In the last two years Shutterstock has provided access to one of the largest Editorial archives in the world thanks to our acquisition of Rex Features, Kobal and Art Archive, and partnerships with the AP and EPA. The depth and range of these images include some of the most significant historical and cultural events of the last century. This rich archive of images is alive with stories, just waiting to be discovered.
With that in mind, two of Shutterstock’s photography experts, Senior Partnerships Manager Jon Feinstein and Senior Content Marketing Manager Bryan Formhals decided to dig into the archive and chat about what they found. The catch? The only search term they were allowed to use was May 23.
Formhals and Feinstein use their spare time to remain active in the larger photography community. Formhals is the host of the LPV Show, a podcast about photobooks and the acclaimed Photographers Sketchbooks, and Feinstein is as an independent curator and founder of the photography non-profit Humble Arts Foundation, and has contributed to publications like Daylight, TIME, and Slate.
Jon Feinstein: When I joined Shutterstock in the early 2000’s, the stock photography landscape was much different than it is today. Despite having a stable of inspiring images, the “microstock,” of business handshakes, and other soon-to-be tropes often led me down a rabbit hole of absurdity. More than a decade later, however, the nature of our content has changed dramatically. With our newly refined editorial archive, our distractions and tangents can take us around the world, through pop culture, significant moments in world history, and even some more obscure, but still fascinating details.
Bryan Formhals: I’m fascinated by photography archives and how digital has made them more accessible than ever. Since I started at Shutterstock last summer I’ve been intrigued by the Editorial archive and always relish the opportunity to search around and discover photographs. What I’m most interested in these days is the connection between photograph, history and our collective memory. A caption can unlock so much cultural information in a photograph and I find it interesting how our perspective on a photograph changes with that information. Conversely, there’s a simple joy in discovering an old photograph that stands on its own aesthetically.
Jon Feinstein: Let’s get this started. What have you found so far for “May 23”?
Bryan: Hey Jon, I’m looking forward to this conversation! I think we found an interesting angle by using May 23 as our search term but I wonder if other people will find it as interesting. I chose this photo from Belgrade in 1999 to start things off. I thought it was Los Angeles, and then reading the caption brought me back to the 90s. This might literally have been from around the time I graduated college! Do you think this type of curating an archive has wide appeal or is it really just photo editors and photo geeks that are into it?
Jon: At first glance it reminds me of the aerial view of Seattle I often see when flying in from NYC. Similarly, I was about to graduate high school when this image was taken. As much as we’re bombarded with images every day, something about the similarities of these far away landscapes makes world events — positive or traumatic — all the more real.
To your question, I think visual curation has reached such wide appeal over the past decade or so that even the non-photo-nerds would have fun with this, but there’s a particular obsessiveness that we’re likely using to approach it. I think it’s interesting how age, cultural experience and a range of other factors can contribute to how we curate, collect and organize images to create our own narratives. But as I’m digging through the archive, part of my excitement is just “wow, I didn’t realize we had this in the collection!” Like this image of Anita Harris and Jeff Beck, taken roughly a month before my parents got married.
Bryan: That’s just a beautiful photograph! The symmetry is perfect. Jeff Beck is one of those famous musicians whose music I’m not sure I’d recognize if I heard it. I’ll have to do a search on Spotify and listen to a few of his popular songs. Back to the photograph, celebrity photography must be incredibly challenging.
How do you find an original moment with people that are completely comfortable in front of the camera? It makes me think that good portraiture often relies on a certain amount of uncomfortable tension from the subject. I’ve heard from a few photographers that they embrace that tension and even try to cultivate it. But with celebrities and people that want their photograph taken, how is that possible? In this case, I think the balance in the composition and formal nature of the photograph create that tension when clearly the people are at ease.
Another aspect of celebrity photography is obviously the candid photograph. I really like this one of Queen Elizabeth II from 1994 when she visited the Chelsea Flow Show, and the caption is killer! For some reason this photograph feels like something I would see in my Instagram feed from a photography student, except instead of the Queen, the subject would be a sad looking twenty-something.
Jon: That photo of the Queen is way hipper and more casual than my preconceptions of what “royal” photography looks like. She’s not posing and she’s caught either in-between moments, or unaware of the photographer entirely. There’s an unexpected level of candid introspectiveness to it.
Despite being shot in 1994, the faded (Kodachrome perhaps?) color feels very 70’s. It’s like William Eggleston meets Ryan McGinley with Collier Shorr art directing for a retro Yves Saint Laurent campaign! Moving almost a decade forward, I found this image of Lauren Ambrose to be a nice counter to your comment about the difficulty of making sincere celebrity portraits.
