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How One Artist Makes New Art From Old Coloring Books and Found Photos

When it comes to coloring techniques, some kids always stay within the lines while others grab the nearest crayon, grip it like a dagger, and stab it repeatedly into the rough surface of coloring-book page, slashing their colorful weapon back and forth before reaching for another slender tube of wax—any hue will do—and attacking the same sheet with equal abandon. “Take that, Mr. Binney!” “Take that, Mr. Smith!” "Coloring-book paper is difficult to work with because it's so crumbly." Then...

Capturing a Generation of Aviation Geniuses and Their Incredible Flying Machines

Bob Seidemann leans on his cane and squints at one of his black-and-white photographs. His white hair, beard, and matching eyeglass frames give him the appearance of an aging hippie saint, or perhaps its friendly ghost. The print he's scrutinizing lies on a table with dozens of others from a portfolio called “The Airplane as Art,” which, in recent years, has brought high-altitude prices at auction—all but one of the images in this article are from that portfolio, and most are being...

In Living Color: The Forgotten 19th-Century Photo Technology that Romanticized America

Every few centuries, someone rediscovers America. After the first humans arrived from Asia roughly 15,000 years ago, Vikings touched down in Newfoundland in the year 1000. Half a millennium later, Christopher Columbus spotted a small island in what is now the Bahamas, and in 1769, Gaspar de Portolà was the first European to gaze upon San Francisco Bay, whose indigenous people had remained hidden behind a thick wall of fog throughout most of America’s Colonial era. “Photochroms were a...

Abandoned Suitcases Reveal Private Lives of Insane Asylum Patients

If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you'd ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane left suitcases behind when they passed away, with nobody to claim them. Upon the center's closure in 1995, employees found hundreds of these time capsules stored in a...