(original image sources unknown)

Paris, France

This is a small sampling of Autochrome images made ​​in Paris between 1914 and 1918. The Autochrome process was developed by the Lumière brothers in 1903. The technique was based on a composite of black and white emulsions passed through a series of color filters (red, blue and green) designed based on potato starch (this technique was abandoned in 1935 in favor of the process Kodachrome, then Agfachrome the following year).

See more of these amazing century-old images of the city of love here.

—Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Eastern Ontario, Canada

Ex-pat Trinidadian landscape photographer Timothy Corbin recently captured some stunning photos of ice-laden trees on the shore of Lake Ontario (between Whitby and Oshawa)… see more on his Flickr stream here.

(source)

—Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

(mid-Century flashback)

I stumbled across a website/archive yesterday which shares more than 14GB of scans and cover illustrations from the genre known loosely as “pulp.” While some of the wide range of topics covered (1153 different tags!) will appeal to some and less so to others, this is an outstanding repository of paperback and magazine illustration well worth perusing for those interested in cultural ephemera and vintage (mostly American, and much of it cheesy) publishing : Pulp Covers

(Lent seems, somehow, appropriate for this post).

Winnipeg, Canada

Three years ago, the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, Manitoba Chapter held its first PechaKucha Night at the Park Theatre on Osborne Street. Thursday, 7 March 2013 will mark the 13th such event organized under the auspices of GDC — as these gigs have consistently been “standing room only” events, be sure to get there early…

For anyone not yet familiar with the concept, PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. Begun by several young architects 10 years ago in Tokyo, PechaKucha Nights now take place in over 500 cities around the world. Why the name PechaKucha (pronounce it Paw-Chalk‘-Ahh-Cha)? It derives from a Japanese term meaning “chatter.”

As I was perusing the PechaKucha/Winnipeg website, I saw that a talk I gave at PechaKucha Vol. 7 is featured online. Watch ‘Causes and Effects’ here. Another talk worth watching from the same night is by artist friend Diana Thorneycroft, ‘Various Bodies,’ here.

The great poster shown above is by GDC colleague Jeope Wolfe.

—Marcus Aurelius (121 AD – 180 AD)

Hmmm…

Perhaps these will be funnier for folks who survived puritan or fundamentalist religious upbringings… (-:

I get a good chuckle, having been raised in a relatively devout Mennonite family (Mennonites are much like our Swiss cousins the Amish, but we get to drive in cars and use zippers instead of hook-and-eye closures and buttons — the risk being, of course, that both cars and zippers are “too fast” and do not provide the opportunity for reflection and sobered second thought).

—Ayaan Hirsi Ali