Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s latest project is called Water.
While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted — until it’s gone.
This is powerful and amazing (and upsetting): Project Unbreakable is a photography project that features images of sexual assault survivors holding signs showing what others (attackers, family members, cops, etc.) said to them about the assaults.
It’s difficult to pick the yuckiest bottom-of-the-barrel sludge here, but the comments from the police officers really get my dander up.
“If you were my daughter I would have killed you.” - Lady police officer while being interrogated
“If you don’t tell us how many people you’ve slept with, the ADA won’t even consider your case.” - Interviewing Dectective
“This is why we have underage drinking laws! THIS IS YOUR FAULT! If you hadn’t been drinking this wouldn’t have happened to you!” - St. Petersburg police when I tried to press charges
Sickening, sickening. The police are supposed to protect the vulnerable, not persecute them. (via @rebeccablood)
In the parlance of NYC graffiti enthusiasts, going “all city” means getting your stuff known all over the five boroughs. Now a group of designers are challenging each other to go “all RGB”, to make images that contain all of the 16.7 million colors that make up the RGB spectrum once each. This entry is amazing because it still looks like an actual photograph when you zoom out (many others do not):
I watched a lot of pro wrestling when I was a kid and this photo of Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, and fashion photographer Terry Richardson is just too much for me. If nostalgia truly is death, someone better make some arrangements for me.
(If you’re not with me on this whole reminiscing about 1980s professional wrestlers thing, Richardson also recently took a photo of Miley Cyrus eating a salad, so you’re basically all caught up on currentevents and you’re welcome.)
I have a soft spot for photography that reaches, seemingly impossibly, back into time…e.g. early color photography. It’s an inexpensive form of time travel. The American Revolution took place back in the days before photography and the way we remember it visually is something like this:
But, some Revolutionary War participants lived long enough to have their daguerreotypes taken in the 1850s and 1860s. This is a photo of Lemuel Cook, the last official surviving veteran of the Revolution1, taken sometime before his death in 1866.
The source of many of these photos is a book published in 1864 by E.B. Hillard called The Last Men of the Revolution. The book contains six photos of surviving war vets and brief biographies of each man. (via @ftrain)
[1] Daniel Bakeman lived until 1869 but could not prove his service in the war. However, Congress passed a special act in 1867 that provided him with a war pension. Bakeman’s longevity (he lived to 109) contributed to another astounding achievement: he and his wife Susan had the longest marriage on record, 91 years. Their marriage began 3 years before the Revolution and continued until Susan’s death in 1863, right in the midst of the Civil War. Amazing. ↩
In Focus has a collection of some of the most excellent Red Bull Illume Photo Contest winners. And as you’d expect, they are about as Red Bull as you can get. Great shots.
You’ve probably seen some of these before, but the 1600+ color photos from the 1930s & 1940s uploaded by the Library of Congress to Flickr are a wonderful look at America around the time of WWII. Here are a few quick favorites:
Today’s fun game is: Golf Ball Innards or Bowl of Gelato? Let’s get started. Is this a creamy bowl of lemon-lime pistachio gelato or the inside of a golf ball?
Ok, that was an easy one. How about this one…is this half of a crazy-ass golf ball or a delicious bowl of watermelon bubble gum gelato?
Yum, I can almost taste the blueberries through the screen. Well, that’s all the time we have today, folks. You’ve been a great group of contestants, and we hope to see you next week on Golf Ball Innards or Bowl of Gelato? (via edible geography)
Thomas Prior’s photographs from the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico are pretty much exhibit A in why your parents didn’t want you and your idiot friends to play with fireworks.
That’s the iconic “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo taken in 1932 during the construction of the RCA Building (aka 30 Rock) in NYC. Eleven construction workers eating lunch on a steel girder 840 feet in the air. The shot was a PR stunt to drum up excitement around the near completion of the new skyscraper…no one even knows for sure who took the photo because it was likely a multiple photographer situation. On the same day the lunch photo was taken, some of the same men were photographed taking a nap on the same girder:
Photographer Clayton Cubitt and Rex Sorgatz have both written essays about how photography is becoming something more than just standing in front of something and snapping a photo of it with a camera. Here’s Cubitt’s On the Constant Moment.
So the Decisive Moment itself was merely a form of performance art that the limits of technology forced photographers to engage in. One photographer. One lens. One camera. One angle. One moment. Once you miss it, it is gone forever. Future generations will lament all the decisive moments we lost to these limitations, just as we lament the absence of photographs from pre-photographic eras. But these limitations (the missed moments) were never central to what makes photography an art (the curation of time,) and as the evolution of technology created them, so too is it on the verge of liberating us from them.
Photography was once an act of intent, the pushing of a button to record a moment. But photography is becoming an accident, the curatorial attention given to captured images.
Slightly different takes, but both are sniffing around the same issue: photography not as capturing a moment in realtime but sometime later, during the editing process. As I wrote a few years ago riffing on a Megan Fox photo shoot, I side more with Cubitt’s take:
As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it’s not such a huge shift for them. The photographer’s exact set of duties has always been malleable; the recent shift from film processing in the darkroom to the digital darkroom is only the most recent example.
What’s interesting about the hot video/photo mobile apps of the moment, Vine, Instagram, and Snapchat, is that, if you believe what Cubitt and Sorgatz are saying, they follow the more outdated definition of photography. You hold the camera in front of something, take a video or photo of that moment, and post it. If you missed it, it’s gone forever. What if these apps worked the other way around: you “take” the photo or video from footage previously (or even constantly) gathered by your phone?
