elsewhere
Elsewhere — Further Reading
The original version of this page said, in full: here are some links, in no particular order, that we like. Underneath it were seven hand-drawn buttons pointing at seven sites belonging to people whose work we admired.
All seven are gone. Not one of the seven resolves to anything today: some are parked, some return nothing at all, and one appears to have become a hosting company's landing page and then stopped being that too. The rot took about fifteen years and it took every single entry, which is a completeness we could not have arranged deliberately. We mention it because it is on theme. This magazine spent its whole existence on the proposition that things get left behind and nobody comes back for them, and then the links page proved it without being asked.
What follows is what replaced it: places that hold the sort of material we spent fifteen years picking up off the ground, all of them institutions with a reason to still be here in another twenty years. A note on each about what is actually there.
Found and vernacular photography
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs. Well over a million digitised images, searchable and browsable, a large proportion of them free of known copyright restriction. It includes a great deal of anonymous and workaday material — survey photographs, documentary series, street scenes — which is precisely the register that interested us. Anyone who liked the slides will lose an afternoon here.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The photography holdings run from the earliest processes to the present and include a substantial quantity of anonymous and commercial work sitting alongside the signed and famous. The online collection is open and image-heavy. It is the argument, made at scale and with money, that an unattributed photograph is still a photograph.
The New York Public Library. Its Digital Collections run to hundreds of thousands of items, a large share in the public domain and downloadable at high resolution: photographs, postcards, ephemera, menus, maps. Free to consult, and the closest thing to the drawer of unsorted material this magazine imagined itself running.
Colour transparency film
George Eastman Museum. A photography and film museum in Rochester, New York, holding technology, prints and motion picture collections, and one of the few institutions that treats the chemistry and the hardware as history in their own right. If you want to know what a 35mm colour slide actually is, and why the ones from certain decades have gone magenta and the ones from others have not, this is where the answer is kept.
Zines and small-press publishing
Barnard Zine Library. A working library collection of zines, catalogued properly, with a public catalogue and a body of open material online. Its cataloguing practice is itself worth reading: it is a serious attempt to describe self-published work in a system built for books, which is a problem the whole small-press world has and mostly ignores.
Comics
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. At Ohio State, and the largest collection of cartoon and comics material anywhere: original art, newspaper strips, comic books, correspondence. Single-panel work of the kind we published is well represented, drawn by people who could actually draw. Their online exhibits and finding aids are open to anyone.
The web itself
The Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine holds captures of billions of web pages, including several hundred of this site, which is the only reason any of it can be read now. Everything on the Foundation gallery and in the comics exists here today because a crawler happened to visit on an afternoon when the server was up.
Library of Congress web archiving. A plain explanation of how a national library decides which websites to preserve, how it collects them, and what it can and cannot keep. Worth ten minutes of anybody's time who has ever assumed a page will simply stay where it is.
None of the above knows we exist. That is the correct arrangement for a links page and it always was. Back to the front page.