(Roughly) Daily

This outrageous display of facial hair configurations made an appearance at the 4th Annual National Beard and Mustache Championships in New Orleans earlier this month. Luckily Las Vegas-based photographer Greg Anderson was on-hand to give us a front-row seat as the bizarre spectacle of facial hair paraded in front of his camera lens.

The championships involved some 150 contestants from the U.S., U.K., and Canada who competed in 17 different categories. If this isn’t enough, here’s a giant gallery of 164 portraits from the event.

From This Is Colossal…

###

As we think on tonsorial temerity, we might send illuminated birthday greetings to Louis Lumière; he was born on his date in 1864.  The son of a portrait painter who added photography to his repertoire, Louis joined with his brother Auguste to pioneer cinema.  Their father returned in 1894 from a trip to the U.S. where he’d been enchanted by Edison’s kinetoscope.  The brothers (who’d already pioneered new darkroom techniques for still photography) were excited…  until they understood that Edison’s display could only be seen by a single viewer at a time.  Louis envisioned something different: a projected image that could be shared by an audience, in the same way that audiences share a play.  With his brother’s help, Lumière designed the Cinematograph, a self-contained camera and projector that used a clawed-gear to advance sprocketed film. It was the first apparatus for making and showing films to audiences in a way that would be recognizable today as “going to the movies”; thus the Lumière brothers are often credited as inventors of the motion picture.  In any case, the principle at work in the Cinematograph was the principle used in movie cameras and projectors for more than a century afterwards.

 source