sensibility, or an eye for thematic grit.

[Related: How Instagram Changed Street Photography]

Despite a definition so elusive, we humbly propose Paul Strand’s 1916 photograph titled “Blind,” as a reference point for the origin of street photography. The image was made in New York, a single exposure shot on a view camera, most likely the Adams Idento he used for much of that decade, which made 3¼ x 4¼ glass plate negatives. According to Anthony Montoya, the former Director/Curator of the Paul Strand Archive, Strand fixed a dummy lens to his camera, or what the MET (which now owns the only vintage platinum print of the image ever made) calls, a “prismatic” lens. This allowed him to photograph at a 90 degree angle from where he and his camera were faced and avoid being noticed, making “Blind” one of the earliest noted surreptitious images. Montoya says it’s not his most reproduced—that would be “Wall Street,” 1915—but it is arguably his most important because of how it prefigures his significant contribution to portraiture in years to come.

Surely, one must think, that by 1916, nearly 90 years after the inception of the medium, couldn’t there have been some other street photograph that predates? It seems so obvious and simple of an impulse—after all, the very first photograph ever made, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s “View from the Window at Le Gras,” c. 1826., is of a street, though it wasn’t made on the street. The photographs of Jacob Riis shot throughout New York slums in the 1880s definitely fit the aesthetic or thematic qualifier we mentioned before, but that body of work is much more unified and sustained and prefigures social documentary photography, which most agree stands apart from, though doesn’t necessarily exclude, street work. Then there is the question of Stieglitz and Atget, both of whom predate and are likely the best fracture points to our claim.

The reason we’ve chosen Paul Strand’s image is not because nothing dated earlier could qualify, it’s that his is among the earliest, most significant, and influential photographs that across form, content, and means of production best anticipates the development of street photography as we know it today. Strand’s desire to be invisible on the street and minimize the presence of the mechanical barrier between subject and photographer anticipates the two big points when the genre exploded—first with the development of compact and reliable take-me-anywhere 35mm cameras, and exponentially after with the advent of the utterly inconspicuous camera phone. The image challenges the idea that photography had to focus on conventional ideals of what’s beautiful, it is socially engaged with issue of poverty, but it is equally concerned with the forms, lines, and clean tonal fields of modernism. The interplay of visual and textual data within the frame, in a particularly self-referential way, anticipates similar juxtapositions, ironic or otherwise, that street photographers commonly use to this very day (note this image by Ruddy Roye made nearly a century after).

Finally, it seems pertinent to anoint an American photographer above others, not from a jingoistic impulse or to fulfill any supposed mandate from our publication title, but because, quite frankly, the genre is weaved into our very culture as one of the earliest modern open societies. Many, though not all, significant bodies of work in street photography—Frank, Winogrand, Levitt, Friedlander, Maier, Meyerowitz—were made in America because our culture has allowed it to cultivate and flourish. It would be foolish to discount the contributions of someone like Cartier-Bresson, but French culture is markedly different in that the nation has all but outlawed street photography for privacy concerns come this day and age. In contrast, over the last century, US courts have repeatedly ruled—in cases involving Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Arne Svenson, and others—that any reasonably expectation of privacy on the street, in the public sphere, may be violated not only for news gathering purposes, but for this very type of creative expression. Though it is controversial at times, street photography, as defined by the image above, has challenged us and brought new ideas into consciousness. If its point of conception, a century ago, is less than certain, what we can be sure of is the continued debate and excitement it will generate in the century to come.

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The Vatican Library is one of the greatest historical archives on the planet, a centuries old institution with a millennia of documents tucked away. But the extreme fragility of many of these original items means that very few people ever get to see them. But that’s all set to change with a new initiative to digitize the library, and allow anyone to peruse it.

The Vatican has partnered with Japanese firm NTT Data for a pilot program to scan some 3,000 of 82,000 documents in the library. Some 50 professionals over the next four years will digitize this first section of the archive using five scanners. According to the Wall Street Journal, NTT Data has been working on a special scanner specifically for this project. They feature a protective screen to limit exposure to light, and will be used in blacked out rooms to limit possibly damaging external light. All operators will be forbidden from wearing jewelry and will wear gloves to provide the utmost protection for the precious documents.

Once scanned, the documents will be “formatted for long-term storage”, and then released online for viewing, starting later this year. The first four-year interval will cost NTT Data $25 million, as the company has agreed to cover the first stages. Hopefully, if successful, further digitization can be done at a faster pace, as at a rate of 750 documents per year, it would take more than a century to complete the entire archive.

[via Mashable]

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