Powerhouse Museum's Virtual Tour of Old Sydney

 
Move over NYC, we've got a new crown jewel in our bonnet – introducing Sydney, Australia on SepiaTown!

This summer we partnered with Seb Chan of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum  (Australia's largest museum) to do our first mass-upload of images from a contributing cultural institution. The results are really fantastic. The Powerhouse's 500 quality historic images of the Sydney metro area and NSW combined with the unique SepiaTown platform have created a massively populated, brand new virtual tour of Sydney at the turn of the 19th century.

We are especially proud to have The Powerhouse Museum be our first mass-uploader; with this approach, they're blazing a digital trail that we hope other institutions will be inspired to follow. For those unfamiliar with the Powerhouse Museum: They are one of the foremost world-class cultural institutions using the latest technology and progressive web-ethics to share their collection in increasingly open, interactive, and interesting ways. Among their accomplishments:

• They were the first museum to geo-code a substantial piece of their photo-archive.

• They presented on their website one of the earliest (if not the very earliest) Google Maps mashups of historical photographs.

• They were an early uploader to Flickr Commons, and an early adopter of Layar.

• And, in the last month, they have joined a tiny group of pioneering museums that have released their own API -- granting developers true open access to their collection, and ensuring some really neat stuff will be made with it in the coming months and years.

Related Links

Read the Powerhouse Museums blog post about the mass-upload to SepiaTown

Lean More about the exciting launch of the Powerhouse Museum's API

Learn more about why it would benefit your institution to mass-upload to SepiaTown



Click on images below to see them mapped on SepiaTown...

Lost Signage in Downtown Providence, Rhode Island

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

Nearly all the buildings in this 1945 photograph of Westminster Street still exist, yet the loss of signage has transformed the look of the street.

25 Early-Color, American, Photographs Mapped on SepiaTown

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Links to More photos...

Rutland, Vermont

http://www.sepiatown.com/812379-Vermont-State-Fair

http://www.sepiatown.com/812380-Ride-and-Freak-Show-at-Vermont-State-Fair

Brockton, Massachusetts

http://www.sepiatown.com/812352-Sylvia-Sweets-Tea-Room

http://www.sepiatown.com/812351-Postings-in-the-Brockton-Enterprise-Window

Caribou, Maine

http://www.sepiatown.com/812354-Trucks-at-Starch-Factory

Southington, Connecticut

http://www.sepiatown.com/812347-Queen-of-May-at-Beecher-Street-School

http://www.sepiatown.com/812356-Memorial-Day-Parade-Heading-North-up-Main-Street

http://www.sepiatown.com/812350-East-Northeast-View-from-the-End-of-Wall-Street

Melrose, Louisiana

http://www.sepiatown.com/812361-Crossroad-Store,-Bar,-Juke-Joint-and-Gas-Station

Campton, Kentucky

http://www.sepiatown.com/812360-Trading-Mules-and-Horses-on-%22Jockey-Street%22

St. Helena Island, South Carolina

http://www.sepiatown.com/812357-Fourth-of-July-Celebration

Romney, West Virginia

http://www.sepiatown.com/812376-Looking-East-from-the-Indian-Mound-Cemetery

http://www.sepiatown.com/812377-Looking-Southwest-Down-Main-Street

Beaumont, Texas

http://www.sepiatown.com/812371-Workers-Leaving-Pennsylvania-Shipyards

Kansas City, Kansas

http://www.sepiatown.com/812348-Assembling-B-25-Bombers-for-WWII

Lincoln, Nebraska

http://www.sepiatown.com/812375-Grand-Grocery-Co.-Corner-Store

http://www.sepiatown.com/812370-Looking-NE-Across-P-Street

http://www.sepiatown.com/812363-Southeast-Corner-of-10th-and-P-Street

Pie Town, New Mexico

http://www.sepiatown.com/812378-Main-Street

Cascade, Idaho

http://www.sepiatown.com/812362-Main-Street

Above are links to 25 color photographs taken by U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers between 1939 and 1944.

Here's the Library of Congress's description of these photographs...

"Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.
The original images are color transparencies ranging in size from 35 mm. to 4x5 inches. They complement the better-known black-and-white FSA/OWI photographs, made during the same period."

Learn more about these photos here.

The Three Incarnations of Grand Central Station

 (click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

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Many New Yorkers are unaware that two other incarnations of Grand Central Station preceded the current Beaux-Arts masterpiece.  Above are four views of these buildings all from the same vantage point and all mapped on SepiaTown.

Fountain Square, Cincinnati, 1938

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

The Sunday Re-Post: Eugène Atget's Paris on SepiaTown

Eugène Atget, the great turn-of-the-century chronicler of Paris, is considered by many to be the first true modern photographer.

In 1898, at the advanced age of 41 (and with no former experience in the visual arts) he took up photography as a way to eke out a living by creating and selling straightforward  depictions of city scenes and architecture for artists to use for reference.   By the time he died in 1927, Atget had created  over 10,000 images of the city and its inhabitants. 

Atget's work was discovered  and heralded by later generations of artists, who recognized that his  photographs were much more than simple “documents for artists” (which is  how Atget regarded and described them throughout his  life). 

We've uploaded to SepiaTown a small  handful of Atget's photographs that the George Eastman house was good  enough to share with the public via Flickr Commons. There's much more material  where these came from, and we hope that many more of Atget's  poetic images of old Paris will be brought to life in a new way as they are uploaded to  SepiaTown.

Here's a sampling of Eugène Atget images on SepiaTown...

(click on any image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

We're really excited about this then/now view because it is the first evidence we've seen of the Google Street View Tricycles handiwork.  In the coming months and years these tricycles will provide Google Street Views for new kinds of locations and the then/now view on SepiaTown will get more and more ubiquitous as a result.

A Virtual Tour of Ellis Island on SepiaTown

Click on the image above to see it and over 25 other historic images of Ellis Island on SepiaTown (and more are on the way!).

Great Then/Now View of Historic Dorothea Lange Photograph

(click image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

The Most Lopsided Game in the History of College Football on SepiaTown

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On this day in 1916 the Georgia Tech Engineers defeated the Cumberland College Bulldogs at Grant Field Atlanta in the most lopsided game in the history of college football. Final score: 220 -0.

10 Early Photographs Mapped on SepiaTown

1826

First permanent photograph ever created.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1835
Photograph created from the oldest photographic negative in existence.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1838
Earliest photograph of a human being.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1839
Possibly the earliest photograph of London.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1841
Earliest photograph ever taken of the Czech Republic.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1846
Early photograph of Frankfurt, Germany.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1851
Early photograph of San Francisco.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1850s
Early photograph of New York City.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1862
One of the earliest known photos of a baseball game.

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

1863
American civil war photograph

(click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

Mapped, Historic, Dorothea Lange Photograph on SepiaTown

(Click on image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

Sputnik on SepiaTown

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On this day 53 years ago the Soviet Union lauched Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. See two mapped photos of the launch on SepiaTown.