Life Photo Archive at Google

Google has just announced that they are hosting an archive of photos that have appeared in Life magazine. In particular, there are about 200 photos related to the Basques, many of sheepherders in the American West, as shown here.  Actually, most of the photos are of sheepherders and sheepherding.

Looking at the details of the archive a bit closer, many of these photos never appeared in Life magazine itself, they are from their archived of unpublished photos.  Also, all of the photos I’ve found so far are black and white, suggesting they are not the more recent photos (or that Life doesn’t have any photos related to the Basques that are more recent).

However, more searching does bring up other photos.  For example, a search on “Bilbao” brought up this photo (among others) showing the night sky with the smokestacks in the background.

If anyone searches through the archive and finds any really interesting photos, please post the links here and share with the rest of us.  I’m sure there are some real gems in there.

New Guest Photo Album


Malgorzata K. Czarkowska, who I met during a visit to my dad’s family in Munitibar a number of years ago, and who was spending the summer visiting Euskal Herria and getting to know the people, sent me some very nice photos from her time there.  She goes after the people a little bit more, juxtaposing the old traditions with the new changes going on.  The gallery of her photographs can be found in the Photo Album.

Txoria Txori by Joan Baez

Dafydd, frequent contributor and poster on the Forum posted this video in the Forum. It is a video of scenes from the Basque Country to the song Txoria Txori as sung by Joan Baez.

The lyrics, as reported on many sites, are:

Txoria Txori

Hegoak ebaki banizkio
Neria izango zen
Ez zuen aldegingo
Bainan, honela
Ez zen gehiago txoria izango
Eta nik…txoria nuen maite

The bird which is a bird

If i had cut the wings to her
She would have been mine
She would not be flees
But,thus
She would not have been anymore a bird
And me…it’s the bird which i loved

Fotos de Pueblos

This is a site I stumbled across a while ago.  It is a site of photos from numerous towns and pueblos of the Basque Country, at least the Spanish side.  They have a pretty big list for Bizkaia, Nafarroa and Gipuzkoa, though the Araba section is a bit thin yet.  They even have a set of photos from my dad’s home town of Munitibar.  And the photos seem to be of good quality.

ausArt: Basque classical music

ausArt is a Basque Classical label, specializing in 24-bit audio recordings.  What does that mean?  A CD — compact disc — is a 16-bit audio format.  That means there is some loss in fidelity of the recording.  If you use a DVD instead, you can get 24-bit audio and a higher fidelity of sound.  That is what ausArt does.  Their website goes into more detail and links to their online shop as well.  They also have a site dedicated to Basque composers with biographical information and includes free mp3 downloads of tracks.  They currently have a post about composer Juan Padrosa, who recently passed away.