The Public Domain Review

Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the history of visual art.

Hand-coloured plates of “the utmost fidelity” for William Hamilton's documentation of the late-eighteenth-century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.

The future’s bombs, this training film produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge.

Described by Kasimir Malevich as the “first step of pure creation in art”, his Black Square of 1915 has been cast as a total break from all that came before it. Yet searching across more than five hundred years of images related to mourning, humour, politics, and philosophy, Andrew Spira uncovers a slew of unlikely foreshadows to Malevich's radical abstraction.

This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom.

A mixture of intimate journal entries, miscellaneous engravings, and sixteen chromolithographs — a unique, often surreal, retelling of life on the ice.

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Air.

Adam Green talks to Creative Review about the new image book Affinities, and the concept of "originality".

The ten-volume Unai no tomo is comprised of charming woodblock prints of traditional objects of play.

Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital. James J. Conway introduces a foundational text of queer identity that finds Magnus Hirschfeld — the “Einstein of Sex” — deploying both sentiment and science to move hearts and minds among a broad readership.