More in the realm of newly discovered images of war, Photography Prison (Pete Brook’s photo-centric blog) links to a Guardian feature with newly declassified aerial imagery from World War Two. They’re fascinating.

Be sure to visit the Aerial Reconnaissance Archive itself for access to millions of images, which are brilliantly linked to Google maps and tagged with geographic coordinates.

Many of these pictures are beautiful “document photography” versions (which Scott got me thinking about) of what photographer Sophie Ristelhueber has attempted with her work, namely documenting the physical scars left on earth by war. I first came across her a month or two ago when she was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, which led me to a great interview at Foto8. I cannot wait to find what seems to be a beautiful new edition of her famous and impossible-to-find book “Fait”, which is produced by the tremendous Errata Editions folks. Her work is unique and thoughtful, and an important alternate take on war photography. I’m diving in to her work and recommend the same, start with that interview.

I just ran into this funny little film by Laurie Hill about the ridiculous requests that sometimes come into photo archives. The animation’s great, a bit reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python work. Hard to keep a straight face when a request comes in for a photo of Jesus or a dodo. “How about an etching, or a painting?” “Nope, we need a photo…and do you have a picture of Hitler at the 1948 Olympics? Or Neil Armstrong on the moon with a crowd of people?”

You’ve probably read the news on APE or PDNPulse or elsewhere…Life magazine’s vast photography archive is making its way online with the help of Google. I posted about Life’s digital foray before, but that page remains the same. PDN’s behind-the-scenes article suggests that Life has more up it’s sleeve planned for the Life.com domain. Only 20 percent of the archive is online at the moment, and the remaining 8 million or so mostly-unpublished pictures will be made available in the coming months, according to Google’s blog.

The PDN article, too, delves into some the financial questions behind the site. Time Inc., who are the owners of the Life empire, and Getty hope the portal will drive traffic to the soon to be released Life magazine site and also offer print sales to the general public through print-on-demand service Qoop.com. Hard to say how all of the contracts over the years will affect the final form of the collection, and one wonders whether photographers or their estates are receiving proceeds from the venture (if any proceeds are due). Commenters on APhotoEditor.com’s thread about the endeavor have been wondering whether more business-savvy photographers in the 80s and 90s, who likely didn’t sign work for hire agreements, will be in the collection or not. Interestingly, PDN’s article suggests that the Life archive will not go after bloggers’ and other personal use of the photos.

I’ve also seen comments online wondering why the collection wasn’t incorporated into the vast Flickr Commons (home to the Library of Congress’ huge archive, among others’) project or at least use Flickr’s engine for community annotation and tagging. Presumably, a great deal of the Life archive remains under copyright and, as such, wouldn’t fit into the Flickr Commons model.

Wish I had more time to sift through the Life archive, but in the meantime, here’s W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor and Spanish Village essays, a strange photo of a bowling alley and archery range, covered wagons used in World War I, Salvador Dali, a running surfer, and a dual cigarette holder for lovers.