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I keep waiting to get sick of seeing photos of huge flocks of birds flying around like they share a brain, but it hasn’t happened. Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of starling murmuration photos at In Focus.
They’re even better in motion.
Like Ukraine, Venezuela has been experiencing anti-government protests over the past few weeks. In Focus has a selection of photos from the protests.
Moisés Naím has an article that explains what’s behind the protests.
This is the half of the country whose sons and daughters have taken to the streets to protest against a repressive regime that treats them as mortal enemies. And maybe they are. After all, they represent the vanguard of a society no longer willing to tolerate an abusive government with disastrous results to show for its 15-year grip on power: Venezuela is now the world champion of inflation, homicide, insecurity, and shortages of essential goods-from milk for children to insulin for diabetics and all kinds of indispensable products. All this despite having the greatest oil reserves in the world and a government with absolute control of all state institutions and levers of power. Sadly, that government has used its immense wealth and authority to push through unsustainable populist policies, buy votes, jail opposition leaders, and shut down television channels. Daily shortages of basic goods, fear of crime, and hopelessness have become unbearable.
Since November, anti-government protests have been happening in Ukraine. A recent truce gave hope that the violence would end, but mistrust on both sides has resulted in the worst clashes yet. The photos from the main fighting in Kiev are unbelievable.
Why the protests? Think Progress published an explainer this morning, before the latest round of violence.
The protests began on November 22, after President Viktor Yanukovych reversed course and refused to sign political and trade agreements with the European Union that had been in the works for years after heavy pressure from Moscow to abandon the agreements. Despite a violent police crackdown, protesters vowed to continue blockading streets and occupying public buildings until their central demand is met: the current government, including Yanukovych, must go.
The treaties would have opened the European Union market to Ukrainian companies and could have boosted the Ukrainian GDP by more than six percent over ten years. The country is suffering through an economic depression and lower tariffs and expanded competition could have also lowered prices, “fueling an increase of household consumption of some 12 percent.” Ukraine would have also adopted 350 EU laws, codifying what many Ukrainians saw as a “commitment to European standards of governance and social justice.” To them, the treaty was a way of diminishing Russia’s long-time influence and reversing the trend of persistent economic corruption and sluggishness.
Following the film footage of the 1932 Winter Olympics (ice skating on stilts! Keystone Cops ski jumping!), here’s a collection of photos from In Focus of the first 12 Winter Games, from 1924 to 1976.
Photo-sharing community Flickr turned ten years old this week. At Time, Harry McCracken takes a look back.
Earlier photo sites were mostly concerned with letting you put your pictures in front of friends and family. Flickr did that, too. But from the start, it was building a community of photo lovers around the world who wanted to share images with other photo lovers, as well as thousands of special interest sub-communities. It was about storytelling.
I was at Etech when Flickr launched and was one of the site’s first few hundred users. The photo chat room they launched with was not that interesting to me, but when they turned it inside out, I was hooked. Happy birthday, Flickr.
Hassan Hajjaj’s photos of female motorbike enthusiasts from Morocco are fun.
On display at the Taymour Grahne Gallery in NYC through March 7.
In Focus has posted some shortlisted images from The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards. This wildebeest photo by Bonnie Cheung stopped me in my tracks…it looks like a painting (or a cave painting).
From photographer Victoria Will, olde tyme tin type portraits of celebrities at Sundance. The one of William H. Macy stopped me in my tracks:
Several others are worth a look as well. (via @khoi)
Photographer Jeremy Cowart writes about a rare time he made a real connection with one of his celebrity subjects. It happened during a shoot with the cast of The Haves and the Have Nots, a show on Oprah’s network. As usual with shoots like this, Cowart only got a few minutes with each subject, time to shoot but not much else. But then John Schneider pulled him aside.
Once we wrapped up his session, Tika walked off set and John came to me and whispered in my ear “Hey can you sneak a few more portraits of me?” and I said “sure of course”. He said “there’s something going on and I just need a photo.”
So I grabbed my camera again and John walked back on set.
He immediately began weeping. Legitimately crying. He was so good at impressions that I thought this was another impression and I thought “wow, what an acting talent.”
(via @gavinpurcell)
The British Library has a million images up at Flickr. 1,019,998 to be precise. And it appears that most (all?) of the images are copyright-free. An amazing resource.
For the past 40 years, Bob Mazzer has been taking photographs of the London Underground and its passengers.
From photographer Greg Alessandrini, a collection of photos of diners in New York City taken in the 1990s. I was pleased to see a shot of Jones Diner, which I ate at several months before moving to NYC:
It closed shortly before we moved and I never got to eat there again. At the time, word was some condos were being built on the site, but it took ten years for construction to start. What a waste.
BTW, the rest of Alessandrini’s site is well worth a look…hundreds and possibly thousands of photographs of NYC from the 80s and 90s. (via @UnlikelyWorlds)
In March, the New York Historical Society is mounting an exhibition of photographer Bill Cunningham’s project, Façades.