To post something to Instagram, you have the app take 100 photos in 10-15 seconds and then select your photo by scrubbing through them to find the best moment. Same with Snapchat. Vine would work similarly…your phone takes 20-30 seconds of video and you use Vine’s already simple editing process to select your perfect six seconds. This is similar to one of my favorite technology-driven techniques from the past few years:
In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering…that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.
Only an after-the-fact camera is able to capture moments like great whites jumping out of the water:
And it would make it much easier to capture moments like your kid’s first steps, a friend’s quick smile, or a skateboarder’s ollie. I suspect that once somebody makes an easy-to-use and popular app that works this way, it will be difficult to go back to doing it the old way.
Due to the increasing ubiquity of connected cameras, writes Nick Bilton in the NY Times, photography is shifting away from documentation to communication.
Photos, once slices of a moment in the past — sunsets, meetings with friends, the family vacation — are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what’s for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, “Hey, I’m waiting for you,” is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated Twitter posts and texts.
“This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”
Dave Pell worries that the realtime availability of all these photos is getting in the way of our experiencing selves.
Maybe it was a bad angle. Maybe I didn’t get his good side. Maybe he just didn’t have that surfer vibe. Whatever it was, the photo wasn’t all that cool. Given time to reflect (even the few days I used to get between my own childhood birthdays and my mom picking up a set of 4x6 prints at the local pharmacy), my son probably would’ve developed a version of that day that had him riding a giant a wave, looking like a cross between Laird Hamilton and Eddie Vedder. Instead, he pretty much looked like a landlocked three year-old on a beach-bound surfboard who was suffering from a rare — but particularly punishing — bad hair day.
The instant my son looked at the image, his imagination-driven perception of himself was replaced by a digital reproduction of the moment he had just experienced. He had a few seconds, not nearly long enough, to create is own internal version of what that moment looked — and by extension felt — like.
[Sherlock season 2 spoilers ahead…] At the end of the second season of the excellent BBC series Sherlock, Holmes jumps off the roof of a building in Smithfield, London. Ever since then, fans of the show have been leaving notes near where he would have landed.
In the early 1900s, photographer George Lawrence built what he called the Lawrence Captive Airship, a series of kites and wires able to hold aloft a camera mounted on a stabilizing mechanism. With his invention, he was able to take aerial photos of cities all over the country — Brooklyn, Atlantic City, Chicago, Kansas City. You’ve probably seen his photos of a burnt-out San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
You gotta love anyone whose company motto was “the hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty”. (via coudal)
Photographer Bela Borsodi fastidiously manipulated household items in the photograph below to create an image that looks like 4 photographs. Created as an album cover for the band VLP, I can confirm it’s possible to stare at this picture for many minutes.
Ah, the good old days, when people used to talk to each other in public rather than looking at their phones or listening to headphones all the time. Except that’s not been the case for awhile as XKCD demonstrates with a series of quotes from various publications dating back to 1871. This is from William Smith’s Morley: Ancient and Modern published in 1886.
With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion… the dreamy quiet old days are over… for men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel… leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them… the hurry and bustle of modern life… lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day’s work done, took their ease…
In 1946, a young Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine and took this shot of NYC subway commuters reading newspapers:
The more things change, etc. More of Kubrick’s subway photography can be found here.
Click through to YouTube to watch it in the original 4K resolution, which is much better than even 1080p. They produced the video in conjunction with the Night Sky edition of their Field Notes notebooks.
Jacob Riis came to NYC in 1870 at the age of 21. He had $40 in his pocket, which he quickly spent. Unemployed, he lived for a time in the city’s notorious slums before working his way up the social and economic ladder to become one of New York’s strongest advocates for reform. Riis also took early advantage of flash photography to steer his camera into the city’s darkest corners — tenements, dark alleys, sweatshops, opium dens, beer halls — and emerged with photographs that helped shift public opinion on NYC’s poverty and slums.
Each pair of photographs includes a recipe for making the pictured dish. Galimberti’s other projects are very much worth checking out as well. (via @youngna)
To understand what is happening in color photography today it is beneficial to know what has been previously accomplished. The quest for color photography can be traced to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1839 public announcement of his daguerreotype process, which produced a finely detailed, one-of-a-kind, direct-positive photographic image through the action of light on a silver-coated copper plate. Daguerreotypes astonished and delighted, but nevertheless people complained that the images lacked color. As we see the world in color, others immediately began to seek ways to overcome this deficiency and the first colored photographs made their appearance that same year. The color was applied by hand, directly on the daguerreotype’s surface. Since then scores of improvements and new processes have been patented for commercial use.
This is a photograph made by Louis Ducos du Hauron sometime between 1869-1879, a particularly early example of a vivid color photographic print that wasn’t colored by hand.
Alan Taylor recently investigated where Google Maps’ Street View coverage ends — “whether blocked by geographic features, international borders, or simply the lack of any further road” — and compiled a photographic look at the ends of the road.
This is amazing: Alan Taylor rounds up some homemade inventions from China, including DIY submarines, giant motorcycles, home-built robots, and can’t-possibly-fly airplanes. I can’t pick a favorite, but this homemade welding mask is outstanding:
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