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kottke.org posts about photography

Graphic Novel Biography of Eadweard Muybridge

The life and work of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of a new graphic novel called Muybridge by Guy Delisle.

a page of the Muybridge graphic novel

a page of the Muybridge graphic novel

Sacramento, California, 1870. Pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge becomes entangled in railroad robber baron Leland Stanford’s delusions of grandeur. Tasked with proving Stanford’s belief that a horse’s hooves do not touch the ground while galloping at full speed, Muybridge gets to work with his camera. In doing so, he inadvertently creates one of the single most important technological advancements of our age—the invention of time-lapse photography and the mechanical ability to capture motion.

You can find Muybridge at Drawn & Quarterly, Amazon, or Bookshop.

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The 35th Anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope

the Eagle Nebula

the Sombrero galaxy

the Large Magellanic Cloud

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 35 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, Alan Taylor collected some recent images from the Hubble, whose mission is still ongoing.

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Whose Streets? Our Streets! Photos of NYC Protests, 1980-2000.

Whose Streets? Our Streets! is an exhibition of photos of protests in NYC taken from 1980 to 2000 by dozens of photographers.

protesters stand on the tracks at a NYC subways stop

thousands of protesters gather holding signs to protest police brutality

a gay pride parade in the 80s protesting AIDS

New York’s streets were turbulent in the 1980s and 1990s, as residents marched, demonstrated, and rioted in response to social changes in their city as well as national and international developments. The profoundly unequal economic recovery of the 1980s, dependent upon investment banking and high-end real estate development, led to heated contests over space and city services, as housing activists opposed gentrification and called attention to the plight of thousands of homeless New Yorkers. Immigration made New York City much more diverse, but a significant proportion of white New Yorkers opposed civil rights and acted to maintain racial segregation.

Attempts to combat the high crime rates of the 1970s and early 1980s exacerbated concerns about police brutality, as innocent black and Latino New Yorkers died at the hands of the police. The culture wars wracking the nation had particular resonance in New York, a center of avant-garde art as well as of gay and lesbian and feminist activism, on the one hand, and home of the Vatican’s spokesman in the U.S., Cardinal John O’Connor, and a significant culturally conservative Roman Catholic population on the other.

The photos are grouped by subject: race relations, police brutality, war & environment, AIDS, queer activism, abortion rights, housing, education & labor, and culture wars. (via the morning news)

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Swamped Skies

a photo of a night sky with dozens of satellite trails

Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies:

The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX alone intending to launch over 40,000 satellites in total. The space industry is almost entirely unregulated, with no limits on the amount of satellites that anyone is able to launch and there is currently no regulation in place to minimise the light pollution they cause.

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Photos of the Hands Off! Protests

protesters hold signs, including a large 'Hands Off!' sign

protesters hold signs, including a large 'get out of my uterus' sign

protesters holding signs marching down the street in NYC

On Saturday, millions of Americans flooded the streets of cities, small towns, and every other sized municipality in the nation to protest the illegal and damaging actions of the Trump regime. These photos published by a number of media outlets show the scale, enthusiasm, and creativity of these peaceful protests, in the US and around the world.


Comets Are Cool

the long tail of a comet stretches over an observatory just after sunset

From astronomer Yuri Beletsky, a photo of Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) arching over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Unfortunately, it seems like the comet disintegrated as it swooped around the Sun, always a danger.

The nucleus of Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) held together during a brutal perihelion but not for long. Lionel Majzik of Hungary was the first to report and record dramatic changes in the comet between January 18th and 19th. The bright, strongly condensed head rapidly became more diffuse, a sure sign that its nucleus was disintegrating based on past observations of crumbling comets. His superb sequence, photographed remotely from Chile, clearly reveal the dramatic transformation, which was later confirmed by Australian observers.

The tail will be visible for a few days after the breakup — such comets are called “headless wonders” by astronomers. (via @philplait.bsky.social)

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Aerial Foodscapes

dozens of fishing canoes sit on an ocean shoreline

an overhead view of a market for grain

a herd of white cattle being led down a road

a phalanx of combines harvest grain

For his book Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food (Bookshop), George Steinmetz travelled the world with his drone, spending “a decade documenting food production in more than 36 countries on 6 continents, 24 US states, and 5 oceans”.

In striking aerial images, he captures the massive scale of 21st-century agriculture that has sculpted 40 percent of the Earth’s surface.

He explores the farming of staples like wheat and rice, the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, fishing and aquaculture, and meat production. He surveys traditional farming in diverse cultures, and he penetrates vast agribusinesses that fuel international trade. From Kansas wheat fields to a shrimp cocktail’s origins in India to cattle stations in Australia larger than some countries, Steinmetz tracks the foods we eat back to land and sea, field and factory. He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them.