Scouring the city’s thrift stores, auction houses, and street fairs for vintage clothing, and scouting sites on his bicycle, Cunningham generated a photographic essay entitled Façades, which paired models — in particular his muse, fellow photographer Editta Sherman — in period costumes with historic settings.
Craig Mod, writing for the New Yorker, says goodbye to cameras as photography transitions to the use of “networked lenses”.
After two and a half years, the GF1 was replaced by the slightly improved Panasonic GX1, which I brought on the six-day Kumano Kodo hike in October. During the trip, I alternated between shooting with it and an iPhone 5. After importing the results into Lightroom, Adobe’s photo-development software, it was difficult to distinguish the GX1’s photos from the iPhone 5’s. (That’s not even the latest iPhone; Austin Mann’s superlative results make it clear that the iPhone 5S operates on an even higher level.) Of course, zooming in and poking around the photos revealed differences: the iPhone 5 doesn’t capture as much highlight detail as the GX1, or handle low light as well, or withstand intense editing, such as drastic changes in exposure. But it seems clear that in a couple of years, with an iPhone 6S in our pockets, it will be nearly impossible to justify taking a dedicated camera on trips like the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage.
And indeed, the mid-tier Japanese camera makers (Panasonic, Fujifilm and Olympus) are struggling to find their way in the networked lens era. A few years ago, I wrote a post called “Your company? There’s an app for that.” about how smartphones were not only going to make certain devices obsolete, but drive entire companies and industries out of business. This bit, about cameras, seems almost quaint now:
Point and shoot camera — While not as full-featured as something like a PowerShot, the camera on the iPhone 3GS has a 3-megapxiel lens with both auto and manual focus, shoots in low-light, does macro, and can shoot video. Plus, it’s easy to instantly publish your photos online using the iPhone’s networking capabilities and automatically tag your photos with your location.
The best camera is the one you have with you the one with built-in posting to Facebook.
In a feature straight out of the movies, Dr. Rob Jenkins and his team have demonstrated that for sufficiently high-resolution photos, recognizable images of reflected faces of the photographer and bystanders can be retrieved from a subject’s eyes.
The researchers say that in crimes in which the victims are photographed, such as hostage taking or child sex abuse, reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators. Images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations could be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations.
By zooming in on high-resolution passport-style photographs, Jenkins and co-researcher Christie Kerr of the School of Psychology, University of Glasgow were able to recover bystander images that could be identified accurately by observers, despite their low resolution.
Here’s some older research about reading confidential data using reflections from tea pots, glasses, eyes, and even diffuse materials like fabric. And of course, there’s the famous eBay tea kettle. (via waxy)
Alex is 2-year-old Henry’s nanny. She’s also a photographer. One day, at Henry’s behest, the pair took photos of each other in the same pose. It turned into a project called Henry’s Concepts.
Each of these photos is strictly Henry’s idea. He chooses the location and the pose. I take the photo of him and then he takes the photo of me.
(via cup of jo)
As I said last year, the photos are always my favorite end-of-the-year media to check out. It’s only early December, but a few media outlets are out of the gate already with their year-end lists.
Best photos of the year 2013 from Reuters.
The Top 10 Photos of 2013 from Time.
2013 Pictures of the Year from Agence France Presse.
The 80 Most Powerful Photos of 2013 from The Roosevelts.
Las mejores fotos del 2013 from Yahoo En Español.
The 45 Most Powerful Photos Of 2013 from BuzzFeed.
2013: The Year in Photos from In Focus. Here are parts two and three.
2013 Year in Pictures from Big Picture. Here are parts two and three.
Year in Focus 2013 from Getty Images.
Year in Photos 2013 from The Wall Street Journal.
The Year in Pictures from The New York Times.
Do you have a list for this list? Send it along!
Errol Morris is at it again, publishing book-length blog posts for the NY Times. This time, he’s examining the photograph evidence of Abraham Lincoln and, I think, what those photos might tell us about Lincoln’s death. Here’s the prologue and part one (of an eventual four).
My fascination with the dating and interpretation of photographs is really a fascination with the push-pull of history. Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects — the storyteller vs. the collector.
For the collector the image with the crack [in one of Lincoln’s photographs] is a damaged piece of goods — the crack potentially undermining the value of the photograph as an artifact, a link to the past. The storyteller doesn’t care about the photograph’s condition, or its provenance, but about its thematic connections with events. To the storyteller, the crack is the beginning of a legend — the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.
It should have a name. I call it “the proleptic crack.”
Alexey Kljatov takes amazing photographs of snowflakes. Infinite beautiful variation. The large versions are worth checking out.
I Pixel U is an iOS app that lets you selectively pixelate people and objects in photos, creating the effect of 8-bit characters in the real world. Many examples are available on Instagram.
See also Aled Lewis’ Video Games vs. Real Life series. (via prosthetic knowledge)
I love these color typologies by photographer Emily Blincoe. This gold candy one is particularly fetching:
(via @mathowie)
Prolific and celebrated writer William T. Vollmann is a “devoted” cross-dresser.
