The last days of Gourmet magazine (in pictures)

November 2, 2009 @ 10:05 pm

Kevin Demaria, who has worked at Gourmet magazine for the last 8 years, published photos of the magazine’s last days to remember the food magazine and to somehow make sense of the poor state of the magazine industry — at least at Conde Nast (or so they say…). Simple yet beautiful photos.

Casualty at an Indian oil depot fire

October 31, 2009 @ 2:53 pm


Photo: Reuters

Wow, Lens posted this haunting picture of a deceased person on the ground after a fire at an Indian oil depot. The blast killed at least 6 people and injured more than 150. Frightening indeed.

Time for a drink at the watering hole

October 30, 2009 @ 9:11 am


Photo: Kevin Frayer/AP

A dog takes a drink from a livestock watering hole in Rajasthan, India during an annual local festival that attracts livestock dealers and thousands of animals. What a great photo! [via]

On a boat in Spain

October 29, 2009 @ 12:09 am


Photo by Samokhvalov on Flickr

This is a nice photograph, compositionally.

A look at the interior of Cipriani 42nd Street

October 28, 2009 @ 9:05 pm

The New York Times has a magnificent look inside Cipriani 42nd Street, the Midtown Manhattan catering hall with grand marble columns, soaring ceilings, and ornate chandeliers. If you’ve ever passed by the building, you’ll know just from the outside that it’s an old-fashioned and majestic place.

Back in the 1920’s it served as the headquarters for the Bowery Savings Bank. My, what a great banking experience that must have been. Banks nowadays are so plain and ugly.

Man builds replica Pan Am cabin in his garage

October 27, 2009 @ 2:22 am


Photo: Brian L. Frank

California resident Anthony Toth has built an impressive replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo. The first-class cabin includes all of the amenities that such a flight would have had in the 1970’s or 1980’s, including red carpted floors, authentic Pan Am seats, overhead bins with working lights and buttons, and even Pan Am napkins and accessories (all of this and more totaling about $50,000 for Anthony Toth). [via]

So why does Anthony Toth do this? According to the WSJ:

Mr. Toth’s obsession with Pan Am began in the 1970s when he was growing up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, about 45 minutes from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Every summer, he and his family traveled to see relatives in Rome and Budapest, where his parents were from, usually flying in Pan Am’s coach class. “There was no other aircraft I could walk on board that intrigued me more than the Pan Am cabin,” he says. “Everything symbolized something. That meant something to me as a youngster.”

As a child, Mr. Toth would save items that most passengers considered to be trash, such as cardboard coasters and paper tray linings from coach meal services. On every flight, he would carry a camera and shoot three or four rolls of film documenting the aircraft’s interior. He lugged a boxy tape recorder to capture in-flight audio by cranking the dial on his armrest up to level 12 and placing the microphone to the earphones so he could listen to the airline’s music selection back home.

To say the least, Toth’s replica is outstanding and you really should have a look at the photos of it below. Photos by Brian L. Frank