The 50 States Project is an online photographic tour of the country, courtesy of 50 photographers, one in each state. From their website:

Each photographer lives in one of the 50 states and during the year long project each photographer will represent the state where they currently live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and their state.

By the end of the project there will be 300 images which hopefully represent the talent of the photographers involved and have something to say about the USA today.

The photographers are midway through the yearlong project right now, having completed photographs for the “People,” “Habitat,” and “Landscape” assignments. “Industry” will be up next month. The images are not all brilliant — I found some of them disappointingly predictable — but the images from Jeremy and Claire Weiss, the duo photographing California, are wonderfully surreal (they have a nifty blog, too). And if you head straight for the quietly nostalgic, sepia-toned photos of Wyoming, taken by Story’s own Adam Jahiel, well, who could blame you?

Google Insights for Search offers a fascinating (and often overwhelming) look at who is Googling what, when, and where, sometimes with surprising results. I plugged “humanities” into their search engine and learned that the state where the most people run searches that include the word “humanities” is Alaska — and Wyoming comes in at a more than respectable number ten! Hooray for Wyoming humanities! “Humanities council” is the second most popular search that includes the word, after the more straightforward “the humanities.” And the related search that has increased the most over time is “digital humanities.” Hours of fun, everyone. Hours of fun.

Finally, for the second year in a row, the Boston Phoenix celebrated the Fourth of July by naming the best band in each state in the union in their 50 Bands, 50 States feature (last year, they also named the best all-time band and solo artist from each state). Being an alternative weekly, their tastes run a little more punky and hard rock than mine, but it’s still fun to see what musicians are up to across the country. I’ll ruin the suspense and tell you that this year’s Wyoming pick was Laramie’s Looker; last year’s was Teenage Bottlerocket; and they claim that the best all-time Wyoming band is The Dirty Dogs, with the best solo artist being Jeb Loy Nichols. Feel free to agree or disagree (both with their choices, and about whether they all even count as Wyoming bands). I’ll leave the other forty-nine states to swallow your Friday afternoon…

Reading Wyoming

Northern Arapaho Experience
Wednesday, August 19, 6:30-8:30 PM
Wind River Casino, Riverton

We invite you to experience Indian Country through the eyes of the Northern Arapaho People.  Celebrate our native heritage through song, dance and storytelling.

Reading Wyoming: Sundance
Thursday, August 20, 5:30-7:00 PM
Crook County Library
Family Photographs series

Reading Wyoming: Upton
Thursday, August 20, 7:00-8:30 PM
Upton Branch Library
Rural in America series

Wyoming Film Festival
August 20-22
Platte Valley Community Center, Saratoga

The Wyoming Film Festival is a unique venue for the community to come together as filmmakers, film lovers, volunteers, corporations, and other organizations from across the state and beyond to celebrate the valuable contribution that film makes to our cultural and economic lives.  Our plan is to present film and video productions that interpret the past, present, and future of the American West in way that embrace the festival themes of environment, equality, and family.

Carissa Mine Tours
Saturday, August 22

Tours will start at the South Pass City parking lot, in South Pass City. The public will be able to see the Carissa Mill House and the newly reconstructed Head Frame and Trestle.

Due to safety regulations, tours are limited to 20 people and reservations must be made with South Pass City State Historic Site. To make a reservation Call 307-332-3684 and ask for Carissa Tour Reservations. The tour is very rigorous and participants should be able to negotiate steep terrain and steep stairs. This tour is not appropriate for young children. For more information visit our web site www.southpasscity.com.

Sergey Larenkov intermingles historical photographs of World War II’s Seige of Leningrad with contemporary photographs of the same locations. Bombed-out buildings are blended with their own rehabilitated selves; tanks roll through placid parking lots; women kneel beside the dead in urban green space. The photographs offer a tangible representation of how the past stays with us and how our own lives and times wash over it.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, on the other hand, photographed the past while it was still the present. In the early 1900’s, Prokudin-Gorskii was sent to survey the Russian Empire by Tsar Nicolas II. He did so beautifully and, through a tri-lens process I still don’t quite understand, in color. His subjects included old Russian architecture; railroads, bridges, and other forms of transport;  industry in all its forms, from factories to farms; and, perhaps most strikingly, the many peoples who inhabited the Russian Empire at the time. After his death in 1948, Prokudin-Gorskii’s heirs sold his equipment and photographs to the Library of Congress, which has created a searchable online archive of the images: The Empire That Was Russia. Worth a look, for sure.

Enter The Museum of Online Museums, a clearinghouse of collections big and small. Sure, they’ve got links to heavy hitters like the Rijksmuseum and The Art Institute of Chicago, but they also feature quirky online exhibits like Toothpaste World, the Gallery of Pulp Paperback Covers, and the Virtual Shoe Museum. Prefer audio collections? Try the Speech Accent Archive or the Locomotive Horn Sound File Collection. My personal favorites are Plan59 (of course), which bills itself as “The Museum of Mid-Century illustration,” and the Condiment Packet Gallery.

Since collage is one of my recent obsessions, I’ve also enjoyed nu-real: a timeline of fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857-2007. I do wish the photomontages were bigger, but I’ve enjoyed scrolling through and reading random entries about the form’s various incarnations.

Finally, if satire is your thing, the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), whose stated goal is “to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences,” might just become your new favorite online hangout. The works featured on MOBA, many of which are listed as “acquired from trash,” are accompanied by mock serious interpretations. Here’s the one that accompanies Mama and Babe, right:

The flesh tones bring to mind the top shelf liqueurs of a border bistro. With an astonishing emphasis on facial bone structure, the artist flirts with caricature and captures features of Mamma’s face which remind us of a Presidential candidate. The upright marionettish pose of the babe hints that the early bond between mother and child is as formal as it is familiar. Good old fashioned parental respect is at the center of this celebration of color and contour.

If you think you can top that, you can enter MOBA’s “Guest Interpretator’s Challenge“!

They also sell t-shirts. What more could we ask for?