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In December, I linked to a small collection of color photos of Paris taken in the 1910s and 1920s. Here’s a much more extensive collection of Parisian color photography. Some of my favorites:
The middle photo is of the flower market at Les Halles in 1914, which would be quite a thing to have experienced. (thx, julien)
Photographer Danny Evans photoshops images of celebrities so that they look like normal people. This one of Kanye and Kim is my favorite:
Man, I could stare at chubby Kanye all day. But the Tom Cruise one is pretty great as well:
(via co.design)
Sworn Virgins of Albania is a project by photographer Jill Peters documenting Albanian women who have chosen to live as men for cultural reasons.
As a tradition dating back hundreds of years, this was necessary in societies that lived within tribal clans, followed the Kanun, an archaic code of law, and maintained an oppressive rule over the female gender.The Kanun states that women are considered to be the property of their husbands. The freedom to vote, drive, conduct business, earn money, drink, smoke, swear, own a gun or wear pants was traditionally the exclusive province of men. Young girls were commonly forced into arranged marriages, often with much older men in distant villages.
As an alternative, becoming a Sworn Virgin, or ‘burnesha” elevated a woman to the status of a man and granted her all the rights and privileges of the male population. In order to manifest the transition such a woman cut her hair, donned male clothing and sometimes even changed her name. Male gestures and swaggers were practiced until they became second nature. Most importantly of all, she took a vow of celibacy to remain chaste for life. She became a “he”.
(thx, tiffany)
During her reign, Queen Elizabeth II of England has met 10 sitting US Presidents, every one from Eisenhower to Obama except for Lyndon Johnson. She also met Harry Truman as a princess in 1951 and former President Herbert Hoover in 1957.
You can see the entire progression here or here. QEII is more definitely a human wormhole.
BTW, Elizabeth is creeping up on Queen Victoria as the longest-reigning British monarch, just another two-and-a-half years to catch her. Victoria reigned during the terms of 19 different Presidents but never met any of them and had an unfair advantage…lots of short terms and one-term Presidencies back then. (via mlkshk)
From Sports Illustrated, their picks for the 100 greatest photos of sports.
In 2007, Kyle Cassidy published a book called Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. He asked his subjects a simple question: Why do you own a gun?
Cassidy traveled over 20,000 miles, crisscrossing the country to meet with gun owners in their homes. Cassidy’s photo essays create a powerful, thought provoking and sometimes startling view of gun ownership in the U.S. These “everyman” portraits, and the accompanying views of gun owners, fashion a riveting and provocative hardcover book.
From book’s web site, a sampling of images and answers:
Paul: My family had guns the whole time I was a kid. then i went off and joined the army and went away and come back. I have guns now largely for the same reason I have fire extinguishers in the house and spare tires in the car. I’m a self reliant kind of guy. and there could come a time when I need to protect my family and i’m a self reliant kind of guy.
Beth: I have one for self protection. I was raised to never rely on anyone else to protect me or watch my back. It took me a year to pick out one that I liked.
Bashir: I just think it’s a good thing to have
Joe: The first time I was introduced to guns was when I was 5 years old; hunting with my dad, grandfather and uncle. I remember my dad shooting a ringneck pheasant and a rabbit. I carried those two animals until I thought my arms were going to fall off. As a little guy, that made a great impression on me. I’ve hunted all of my life; in Pennsylvania, Idaho, Colorado and Maine. I have a tremendous respect for life, especially wildlife. It never ceases to amaze me how much satisfaction I get from just simply being in the Great Outdoors, whether I make a kill or not.
(via virtual memories)
Flickr released a new version of their iPhone app today (App Store) and it appears to be a dramatic improvement over their old offering.
We know that some of your best photo moments happen on the fly, so we’ve made it easier to get the perfect shot when inspiration hits. Once you get the shot, there’s a built-in editor to quickly correct, crop, or enhance it with one of the new high res filters.
I haven’t had a chance to check it out in detail yet, but from everything I’m hearing, people are jazzed about it.
My favorite end-of-the-year lists are always the photos. Here are a few that have made their way online so far; I’ll be updating this list throughout the month so send me your lists.
2012: The Year in Photos from In Focus: Alan Taylor is still my favorite picker of photos. Here’s part two.
Best Photos of the Year 2012 from Reuters: Almost a hundred photos, heavy on hard news.
The 45 Most Powerful Images of 2012 from Buzzfeed: A wide-ranging selection of photos designed to tug at the heartstrings. See also The Best Animal Photos of 2012.
Pictures of the Year 2012 from AFP (Agence France-Presse): Not an official list but a nice selection of AFP photos nonetheless.
2012: The year in pictures from CNN: A good selection from the cable network.
