In 1979, sometime during the barely controlled chaos of the last months of finishing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, someone in legal affairs had the presence of mind to ask…

At the turn of the 20th century, a color revolution was sweeping across Europe and North America. The invention decades earlier of aniline dyes, synthesized from coal tar, had made…

Adam Magyar’s gone viral. His recent series Stainless, in which video recordings of subway platforms are played out in super-slow-motion, has been rippling across the web. Magyar…

Both poetry and physics have a way of turning our expectations upside down—but direct intersections of the two are rare. This makes William Carlos Williams’ poem “St. Francis…

For many years I ran a field station in Amazonian Peru. The station was a five-hour canoe ride from the nearest road, and every Friday our boat made the long trip upriver carrying…

To see larger versions of these photographs, see the above slideshow.The word “photography” might bring to mind the stark granite of an Ansel Adams photograph, or perhaps the memory…

A range of dark hilltops appears against a dawn sky. On a ridge in the far distance we can discern a human silhouette. It is some- one telling us about the uniqueness of Man. “Man…

A range of dark hilltops appears against a dawn sky. On a ridge in the far distance we can discern a human silhouette. It is someone telling us about the uniqueness of Man. “Man…

In the summer of 1867 American photographer Carleton Watkins hauled a mammoth wooden camera through the wilderness of Oregon, taking pictures of the mountains. To prepare each negative,…