You can read more (and watch a video) about the project and view a bunch of photos from the book.

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In Training: A Book of Bonsai Photos

photo of a bonsai tree with a lush green crown and stout trunk

photo of a bonsai tree with delicate pink flowers

photo of a bonsai tree with a twisted trunk

I was reminded recently of Stephen Voss’s lovely book, In Training: a book of bonsai photos (Amazon). Voss has a number of bonsai photo prints for sale as well as some videos of bonsai on his blog. This one is of a tree called Goshin, which has been in training since 1953:

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The Search for the Mystery Man Who Took These Forbidden Photos of Nazi-Occupied Paris

A photograph of German soldiers at the entrance to the Richelieu Drouot metro station in Paris, taken on July 14, 1940

A photograph of Paris' Le Meurice hotel in Rue de Rivoli flanked by the flags of Nazi Germany

In 2020, Stéphanie Colaux discovered an album of photos of Nazi-occupied Paris at a French flea market.

“As I flipped through the pages I realized, my God, it’s all scenes of [Nazi] occupied Paris. And I knew I’d found a treasure,” she says. “And then I read the little note in the front. ‘If you find this album,’ it said, ‘take care of it and have the courage to look at it.’ I thought, someone sent a message in a bottle and I just found it.”

The discovery set off a hunt for the unknown photographer, who took the photos at the risk of their own life — the unauthorized taking of such photos was “punishable by imprisonment or death”. The story of the search is very much worth reading.

Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos, written in block letters as if someone were trying to mask their handwriting. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was also often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, whom the photographer referred to, pejoratively, as “Fritzes.”

One read: “After 10 months of Occupation, the Fritzes still can’t find their way around Paris.”

“The words are very sarcastic,” Broussard says. “There is a kind of irony. For example, he says ‘our protectors.’”

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Gobsmacking Image of a Stellar Nursery

A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-coloured gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright.

Wow, check out this just-released image from the JWST team of star cluster NGC 602.

The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.

It is very worth your time to click through and look at this image in all of its massive celestial glory. I found this image via Phil Plait, who calls it “one of the most jaw-droppingly mind stomping images I’ve seen from JWST” and, directing us back to the science (remember the science?!), notes that NGC 602 is actively forming stars (it’s only about 5 million years old) and that it depicts “the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way”. Cool!

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Stuffies & Lovies That Have Been Loved Too Much

a brand-new stuffed animal next to a well-loved one

a brand-new stuffed animal next to a well-loved one

a brand-new stuffed animal next to a well-loved one

Too Much Love is a project from Katja Kemnitz in which she photographs the beloved dolls & stuffed animals of young children alongside brand-new versions of the same toys. Anyone who is a parent or caregiver can relate to the destruction on display here, as well as the difficulty of replacing these items.

I show old, much-loved teddies and dolls and compare them with as good as new doppelgangers. I think the broken stuffed animals have a lot of soul. The project is inspired by my older daughter, who took her plush dog everywhere when she was little. One day I found this dog again without button eye and torn seams in the store and bought it. She did not like him. The old one was better and could not be replaced.

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Artfully Arranged Junkyard Objects

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

In a continuation and tweak of his Coletivos project (which I posted about previously), Cássio Vasconcellos took aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects into dense photographic collages.

OVER presents a scenario that seems to point to a dystopian future, but which, in fact, brings together fragments of the present. The exaggerated agglomeration denounces the misleading idea of “disposal”, given that objects do not cease to exist in the world when we throw them away. Rather, they inhabit other places.

This video shows the artist’s process, from hanging out the side of a helicopter to arranging all the items in Photoshop.

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The Best Panoramic Photos of 2024

The results of the 15th annual Epson International Pano Awards have been announced — you can check out all the winners & runners-up on the competition website. Here are a few of my favorites:

an overhead view of a boat navigating rows of crops

a lightning strike illuminates a mountainous landscape

a wave crashes on rocks

a triangular hill leaves a long shadow

From top to bottom, the photos are by Tuan Nguyen Tan, Kelvin Yuen, Elliot McGucken, and Ignacio Palacios. (via in focus)

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Finalists for the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

one bird looks on as another crashes into a rock

The finalists of the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition have been announced, so if you need a laugh, here you go.

a colorful mantis strikes a pose

a beaver covers its eyes

three raccoons sit in a tree; one looks like it's whispering something in another's ear

There are so many “tag yourself” moments in these photos. You can check out all of the finalists here and vote for the People’s Choice Award until Oct 31.

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Infinite Cosmos: Visions From the JW Space Telescope

book cover for Infinite Cosmos

Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.

page spread of Infinite Cosmos showing the swirling Phantom Galaxy

Siegel wrote a piece about the book for Big Think, which includes an excerpt. Gravitational lensing is so cool:

Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.

Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.

page spread of Infinite Cosmos showing how JWST images are colored

page spread of Infinite Cosmos showing the table of contents overlaid on an image of the JWST mirrors

Infinite Cosmos is available for purchase at Amazon and Bookshop.

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Kodak and the Invention of Popular Photography

In 1888, the Eastman Kodak Company rolled out a new camera and a new slogan. “You press the button, we do the rest.” To say this moment revolutionized photography would be an understatement. But this story isn’t just about Kodak. It’s about what happens when a powerful technology, originally only understood by a select few, can suddenly fit in your hand.

And then, fast-forwarding to the 90s and 00s, Kodak gradually, then suddenly, missed a similar shift that further democratized photography: the move to digital.

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The Williamsburg Bridge Riders

a biker exiting the Williamsburg Bridge bike path

a biker exiting the Williamsburg Bridge bike path

a biker exiting the Williamsburg Bridge bike path

a biker exiting the Williamsburg Bridge bike path

a biker exiting the Williamsburg Bridge bike path

a biker exiting the Williamsburg Bridge bike path

Adam DiCarlo takes photos of commuters (mostly bikers) as they exit the Williamsburg Bridge bike path on the Manhattan side and posts them to his Instagram account. (via @BAMstutz)

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Astronomy Photographer of the Year for 2024

photo of the ISS transiting the Sun

comparision of maximum solar activity with minimum solar activity

several stacked images of the Sun during an annular eclipse

the Milky Way stretches across the sky

Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. You can also check out some of the shortlist entries and runners-up in each category (Moon, Sun, etc.)

Photos above by (from top to bottom): Tom Williams, Peter Ward, Ryan Imperio, and Tom Rae.

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Irving Penn: Small Trades

black & white photo of two bakers

In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.

black & white photo of a man selling chestnuts from a cart

Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.

black & white photo of a deep sea diver posing

Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.

black & white photo of two tradewomen carrying buckets

Penn said of the project:

Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist.

A possible companion to Penn’s photographs: Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. (Fun fact: Terkel and his editor got the idea for Working from Richard Scarry’s children’s book, What Do People Do All Day?)

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Vivian Maier: Unseen Work

The first major US retrospective of Vivian Maier’s photography is currently on display at Fotografiska New York through Sept 29. Maier was a street photographer whose work was discovered in 2007 and is now recognized “alongside the greatest masters of the twentieth century”.

black & white photo of a woman looking to the right in front of a building

black & white photo of two girls playing on the street in front of a car

black & white self portrait of Vivian Maier reflected in a store window

two black & white photos of a man and a child sittng on a bench with a balloon

photo of three people on a street corner, all wearing the color yellow

You can see much more of Maier’s work on this website of her work.

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The Disciples

For his project The Disciples, photographer James Mollison took photo montages of fans outside of music concerts. See if you can guess which concerts these groups of fans attended:

seven people who attended a Lady Gaga concert, wearing colorful, wacky clothes

seven people who attended a Merle Haggard concert, wearing mostly denim

seven people who attended a 50 Cent concert, wearing baseball caps, baggy jeans, and big jackets

eight people who attended a The Casualties concert, wearing leather and mohawks

eight people who attended a Tori Amos concert, wearing dark, muted colors

Here’s Mollison on the project:

Over three years I photographed fans outside different concerts. I am fascinated by the different tribes of people that attend them, and how people emulate celebrity to form their identity.

As I photographed the project I began to see how the concerts became events for people to come together with surrogate ‘families’, a chance to relive their youth or try and be part of a scene that happened before they were born.

Fascinating! From top to bottom: Lady Gaga, Merle Haggard, 50 Cent, The Casualties, and Tori Amos. Here’s a video featuring some of the photos accompanied by music from the corresponding artists:

Mollison published a book featuring the photos; a signed copy is available from his website.

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Baltic Ice

aerial shot of sea ice in the Baltic Sea

Oh, I really like this particular image from Bernhard Lang’s series of aerial photographs of sea ice in the Baltic (part one, part two). (via colossal)

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Riding With the Street Demon

Photographer Ryan Weideman worked as a NYC taxi driver for 35 years (1981-2016) and photographed his passengers while on the job.

woman in the back on a taxi cab peeking through the window

a young woman with a mohawk sitting in the back of a taxi

a woman sitting in the back of a cab

Huck did a profile of Weideman and his work several years ago.

“I drove a Checker cab but I usually got the wrecks because I only drove three or four nights a week,” he remembers wistfully. “I spent the rest of the time in my darkroom, printing and developing film.”