Year in Photos 2012 from the Wall Street Journal: A massive selection of photos organized by month, region, category, and rating.
The best photographs of 2012 from The Guardian: Photographs and interviews with the photographers who took them.
Photos Of The Year 2012 from the Associated Press: Photos are great but the way they’re displayed isn’t.
2012 Year in Pictures from The Big Picture: About 150 images chosen from a number of different sources. Here’s part two and part three.
Albert Kahn sent photographers all over the world in the early 1900s and amassed over 72,000 color photos in the process. Here are a few shots of his from Paris on the eve of World War I.
That photo is of the entrance to the Passage du Caire at the corner of Rue d’Alexandrie and Rue Sainte-Foy in the 2nd arrondissement. Here’s what it looks like today:
NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exhibit running until January 27, 2013 featuring over 200 photos employing old timey trickery.
For early art photographers, the ultimate creativity lay not in the act of taking a photograph but in the subsequent transformation of the camera image into a hand-crafted picture.
Some dude next you on the subway falls asleep on your arm and you just go on about your business. That’s about right. (via gothamist, photo by molossoidea)
A new series of photographs from Shinichi Maruyama shows the nude human form in motion. (Totally SFW.)
According to Petapixel, these are not long exposure shots (like these).
Although the photographs look like long-exposure shots, they’re actually composite images created by combining ten thousand individual photographs of each dancer. The result is a look in which each model’s body is (mostly) lost within the blur of its movement.
You may remember Maruyama from his hand-thrown water sculptures.
In their book Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, James and Karla Murray are documenting the changing commercial facade of NYC’s streets. A recent post on their blog focuses on a strip of Bleecker St between 6th and 7th Avenues in the West Village. This is Murray’s old location circa 2001, before they moved across the street into a bigger space, expanded that space, and opened an adjacent restaurant:
I moved to the West Village in 2002 and, after a few stops in other neighborhoods around the city, moved back a couple years ago. Walking around the neighborhood these days, I’m amazed at how much has changed in 10 years. Sometimes it seems as though every single store front has turned over in the interim. (via @kathrynyu)
A little late for Veteran’s Day, but this is a great collection of photography from Vietnam. These two stick out for me (both photos by Horst Faas):
Some images NSFW and may be disturbing, etc. (via @Colossal)
Photographer Jessica Hilltout has documented the game of soccer/football/futbol around the world, from the secondhand footwear to the improvised goals to the makeshift balls:
Photographer James Balog (the guy behind a new documentary called Chasing Ice) spent years taking pictures of the melting glaciers. In a variety of ways, these photos are quite incredible.
Early color photography is a particular interest of mine, so Sanna Dullaway’s efforts to colorize historical photos, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Thích Quảng Đức, and Anne Frank, are an intriguing twist on the theme.
German photographer Hugo Jaeger traveled around Poland after the Nazi invasion and documented daily life there. Life has a selection of Jaeger’s color photos from that time.
Why would Hugo Jaeger, a photographer dedicated to lionizing Adolf Hitler and the “triumphs” of the Third Reich, choose to immortalize conquered Jews in Warsaw and Kutno (a small town in central Poland) in such an uncharacteristic, intimate manner? Most German photographers working in the same era as Jaeger usually focused on the Wehrmacht; on Nazi leaders; and on the military victories the Reich was so routinely enjoying in the earliest days of the Second World War. Those pictures frequently document brutal acts of humiliation, even as they glorify German troops.
The photographs that Jaeger made in the German ghettos in occupied Poland, on the other hand, convey almost nothing of the triumphalism seen in so many of his other photographs. Here, in fact, there is virtually no German military presence at all. We see the devastation in the landscape of the German invasion of Poland, but very little of the “master race” itself.
It is, of course, impossible to fully recreate exactly what Jaeger had in mind, but from the reactions of the people portrayed in these images in Warsaw and Kutno, there appears to be surprising little hostility between the photographer and his subjects. Most of the people in these pictures, Poles and Jews, are smiling at the camera. They trust Jaeger, and are as curious about this man with a camera as he is about them. In this curiosity, there is no sense of hatred. The men, women and children on the other side of the lens and Jaeger look upon one another without the aggression and tension characteristic of the relationship between perpetrator and victim.
It’s still amazing the extent to which early color photography can transport us back to the past in a way that black & white photography or even video cannot.
Danxia refers to a “type of petrographic geomorphology” found in China. What that means is you get these mountains that look as though they were decorated with crayons by a five-year-old channelling Dalí.
That shot was taken by Melinda ^..^ on Flickr…you can find dozens of her Danxia photos here. A kottke.org reader suggests that Tiny Wings creator Andreas Illiger was influenced by the Danxia landforms in developing the iconic scenery for the game.
