Born in 1980 photographer and illustrator Agan Harahap from Jakarta, Indonesia, currently works for music magazine TRAX. His latest photography project called ‘Super Hero’ consists of memorable political and wartime scenes from the mid-20th century featuring beloved superheros like Spiderman or Batman in some interesting and funny positions – true juxtaposition in effect.
via Format Mag
That’s the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in modern Nigeria that lasted from 1440 until 1897.
via kottke
Top 10 Crazy Bastards Who Actually Changed the World (for the Better) via Spike
1. Phythagoras
Pythagoras was one of the founding fathers of mathematics. Aside from being credited with writing the Pythagorean Theorem, he also conducted a great deal of work with sound and harmonics, and discovered the Golden Ratio.
So what’s so crazy about him?
He had a cult. A weird one. Sure, they had all the weird rules. Have sex in the summer, not the winter, only drink water, only eat uncooked foods, don’t wear wool, etc. Oh, and never ever eat beans. They make you fart and are “like the genitalia” therefore they are pure evil.
Pythagoras’ end came when he denied a few people entry into his elite group of math nerds. They came in a mob to torch his house, and he ran away out the back with them hot in pursuit. Supposedly this continued until he came to a large field of beans. Given the option between the Angry Mob and the Bean Field, he just turned around and let them kill him.
This guy made math what it is today. Damn, eh?
A small collection of photos from two photography books published in the 1980s in the USSR. All photographs from this set are by amateur photo artists from the republics of Ukraine (Amateur Photography, 1986) and Moldovia (Moldavian Artistic Photography, 1985).
via Real USSR
Violette Szabo’s bravery, beauty, and tragically short life have contributed to her legend (and even inspired a video game for the Xbox 360, Velvet Assassin). As a secret agent for the Special Operations Executive in England, her missions in occupied France ranged from intelligence-gathering to sabotage.
Shortly after D-Day, she was captured by German troops following an intense gun battle during which Szabo emptied every clip of ammunition she had. Brought to Ravensbruck concentration camp, her open defiance inspired fellow prisoners and led to her execution in 1945, at just 23 years old.
Sovetskiy Soyuz magazine, launched in 1956, was distributed within Russia and translated for readers in other Warsaw Pact countries with the aim of promoting Soviet culture.
This issue from 1965 celebrates the 20th anniversary of Soviet Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany at the end of World War Two, proudly showing the hammer and sickle flag flown on the Reichstag above the devastated streets of Berlin.
via Creative Cloud
A history of modern art in three paragraphs
Impressionism - painting outside of a studio with quick, loose brushstrokes to capture an evocative impression of their subject. Van Gogh was an Impressionist but wanted to express how he felt about what he saw so he distorted the subject. This helped to lead to Expressionism practised by artists from Edvard Munch through to Francis Bacon. The Fauves (wild beasts) expressed themselves by painting with bright colours. Jackson Pollock did it by throwing or dripping paint on a canvas. His paintings were abstract — Abstract Expressionism.
Cezanne was very important. He began as an Impressionist but then started to look at a subject from two different perspectives to represent how we see. Picasso and his friend Georges Braque were very impressed and started to paint subjects from lots of different views. This is Cubism. Marcel Duchamp was a Cubist but then changed art for ever. He said the idea is more important than the medium and refused to stick with the limited choice of canvas or stone. So he chose everyday objects and called them art because he had altered their context. This led to Conceptual Art where the idea becomes the medium.
The Dadaists were very cross. They blamed the horrors of the First World War on the Establishment’s reliance on rational and reasoned thought. They radically opposed rational thought and became nihilistic — the punk rock of modern art movements. Dada plus Sigmund Freud equals Surrealism. The Surrealists were fascinated by the unconscious mind, as that’s where they thought truth resided. Piet Mondrian thought he could paint everything he knew, felt and saw by using two lines placed at rectangles and three primary colours. This was called Neo-Plasticism and was inspired by Cubism. So was Futurism, which is Cubism with motion added. Vorticism is the same as Futurism, but British. The Minimalists might represent the real truth because they weren’t trying to represent anything. Performance Art is Dada live.
That’s from Will Gompertz in the Times.
via kottke.org
![Top 10 Colorful First Spouses: Imelda Marcos (Philippines)
Though Imelda Marcos may be best known for her extensive collection of shoes, gowns, and jewelry, there was much more to her. The former beauty queen married then-Philippine Congressman Ferdinand E. Marcos, who would become the country’s 10th President in 1966. And Imelda, whom Marcos appointed to various positions in government, was a polarizing figure early on; in 1972, an assailant, Carlito Dimahilig, tried to stab her to death during a televised award ceremony.
Her Special Envoy duties took her around the world but went hand in hand with a lavish lifestyle, which reportedly included multi-million-dollar shopping trips to New York, Rome and Copenhagen; a massive property portfolia (although Marcos declined to buy the Empire State Building for $750m as she considered it “too ostentatious”) and a collection of art including works by Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Canaletto. Marcos, who eventually had to sell or give up nearly all of her riches after her husband was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1986, responded to criticisms of her extravagance by maintaining it was her “duty” to be “some kind of light, a star to give [the poor] guidelines.” Earlier this month, Imelda gave an interview where she admitted that she still dreams of a return to power — but this time with her son Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. as president.
via Time](http://12.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kplzthg8vP1qzdhk9o1_400.jpg)
Top 10 Colorful First Spouses: Imelda Marcos (Philippines)
Though Imelda Marcos may be best known for her extensive collection of shoes, gowns, and jewelry, there was much more to her. The former beauty queen married then-Philippine Congressman Ferdinand E. Marcos, who would become the country’s 10th President in 1966. And Imelda, whom Marcos appointed to various positions in government, was a polarizing figure early on; in 1972, an assailant, Carlito Dimahilig, tried to stab her to death during a televised award ceremony.
Her Special Envoy duties took her around the world but went hand in hand with a lavish lifestyle, which reportedly included multi-million-dollar shopping trips to New York, Rome and Copenhagen; a massive property portfolia (although Marcos declined to buy the Empire State Building for $750m as she considered it “too ostentatious”) and a collection of art including works by Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Canaletto. Marcos, who eventually had to sell or give up nearly all of her riches after her husband was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1986, responded to criticisms of her extravagance by maintaining it was her “duty” to be “some kind of light, a star to give [the poor] guidelines.” Earlier this month, Imelda gave an interview where she admitted that she still dreams of a return to power — but this time with her son Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. as president.
via Time
The First Image Online
In 1992, the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee asked a CERN programmer named Silvano de Gennaro to scan some photos from a CERN party and post them on the first website, http://info.cern.ch. The first image in web history was these four women.
via 11 points
A view of traffic on the Jones Bridge in Manila one week before the war with Japan
(Source: LIFE Photo Archive)
Notice how they spell the Philippines as Filipinas. This was before Pres. Manuel Quezon of course.
