marti, pe blogul de fotografii al New York Times. un redactor a aratat citeva fotografii dintr-un album de pe vremea celui de-al doilea razboi mondial, rugind cititorii sa identifice fotograful. la mai putin de patru ore distanta, avea raspunsul.

nu mi-e clar daca e vorba de puterea internetului sau a NY TIMES, dar imi place tare intimplarea:)

Tuesday morning, Lens andEinesTages, a Spiegel Online site (loosely translated as Once Upon a Time), simultaneously published posts asking readers to help us find out who had created this chilling, fascinating and unidentified document. (“Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album” on Lens; “Das Rätsel des Nazi-Fotoalbums,” by Marc Pitzke, on EinesTages.)

Before lunchtime in New York, Harriet Scharnberg had written from Hamburg, Germany, to say:

The photographs, at least a lot of them, were taken by the photographer Franz Krieger (1914-1993). Krieger worked as a photojournalist in Salzburg, Austria. In the summer of 1941, he went to Minsk as a member of the Reichs-Autozug Deutschland. In Minsk, he took pictures of Soviet prisoners of war and he also visited the Jewish ghetto and photographed the poor people there. On his way back to Berlin, he took the pictures of Hitler meeting [Adm. Miklos] Horthy in Marienburg.

Ms. Scharnberg explained in a subsequent e-mail that she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg on German propaganda photographs depicting Jews. This is her specialty as a historian, she said. She has worked in the photo archives of the Neuengammeconcentration camp memorial and at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

In the course of trying to learn more about photos of the Minsk ghetto, Ms. Scharnberg said, she came across the 2008 book, “The Salzburg Press Photographer Franz Krieger (1914-1993): Photojournalism in the Shadow of Nazi Propaganda and War,” by Peter F. Kramml.

“Of course, the pictures came to my mind immediately when I saw them and read the descriptions today at Spiegel Online and The New York Times Lens,” she said. We received her communiqué 3 hours 45 minutes after publishing the post.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/world-war-ii-mystery-solved-in-a-few-hours/