Utterly interesting

Before social media, strippers in Southern California used Polaroid photos as calling cards. Taken on the spot and labelled by hand, these instant photographs offered autonomy, visibility, and control in a pre-digital nightlife economy.

Hand coloured glass plates from Yokohama show Japan between 1908 and 1918 in extraordinary clarity. Made for foreign visitors these luminous images capture labour family life and a society on the edge of modernity long before colour film existed.

Hidden beneath a small Italian church, plague victims became perfectly preserved by chance. The mummies of Venzone puzzled scientists, fascinated Napoleon, and were treated as ancestors by locals for centuries. Nature did the embalming, and no one knows how.