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Photography

Frederick Eugene Ives' photochromoscopy plates "are perhaps the first color photographs of San Francisco.

The 1906 San Francisco Quake in Color

Recently discovered photographs depict the aftermath of the devastating California earthquake in a new light

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Photo Contest Finalist: The Last Prayer

GRAND PRIZE WINNER Indonesian artists make a few final touches before performing Bhopal, India • Photographed June 2008 Hatvalne, who has worked as a photojournalist for the past two decades, was taken by the dancers’ fastidious preparations before a performance. “I love photographing people,” he says. “I also sometimes photograph landscapes as well, but there is no better landscape than a human face.”

8th Annual Photo Contest Winners and Finalists

See the winning photos from our 2010 contest

Under the right conditions, patterns emerge from the brain's monumental complexity.

Beauty of the Brain

Stunning new images reveal the marvelous and mysterious world inside our heads

In his new book, iDubai, Joel Sternfeld publishes scores of photographs from his iPhone.

Seeing Dubai Through a Cell Phone Camera

At a shopping mall in Dubai, Joel Sternfeld documents the peak of consumer culture with his iPhone

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Royal Observatory Photography Prize

In a letter to the Daguerreian Journal in 1851, Levi Hill claimed to have invented color photography.

A 160-Year-Old Photographic Mystery

In 1851, Levi Hill claimed he invented color photography. Was he a genius or a fraud?

"He'd go down there [to the docks] in the middle of the night sometimes," Bodine's daughter says.

Photographing Baltimore’s Working Class

Baltimore’s A. Aubrey Bodine cast a romantic light on the city’s dockworkers in painterly photographs

Biographers disagree over what kind of man Charles Dodgson really was.

Lewis Carroll’s Shifting Reputation

Why has popular opinion of the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland undergone such a dramatic reversal?

For two years, photographer Dona Schwartz chronicled the newly blended family members' interactions in the shared space of their kitchen.

Home is Where the Kitchen Is

Photographer Dona Schwartz viewed her family through her camera lens in the hub of their household: the kitchen

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Photo Contest Finalist: A Coconut Floats in the Shallows

GRAND PRIZE WINNER Young monks from Myanmar Bagan, Myanmar • Photographed April 2007 Winn traveled north from his home in Yangon to the countryside of old Bagan to capture this image of young Buddhist monks in the Shwesandaw Temple. “I found them lighting candles and praying,” Winn says. “You can see monks everywhere in Myanmar.”

7th Annual Photo Contest Winners and Finalists

See the winning photos from our 2009 contest

Perez (at home in Guatemala in 2001) "really had a foot in both worlds," Donna DeCesare says.

Out of the Guatemalan Gang Culture, an Artist

Carlos Perez could have been an artist or a gangster. Photographer Donna DeCesare helped him choose

John Gerrard uses a combination of photography, 3-D modeling and gaming software for his landscape images.

Q and A: Irish Artist John Gerrard

Artist John Gerrard uses 360-degree photography and 3-D gaming software to create a virtual reality

"Here is business enough for you," Gage told the first doctor to treat him after a premature detonation on a railroad-building site turned a tamping iron into a missile.

Phineas Gage: Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient

An accident with a tamping iron made Phineas Gage history’s most famous brain-injury survivor

The Centennial Ride to Wounded Knee, December 29, 1990. Photograph by James Cook

Photograph Captures the Centennial Ride to Wounded Knee

On December 29, 1990, photographer James Cook caught sight in the distance of more than 350 horseback riders who were recreating the ride to Wounded Knee

From childhood on, abolitionist John Brown (in a c.1847 daguerreotype taken by Augustus Washington) had sworn "eternal war with slavery."

John Brown’s Famous Photograph

An 1840s image captures an extremist’s fervor

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Picture of the Week—Pentacene

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Picture of the Week—Ancient Altinum

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Smithsonian Magazine 6th Photo Contest: Winners Go on View in the Castle

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