The oldest photograph

Adam Clark Estes on Gizmodo

Twitter lit up with wows a while back as this handsome photograph of Broadway and Franklin Street in Manhattan circa 1850 got passed around. According to one source, it's "believed to be the earliest photograph taken of New York City." That would be cool—if it were true.

It's not. Sure it looks old—there's a horse and buggy! it's sepia-toned!—but it's tough to say if this is even a pre-Civil War photo. Are those power lines to the right? Where is Daniel Day Lewis's character from Gangs of New York? And what the hell are they doing to the street?

The actual oldest known photo of New York City surprisingly contains very little city. A daguerrotype believed to have been taken in 1848 sold for $62,500 a few years ago. It shows a surprisingly bucolic scene—you'd never guess that the road in the foreground is actually Broadway. Actually, at the time it was "a continuation of Broadway," according to a note that was included with the daguerrotype. This means that the road in the photo is likely Bloomingdale Road which became Broadway in 1899.

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There is also a new documentary about Vermeer and the camera obscura 

How did Vermeer paint his masterpiece?

A new documentary explores the possibility that the 17th century Dutch painter Vermeer used a camera obscura - an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings onto a screen - to create one of his masterpieces.

If this was the case then it would challenge the view that the artist had an incredible innate ability to paint with such accurate and precise detail.
Talking Movies' Tom Brook reports.

See the report