A Chaos of Conscious Forces

Listen: I've been accumulating a pretty nice collection of bookmarks to various photo and imagery archives around the internets for a while now, with the intention of sharing. There is so much visual treasure just waiting to be looked at, from Soviet-era maps of the U.K. to photos developed from film found in cameras at antique stores and flea markets to hundreds of scans of old illustrations from the turn of the century.

[I have to disclaim that I've been turned on to a large majority of these collections via Boing Boing, (though I've found some on my own,) so if you're a regular BB reader, I ask you to forgive a little repetition. But I think some of y'all might not have seen this stuff, and I want you to.]

So I'm gonna start posting some of these archives regularly.

To start: a really nicely designed site about found photos from Buenos Aires.

And this:

'A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol -a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it.’

Well put, G.K. Chesterson.

By the way, I like the layout of this website. The photos are neatly separated into categories, and you get the thumbnails and the actual photo you're looking at in the same screen. Everything here is pretty good, but the "pieces" section is especially worth seeing.