...Each day of the week a new historical photograph with rss feed

For three decades Sly Stone -- one of popular music's most dynamic and un-pigeonhole-able stars -- lived in almost complete seclusion, occasionally emerging for guest spots during friends' live shows and engaging in a much-publicized "back from oblivion" profile in Vanity Fair magazine in 2007.

The Best Actress winner and her husband find a quiet corner at the Governor's Ball, the most convenient of all the Oscar parties (it's at the Kodak Theatre, the same venue as the ceremony).

The presenter wore what she described as an "iridescent pink" gown with unique side ruching. Sounds strange on paper, but on the red carpet it was a show-stopper.

The Volkswagen bus wasn't always something people automatically associated with Grateful Dead shows and suspiciously stinky "cigarette" smoke. When it first went into production, on March 8, 1950, the VW bus was seen as nothing more and nothing less than an inexpensive, reliable, bigger, boxier version of the Volkswagen Beetle that had proved so popular all over the world. Pictured: Five beautiful versions of VWs in a factory parking lot in 1951, waiting to be shipped to dealers.

As Kathryn Bigelow walks back on stage, her stars Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty, and Anthony Mackie roar after their movie The Hurt Locker was named Best Picture.

As the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's untimely death nears (Sept. 18), a batch of previously unreleased Hendrix songs promises to turn on a new generation to the rock god's genius. "You hear the pure essence of the band, an in-your-face vibrancy," Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer told USA Today of the music included on the collection, called Valleys of Neptune (out March 9). "There were only four tracks and no overdubs, with Jimi singing as if he's in concert. He's at the top of his game." Pictured: Hendrix at the Isle of Wright Festival, August 1970, less than a month before his death.

In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked the beautiful, mysterious Swedish actress as the fifth greatest female star of all time. In the 1950s she bought an apartment in New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life, hardly venturing out, refusing all interviews. None other than the formidable Bette Davis once said of her: "I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera."

Hurt Locker star Jeremy Renner and director Kathryn Bigelow hold three of their film's six Oscars at the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party.

Syd Barrett -- pictured with Pink Floyd bandmates Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright -- was often called "the most famous recluse in rock," and it's hard to argue with the tag. A founding member of Pink Floyd and the band's leader early on -- especially on the amazing, scarily great debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn -- Barrett gradually succumbed to mental illness and the effects of massive self-dosing with LSD over the years, and for the last decades of his life lived as a recluse. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2006. The Floyd song, "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," is a tribute to Barrett.

Page was the pin-up girl of the 1950s, as well as the most recognizable fetish model (boots, leather, whips, the works) of the era. She was something of a recluse late in life -- attributed to a number of factors, including a 1979 diagnosis of schizophrenia.

American author, Catcher in the Rye, etc.

Best Actor nominee Jeremy Renner laughs with Best Actress nominee Carey Mulligan at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

Visionary, aviator, film producer and director, and for years one of the richest men in the world, Howard Hughes is probably remembered today more for his eccentric behavior and reclusiveness late in life than his technical genius and badass, maverick persona. In his final years he lived in a curtained penthouse at the Desert Inn hotel in Vegas?one of five casino hotels he owned. Engineering genius, squire of Hollywood beauties, and battler against long odds, he was a broken, battered soul when he died. One can't help feeling that, for all of his accomplishments?and there were so many, from his aviation records to his Hollywood triumphs?much of Hughes' life must have been a day-to-day horror.

Frontman for what was, for a while there, the greatest rock and roll band on the planet, Axl Rose retreated into semi-seclusion for years in the 1990s, verbally sparring from afar with his old Guns N' Roses band mates and working -- and working, and working -- on the long-delayed Chinese Democracy album that he hoped would cement his reputation as a songwriter and producer who had to be reckoned with. (It didn't.)

The driving creative force behind the Beach Boys and number 52 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time," Wilson famously retreated to his bedroom for several years in the early 1970s, doing cocaine, watching TV, occasionally dabbling in songwriting, and gorging to the point where he became dangerously obese. He eventually sought and received treatment for bipolar disorder, and gradually returned to making music, including live performances.

Genius, chess champion (still the only American to be World No. 1), Holocaust denier, and all-around enigma, Fischer largely disappeared from public view in the 1980s, occasionally popping up to utter something outlandish -- he called the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. "wonderful news" -- and ultimately renouncing his American citizenship. He was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2005, 33 years after he bested Russian world champ Boris Spassky in a celebrated match played in Iceland's capital, Reykjavík.