The quintessential New York cabbie, with a wisecracking mouth and lead foot on the gas pedal, Weideman carefully covered the first three letters of his license so that only the letters ‘DEMAN’ were visible. When passengers entered the cab, he would proudly announce, “You’re riding with the Street Demon.”

“I was on the edge of my seat most of the time because I was caught up in the rush of the ride,” he recalls. Although the 12-hour shifts were grueling, he never drank coffee or took drugs.

“It was all the adrenalin that flowed from my driving style. I enjoyed the thrill of driving and the sense of competitiveness. Some people really loved it; others were scared and wanted out so I would have to drop them off. Once in a while I would have a passenger that really enjoyed it. One guy jumped out of the cab and said, ‘My God, that was a religious experience!’”

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A Massive Trove of Aerial Photos of Glaciers

Over at Beautiful Public Data, Jon Keegan shares some details about two huge collections of aerial photos of glaciers.

aerial b&w photo of a glacier

aerial color photo of a glacier

As scientists study the effects of global warming, one of the most visible and alarming indicators is the rapid shrinking of glaciers. Government scientists have been documenting the size, shape, and movement of glaciers since the 1950s employing techniques ranging from direct field observations to aerial photography.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has one of the largest collections of aerial glacier photographs. Over 40 years, the USGS’ North American Glacier Aerial Photography (NAGAP) project captured thousands of striking high-resolution photos of glaciers and their surroundings.

From 1960 to 1983, self-taught glaciologist Austin Post used a 63-pound World War II-era Fairchild K-17 aerial reconnaissance camera to shoot over 100,000 glacier photos in the western US and Alaska. One of the bush pilots Post teamed up with was William R. Fairchild, who flew a Beech 18 twin engine airplane equipped with five K-17 cameras-one mounted on the nose, two in the belly of the plane, and one on each side.

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The 2024 Drone Photos Awards

The nominees for the 2024 Drone Photos Awards have been announced; here are a few that caught my eye:

drone photo of a highway crossing a frozen lake

drone photo of a crowded bull ring in Mexico

drone photo of a flock of white birds flying across a green expanse

drone photo of a small town in the snow

Photos by (from top to bottom) Sheng Jiang, Roberto Hernandez, Silke Hullmann, and Hüseyin Karahan.

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“The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age”

photos of Earthrise taken from Apollo 8, a woman and a child underneath a sign reading 'colored entrance', and Tank Man in Tiananmen Square

A group of photographers, editors, and curators recently convened to choose a list of “the 25 most significant photographs since 1955”. Choosing just 25 photos to represent 70 years of the richest visual era in human history is just an impossible task, so there’s bound to be some grousing about individual choices. (I love Beyoncé but really?) But the selection is fascinating, includes a few images I’d never seen before, and the accompanying discussion is worth reading.

I would love to see a process that asks for nominations across a
larger & broader range of folks and then whittle it down through ranked choice voting or pairwise ranking. Paging The Pudding

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“Planet of the Apes” Goes to a 70s Mall

an actor from Planet of the Apes dressed in an ape suit and wearing glasses

From Life magazine and photographer Ralph Crane, a gallery of outtakes from the filming of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in 1972.

The Century City mall, selected for its futuristic appearance, was a primary battleground in the plot. LIFE staff photographer Ralph Crane came to the set and took pictures of the costumed actors in the mall, trying on shoes and making eyes at the lingerie store display, as well as eating in the mess hall with their masks half off. The pictures make for easy laughs, capturing the kind of shenanigans that help liven up a fourth Apes film in as many years.

(via daniel benneworth–gray)

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The Sky Was Purple and Red and Yellow and On Fire

a photo of the aurora borealis above windmills

a photo of the aurora borealis above some mountains

There was a big solar storm this weekend and photos of the aurora borealis took over social media; it was delightful. For round-ups, check out the NY Times, the Guardian, @itsjackcohen, PBS NewsHour, Spaceweather.com, Forbes, and MSN.

The photos above are by Albert Dros and Sean O’ Riordan (prints here). O’ Riordan took his shot in Tasmania and actually had to tone it down for publication:

When the clouds are glowing red you know something is off the charts, I tried my best to desaturate this and make it look some bit like a photo and not a science fiction scene!

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Fantastical Portraits of Cate Blanchett

photo of Cate Blanchett

I love these (haunting? are they haunting?) photos of Cate Blanchett taken by Jack Davison for this 2022 profile in the NY Times Magazine.

When the magazine asked the photographer Jack Davison to create the art for this story, he took inspiration from Cate Blanchett’s legendary gift at transforming herself on film. Over the course of a four-hour shoot, across nine different setups, Davison made the fantastical, perspective-bending portraits that appear here.

(via @gray)

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