osu_archives

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We like it local!

Strawberries, greens, and crunchy carrots? Must mean it’s spring in the Valley! In the Heart of that Valley (Corvallis), we expect the Saturday Farmers’ Market to grace the riverfront– but now the Wednesday Market does as well.

Link to history & archives? Only a tangential one… We are the archives of a university once named “Oregon Agricultural College,” and it’s hard to miss the greenhouses and cattle, but we have a direct link as well: the University Archivist’s wife runs the markets. No market wide discount for us, though there was a buzz in the air yesterday AM and lots of talking about glorious fruits & veggies!

And if you find yourself there on a Wednesday, at the end of the day and hungry for more than a big carrot, check out booths for the Pretzel lady, the potato doughnuts at Gathering Together, Pacific Sourdough pizza, and Zia.

For more juicy details, visit the Locally Grown site.

To learn more about last night’s event, check out the Gazette Times article.

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Beautiful book…

On this Earth Day eve, check out “The dawn of the color photograph: Albert Kahn’s archives of the planet” by David Okuefuna.

From Booklist: “In 1907 the Lumiere brothers, who wowed Paris with its first commercially shown movies in the 1890s, demonstrated the autochrome photographic process, with which color photos could be taken by a glass-plate camera. The banker Albert Kahn embraced it and the next year launched a project that would continue until the Great Depression bankrupted him. Kahn felt that if the world’s people could see one another, animosity based on stereotypes would be dispelled and world peace realized. He dispatched opérateurs, some female, with autochrome plates and movie film to capture how the Other looked and lived for a maximally public archive. It was the dream of, Musée Albert-Kahn’s director Gilles Baud-Berthier says, a man of the nineteenth century, perhaps even the eighteenth—but not the twentieth. So much for outdated idealism. But just look at the pictures, full of the fascination of all old photodocumentation, heightened by color more sensual than later color processes deliver. Accompanied by a nontechnical text and complementing a BBC-TV series, this is a world-history buff’s delight” (Ray Olson).