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Just a decade after the first surviving photograph was taken, photography became widespread enough that, today, the Canadian film archivist and YouTuber Guy Jones could assemble this parade of streets worldwide – one photograph for each year from 1838 to 2019. The resulting montage offers a scattershot urban history of modernity, chronicling seismic shifts in transportation methods and fashions, as well as the more subtle evolutions of storefront signage and roadway surfaces. The video also provides a meaningful window into the history of the medium itself. At the dawn of photography, the black-and-white images are deliberately framed, with the camera often drawing the attention of its subjects. In recent photos, as the camera has become more ubiquitous, it’s often less artfully employed, and its presence goes mostly unnoticed by the people whose lives it freezes in discrete moments.
Editor: Guy Jones
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Biology
Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves
3 minutes
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Animals and humans
What happened when one woman raised an abandoned squirrel as her own
8 minutes
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Art
The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art
15 minutes
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The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
15 minutes
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Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
8 minutes
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
3 minutes
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History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
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Human rights and justice
Thirty years after one teenager shot another, is it time to forgive?
28 minutes
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Biotechnology
What it’s like to wear a prosthetic that ‘feels’
6 minutes