Not a bad theory. (thx, christopher)
What if Andreas Gursky, Garry Winogrand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson put cheesy watermarks all over their photographs?
(via @jenbee)
In Reckless Unbound, photographer Christy Rogers takes photographs of brightly-clothed people underwater resulting in photos that resemble Baroque paintings. GUP Magazine says:
Without the use of post-production manipulation, Rogers’ works are made in-camera, on the spot, in water and at night. She applies her technique to bodies submerged in water during tropical nights in Hawaii. Through a fragile process of experimentation, she builds elaborate scenes of coalesced colours and entangled bodies that exalt the human character as one of vigour and warmth, while also capturing the beauty and vulnerability of the tragic experience that is the human condition.
(via @robinsloan)
On Saturday, the Space Shuttle Endeavour was driven 12 miles through the streets of Los Angeles on its way to the California Science Center. It was a tight fit at times.
From New Zealand photographer John Crawford, a series called Aerial Nudes.
Technically not safe for work but your coworkers would need to be sitting at your desk with a magnifying glass to be offended so… (via @coudal)
Gentlemen of Bacongo is a book of photography by Daniele Tamagni documenting a group of men from the Congo who dress in designer suits. Meet Le Sapeurs.
Photographer Daniele Tamagni’s new book Gentlemen of Bacongo captures the fascinating subculture of the Congo in which men (and a few women) dress in designer and handmade suits and other luxury items. The movement, called Le Sape, combines French styles from their colonial roots and the individual’s (often flamboyant) style. Le Sapeurs, as they’re called, wear pink suits and D&G belts while living in the slums of this coastal African region.
In interviews with some notable sapeurs, Tamagni unearths the complex and varied rules and standards of Le Sape, short for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People. Sapeur Michel comments on the strange combination of poverty and fashion, “A Congolese sapeur is a happy man even if he does not eat, because wearing proper clothes feeds the soul and gives pleasure to the body.”
Solange Knowles recently shot Losing You in South Africa and it features many gentlemen of Le Sape. Tamagni went along as an advisor and photographed Solange along the way. (via @youngna)
Photographers Stephanie Bassos and Timothy Burkhart are working together on a project called People vs. Places.
This double exposure project allows us to step back from having full control of the image making process and trust in one another while allowing coincidences to happen naturally on film. Stephanie exposes a full roll of 35mm film of only “people,” and Timothy reloads the film again into the same camera, to imprint only “places” and locations to the same roll. These images are all the end result of our ongoing series and are unedited negatives straight from the camera.
Many of the images are unremarkable but every once in awhile, boom:
(via co.design)
Manga Camera is an iPhone app that allows you to convert regular photos to Manga style comics. It’s fairly simple, and provides several different backgrounds, but I don’t think you can convert existing photos. Despite the cat picture rule, below are a few quick examples of Manga Camera in action. Some better examples here.
(via @heyitsgarrett)
In Focus has a selection of entries from this year’s installment of the National Geographic Photo Contest.
(via @dunstan)
Freelance underwater photographer Yoji Ookata recently discovered a curious underwater pattern not unlike a crop circle:
When I first saw the pictures, this seemed like a hoax on the part of Ookata (which it might still be, I guess) or the work of someone who enjoys making sand art where no one will ever see it. But Ookata convinced a camera crew to check it out and the mystery circle’s artist turns out to be a fish!
The unlikely artist — best known in Japan as a delicacy, albeit a potentially poisonous one — even takes small shells, cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as if decorating his piece. Further observation revealed that this “mysterious circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty. Attracted by the grooves and ridges, female puffer fish would find their way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish where they would mate and lay eggs in the center of the circle. In fact, the scientists observed that the more ridges the circle contained, the more likely it was that the female would mate with the male. The little sea shells weren’t just in vain either. The observers believe that they serve as vital nutrients to the eggs as they hatch, and to the newborns.
Amazing. (via colossal)
Leica announced a new version of their M series camera on Monday and the “one more thing” concerned a Jonathan Ive-designed special edition of the Leica M.
This camera will be the mother of all limited editions based on one simple fact: only a single unit of the camera will ever be produced. Aside from announcing this camera, not much else was revealed. It is, however, for more than just a publicity stunt: the camera will be auctioned off, and the proceeds will be donated to charity.
The regular M retails for almost $7000 so I imagine the iLeica will go for about eleventy gajillion. Also, designed? How much leeway will Ive have to really change the camera? He’ll just slap some new colorways on it, yes? (via df)
Than Tibbetts took all the frames from Noah Kalina’s Everyday video and averaged them into one photo.
Those are some of the yearly averages…you’ll have to click through to see the overall average.
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