A Kansas farm girl from a strict Catholic family ran off to join a traveling carnival in 1916, taught herself to ride a motorcycle sideways around a vertical wooden wall at full throttle, and spent the next couple of decades billed as the world's foremost woman motorcycle stunt rider. That part of Lillian La France's story shows up on plenty of vintage photo blogs. What most of them leave out is what happened to her memory decades later, when an experimental filmmaker tracked

For 25 years, Herb Ritts built his entire career on physical perfection. He photographed the most idealized bodies in the world, supermodels glistening in black and white, Madonna at her most sculpted, an unknown actor named Richard Gere looking like a god at a gas station, and sold that vision of flawless health to magazines, movie studios and advertising agencies across the planet. The whole time, for well over a decade of it, he was quietly living with HIV, a fact he hid f

Before it had emperors, movie stars and one of Weimar Berlin's most scandalous dancers in front of its lens, the Atelier d'Ora was just one woman's stubborn bet on herself. Dora Kallmus opened it in Vienna in 1907, at a time when formal photography training simply wasn't available to women, and built it into the most fashionable portrait studio in the city with the help of a technician named Arthur Benda who eventually got his own name on the door. For twenty years the studio