It’s clearly posed, and she’s looking directly at the camera, but that becomes a kind of nature of contract between photographer and subject. There’s a psychological negotiation going on between Ambrose and the photographer, and she’s opening up, just slightly. Funny to come across this portrait now — last weekend I just started re-watching Six Feet Under for the first time in over a decade, and it still holds up.
Bryan: Six Feet Under makes my top 10 list of best TV shows, hands down. I was in my first year in LA during the final season, and for some reason, this portrait of Ambrose gives me those California vibes, even though it was made in Bryant Park, right in the heart of Manhattan. I think the color really makes the portrait for me. It sounds superficial but that’s one of those aspects of photography you can never outrun. The surface of the photograph matters! Even right down to her bracelets which give the photograph a little bit of glitter.
This portrait also feels like something you’d find in contemporary fine art portraiture. It lead me to this photograph of George W. Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi in 2004. It looks like it could be a large format photograph made by Alec Soth. I like the color palette and the tree connecting them is a nice touch.
Jon: Have you seen Soth’s “Fashion Magazine” book from a few years ago? I think there’s a connection to that work, but also interesting to look at if you remove the political context of this being Bush and Koizumi. It feels more like a portrait photographer on assignment than a traditional editorial image.
Moving along, I found this image of Henry Kissinger, which reminded me of Margaret Bourke White’s portraits of political figures like General Patton and Joseph Stalin. One of my students at Seattle’s Photographic Center Northwest recently did a presentation on her work, describing her as the “master of the staged portrait,” for her formal, yet natural feeling images. Like Bourke White’s work, this portrait’s hovering between staged and candid is incredibly effective.
Bryan: I wonder what Kissinger is thinking? We probably shouldn’t speculate! In this photo it’s the bold black glasses that hold my attention, and the slight smirk, but I wonder if my perception would change if I knew nothing about him. I think it’s interesting that we’ve focused this conversation on portraiture for the most part. Are portraits easier to talk about than candid photographs or landscapes?
This next image of a group of men crouching down with their hands on their heads caught my attention because it’s one of those ambiguous candid photographs where you really have no idea what’s going on until you read the caption. At first, I thought they might be ducking because of an explosion but it turns they are being detained by the police. If you look closely in the upper right corner you can spot the gun. It’s the type of image where the more you look and then understand the context, the more powerful it becomes. To immediately contradict myself, I can see how people might find it very boring, especially without knowing the context.
Jon: Yeah, I think this image brings things back to Belgrade aerial photo you selected. Out of context, aside from its compelling structure, there’s a kind of mystery to it. I didn’t catch the gun at first glance, but in some ways it serves as a footnote or clue. Even without the gun or caption, I don’t see this as a boring photograph. Something feels “not right.” There’s a tension and fear in the way they cower and hold their heads.
I just found this next picture — it’s an image of a woman cutting steel from ships that sunk in the Pearl Harbour raid, months after. Like the other images, without context it could have a range of meanings and editorial functions. To the unaware, the object she’s holding might look like a gun, and without caption, there’s even an element of science fiction to this. Maybe it’s the steampunk goggles…
Bryan: I immediately think of the iconic Eugene W. Smith photograph of the steel worker wearing similar goggles. There’s been in a recent push in stock to depict women in more realistic work situations, which is much needed in my opinion, so that came to mind when I saw this as well. From a purely photographic perspective, I find the low angle puts me right close to the action and the muddy tones add a level of abstraction I find fitting for the harsh type of labor she’s performing.
I was happy to see the baseball photograph in the mix. I played until I was about 25 but never thought much about photography. I wish I would have had a camera with me during those summers. We took a few road trips during high school that were amazing experiences. Nothing like baseball in the summer!
Jon: I love that image. I might be nostalgic, or perhaps it’s because it’s a black and white photo, but it feels way more poetic than many of today’s sports photographs. There’s a kind of dance going on here, a softer sense of drama than a lot of contemporary sports photography. And something about that hand coming into the frame on the left – I know many photographers might to crop it out, but it gives the photo some extra weight.
Bryan: Thanks Jon! I think that’s a good place to stop, but let’s leave a few more photos for our readers to contemplate.
Top Image by: Nara Archives/Shutterstock – Frenchmen’s Flat, Nevada, May 23, 1953, Atomic Cannon Test, Members of the party of 17 Canadian and United Kingdom observers at the 400-foot tower shot at Frenchmen’s Flat are shown illuminated by both the sun and the burst.
