A great tumblr blog that started fairly recently is The Lively Morgue an online repository for the archives of the New York Times. As you might expect from the greatest newspaper from the greatest city in the world everything is pretty NY-centric featuring images of cops, skyscrapers and baseball most prominently. What is most interesting to me though is that that next to every image they also have a small thumbnail which allows you to 'flip' the image and see its back as if you really were standing in the 'photo-morgue' of the New York Times. For someone who writes regularly about the materiality and ephemerality and social and industrial use of photography this simple site really gets me interested and after a recent, similar exhibition of the backs of press photos (made by jobbing photographers who went on to bigger things, such as Bill Brandt) here in the UK it is good to see the trend being extended towards websites. I, for one, always take photos of the back as well as the front of a photo in an archive where possible.
Enjoy.
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