Mr. Vollmann is 54, heterosexual and married with a daughter in high school. He began cross-dressing seriously about five years ago. Sometimes he transforms himself into a woman as part of a strange vision quest, aided by drugs or alcohol, to mind-meld with a female character in a book he’s writing. Other times it’s just because he likes the “smooth and slippery” feel of women’s lingerie.
He said his wife, who is an oncologist, is not thrilled with his outré experiments and keeps her distance. “Probably when the book comes out, it’ll be the first she’s heard of it,” he said. “I always try to keep my wife and child out of what I do. I don’t want to cause them any embarrassment.” He asked that his wife not be interviewed for this article.
Vollmann has collected self-portraits of himself as his female alter ego in The Book of Dolores. (via @DavidGrann)
An exhibition from Philip Worthington at MoMA last year turned people’s shadows into monsters. Joe Holmes turned his lens away from the shadows and instead captured the silhouettes of museums goers in their attempts to make shadows.
In Focus has a selection of winning photos from Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition. The award for most terrifying goes to Dimitri Seeboruth for his shot of a worker ant:
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
Jay Zeamer and a group of fellow misfits collectively called the Eager Beavers were an American photoreconnaissance team in the Pacific theater during WWII. They flew their beat-up B-17 bomber into enemy territory to collection reconnaissance photographs. Roger Cicala shares the engaging story of their most noteworthy photo.
The only crew that volunteered, of course, was Jay Zeamer and the Eager Beavers. One of the crew, bombardier Joseph Sarnovski, had absolutely no reason to volunteer. He’d already been in combat for 18 months and was scheduled to go home in 3 days. Being a photo mission, there was no need for a bombardier. But if his friends were going, he wanted to go, and one of the bombardier’s battle stations was to man the forward machine guns. They might need him, so he went.
They suspected the airstrip at Buka had been expanded and reinforced, but weren’t sure until they got close. As soon as the airfield came in sight, they saw numerous fighters taking off and heading their way. The logical thing to do would have been to turn right and head for home. They would be able to tell the intelligence officers about the increased number of planes at Buka even if they didn’t get photos.
But Zeamer and photographer William Kendrick knew that photos would be invaluable for subsequent planes attacking the base, and for Marines who were planning to invade the island later. Zeamer held the plane level (tilting the wings even one degree at that altitude could put the photograph half a mile off target) and Kendrick took his photos, which gave plenty of time for over 20 enemy fighters to get up to the altitude Old 666 was flying at.
(via petapixel)
At In Focus, Alan Taylor surveys the state-of-the-art in robotics with a varied selection of photos. For example, here are two Big Dogs frolicking in the robot dog park:
And better yet, Florian Lopes looks as though he’s enjoying his new bionic hand:
In her series City of Brother Love, Hannah Price photographs the men who catcall her on the street. A selection of her images and a short interview is available on The Morning News.
Once a guy catcalls me, depending on the situation, I would either candidly take their photograph or walk up to them and ask if I can take their photograph. They usually agree and we talk about our lives as I make their portrait.
An interesting approach to sexist heckling. Here’s another by jogger Anna Hart:
But sometimes, a heckler still makes himself heard, like the wheezing smoker on a park bench who called out to me: “I could give you a better workout, love,” as I ran past him earlier this week.
I suddenly thought of that 16-year-old stuck indoors on the treadmill, and turned around. “You know what I want?” I said, as he shrank back in alarm. “I want you to never, ever speak to another woman or girl like that, you pathetic old fool.” I was very sweaty, very pink and very angry, and he was plainly terrified.
If you’re into cheese, you’ll want to take this photographic journey into a season with Swiss cheesemakers.
In Gruyeres, western Switzerland, from mid-May to mid-October, the fifth generation of the Murith family produces its distinctive mountain pasture Gruyere cheese. Each wheel of cheese weighs between 25 and 40 kilograms, and takes a minimum of six months to mature. The family produces 200 wheels each year to sell locally, using unpasteurized milk from their own herd of cows. Reuters photographer Denis Balibouse spent time with the Murith family over this past grazing season, capturing days and nights in the alpine pastures of Switzerland.
Over at The Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla highlighted an image taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn separate from its rings.
This enormous mosaic showing the flattened globe of Saturn floating amongst the complete disk of its rings must surely be counted among the great images of the Cassini mission. From Earth, we never see Saturn separate from its rings. Here, we can see the whole thing, a gas giant like Jupiter, separated at last from the rings that encircle it.
Taking this idea one step further, I removed the rings completely, along with the “ringlight” lighting up the night hemisphere, creating a more-or-less pure look of what Saturn would look like without its rings.
Larger version is available on Mlkshk.
In Focus has a nice slideshow of photos of blimps, dirigibles, and airships, from the first flights in the early 1900s to the Hindenburg disaster to the blimps flying high over sporting events.
(via @alexismadrigal)
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