I was wondering about some of those people of whom supposedly only a very few photos exist (like Thomas Pynchon). Presumably though they could just exclude those people from the list.

Pynchon is on my dream list of people to be able to eventually add. For now, I like to imagine he is in the background of every photo with an NYC crowd over the last 60 years.

Creator here – everyone on the site right now is connected, and you can imagine how everyone living today could be added with photos that already exist! The really interesting cases are the historic outliers – like Harriet Tubman, Edgar Allan Poe – who were photographed with others but still can’t be linked into the main graph from anything I’ve found so far. I’m working on a write-up about these “most wanted” isolates.