“Amadeo de Souza Cardoso left Lisbon for Paris in 1906. He had just turned nineteen and intended to continue the architecture studies he had begun in Lisbon. However the Paris artistic milieu radically changed his life in that it opened to him the world of painting. In 1907, the writer Manuel Laranjeira, enthused with the drawings that he was receiving from his young friend in Paris, did not hesitate to recognize him as “an artist in the absolute meaning of the term.”

“… As for his painting, Souza Cardoso was determined to show his work outside the Parisian circuit. The contacts he had established led him to participate in a series of important group exhibitions, among them the celebrated 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, also called The Armory Show.” (See photos of the 2008 Armory Show.)

- Excerpt from Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, A Biography

 

Luckily, Lisbon’s Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) has a small collection of photos of the life of Souza Cardoso, and has shared them with us in The Commons on Flickr.

The Biblioteca de Arte also has some wonderful images of the gothic architecture of Portugal collected in a photographic survey in the 1950s, which will hopefully be making their way into The Commons in the coming months. Meanwhile, these candid portraits of Souza Cardoso complement to the Smithsonian Institution’s "Portraits of Artists" set.

In other Commons news, The Library of Congress‘ photostream recently steamed past 9 million views since their launch into The Commons in January. WOW! In addition to the 500 or so updates made to The Library of Congress catalogue (as a direct result of the feedback received via Flickr), the Powerhouse Museum has also “closed the circle,” beginning to re-ingest tags added to their Commons photos back into their collection. YAY!

We’re continuing to work on developing more views into The Commons, including
this new tag cloud view of all the photos so far, as well as a special page for photos tagged with, say, texas, that are just in The Commons. It’s funny… I hadn’t realised all those gorgeous Rosie The Riveter shots were taken in October of 1942 until I was poking around the new tag views.

Don’t stop taggin’! It’s wonderful.

We’ve been sifting through your wonderful contributions to Flickr 888* and there are some emerging themes. (Who knew that there were so many Magic 8-balls out there?) We’ll be sharing a few of our favourites over the next few weeks.

Photos from James_at_Slack, jonzer, sgroni, Maxfacs, Plutone (NL), and Highway Royalty. View more photos in the Flickr 888 group pool.

* What is this Flickr 888 thing? We’re celebrating another 24 hours of Flickr with members contributing photos taken on August 8, 2008 — 888! If you missed the blog post, but took a photo last Friday, there’s still time to participate. The full info is available in the Flickr 888 group and the group rules.

We’re pleased to support the Berlin Fotomarathon again this year. If you haven’t heard of Fotomarathon, you’ll be thrilled to know it doesn’t involve running 26 miles — it’s a marvelous photography challenge.

Fotomarathon participants are asked to shoot 24 different themed, chronologically ordered photographs in 12 hours. 2007′s theme was “The Big Screen” with topics such as “The Blue Angel”, “Marathon Man”, and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. To make things even trickier, all the topics kept under wraps until the start of Fotomarathon and then released bit by bit throughout the day. A month later, the participant’s photos are curated in an exhibition, and prizes are awarded to the winners.

This year, our friends at Fotomarathon are offering 5 Flickr members the chance to participate for free! If you’d like to be considered, send an email with the subject line “Flickr Fotomarathon” with a link to your Flickr photostream to 2008flickr(at)fotomarathon.de.

If you’d like to participate, you can sign-up online at Fotomarathon.de until August 28, 2008. The entry fee is 27 €.

If you’d like to learn more, please visit the Fotomarathon website and join the official Fotomarathon Flickr group.

Photo from Thomas Langenfeld.

You know that moment when you crack open a new canister of 35mm and that unique smell of chemicals & plastic wafts outwards? That’s one of my favourite moments. Really. It’s been a personal goal to share my love of film photography with as many members of Team Flickr as possible. There are some converts. Yay!

Team Flickr invites you to become a charter member of our brand spanking new group: The Film Fanciers’ Guild.

Our creed? To celebrate the beauty of all things film, to raise our fists to the sky and proclaim that “film is not dead!”

And to celebrate the launch of The Film Fanciers’ Guild, we’ve teamed up with up with our friends at the Lomographic Society International to spread the word that film isn’t dead!

Any photo contributed to The Film Fanciers’ Guild group pool between now and August 25th will have the chance to be shown at this year’s Photokina conference in Cologne, Germany, where Lomography is building a “Lomowall” as the highlight of their the “Future is Analogue” exhibition.

There’s more info about Flickr and Lomography in The Film Fanciers’ Guild.

Photo from George.

At Flickr, it has always been our goal to enable new ways of sharing photos (and video). Apart from the various tools we’ve built within Flickr itself to help you share photos with those near and dear, the software backbone of Flickr — our API — has been public for about 4 years too. For those non-nerds amongst us, that means that developers from around the world have been able use our API to mould the Flickrverse into a completely different shape, like FD’s Toys, Photojojo’s Time Capsule & krazydad’s FlickrColor Pickr. When you decide to release software into the world, it is exciting to see it transformed into something new.

That’s part of what appealed to us so much about a fantastic project called OpenStreetMap – a free, editable map of the world, made by the people in it. What an exciting prospect to be able to see maps that are alive and have been lovingly created by citizen cartographers all over the world. What an even more exciting prospect to be able to display those maps in Flickr!

We racked our brains for a place that we knew we didn’t have a very good street-level resolution for, and had something going on there right now… The 2008 Summer Olympic Games! They just kicked off in Beijing!

Before:

Thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license in use at OpenStreetMap, we are able to download and make use of these hand-crafted map tiles to improve the street-level resolution of the Beijing map in Flickr.

After:

I also noticed that an old Flickr buddy from the Vancouver days, Kris Krug, is lucky enough to be travelling around Beijing, taking some fabulous pictures at the Games, as well as some lovely “vox pop” shots of the streets, the people and food of this “Great Ancient Capital” of China.

Wish I was there!

In Asia the number "8" stands for wealth and auspiciousness. For many people, 08.08.08 is not only a very exciting day because of the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, China. It is also a day where many couples get married to be reminded of this unique date for the rest of their lives.

No matter what you have planned to do this Friday, show us your unique experiences in Flickr 888 – Another 24 Hours of Flickr.

Photos from KayVee.INC, puja, and Sanctu.

Flickr’s great for exploring photos by photographer, tag, time, text and group, and it’s also great for exploring photos by place. Adding geo data is a way for our members to organize their memories (that trip we took to Europe last year) and share their experiences with other members.

Today, we’ve added an easy-peasy way of adding Geo data without having to leave the comfort of your own photo page. On the right side of your photo, in the Additional Information section you’ll see a new “Add to your map” link, it’ll pop-up a new map which you can literally put your photo on.

(If you’ve never geotagged before, the first time will take you to the organizr to pick your geo-settings.)

We’re also trying an exciting new experiment to let you be a bit more specific about where we say a photo was taken. We’ll not always get it right, so this is where the “experiment” bit kicks in.

As the odds are you know more about your local neighborhoods than we do, when you edit a location on the pop-up map you can also see other nearby options and choose one. Over time if everyone continuously tells us we’ve got somewhere wrong, we can feed it back into the system and update it for everyone else. We’ll all stand united, hands joined across the world, singing and taking photographs in perfect world geotagging harmony*, la la la la … [fade to black]

*or something like that

Photo by Kaptain Kobold.

Thanks to the Powerhouse Museum Collection & lava2bk.