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Dillon Marsh photographs cell towers disguised (poorly) as trees.
There’s one of these as you drive north out of NYC on the Hutch…it’s twice as tall as any other tree in the area, like a redwood that got lost while visiting its grandparents back east.
Up close, everyone looks a little weird. Even Anne Hathaway:
These remind me of macro photography of insects…when photographed close-up, people look like aliens too.
Flóra Borsi inserts herself into historic photos, as though she were there photographing events with a contemporary camera. This is my favorite:
Borsi states she was inspired by “a Charlie Chaplin movie”, which is likely this clip shot in 1928 at the premiere of a Chaplin film which shows a woman who looks like she’s talking on a cellphone. See also Girl with a Pearl Earring and Point-and-Shoot Camera. (via @coudal)
For a project called The Fundamental Units, Martin John Callanan used a very powerful 3D microscope to take 400-megapixel images of the lowest denomination coin from each of the world’s 166 active currencies. This is the 1 stotinki coin from Bulgaria:
And this is a small part of that same coin at tremendous zoom:
More information is available here.
After an exhaustive search, I have decided this photo most exemplifies life in these United States during the 1980s:
And if not that one, then one of several other possible candidates from Roger Minick’s Sightseer project, for which he took photos of tourists at popular US tourist destinations during the early 1980s and into the 2000s.
When I approached people for a portrait, I tried to make my request clear and to the point, making it clear that I was not trying to sell them anything. I explained that my wife and I were traveling around the country visiting most of the major tourist destinations so that I could photograph the activity of sightseeing. I would quickly add that I hoped the project would have cultural value and might be seen in years to come as a kind of time capsule of what Americans looked like at the end of the Twentieth Century; at which, to my surprise, I would see people often begin to nod their heads as if they knew what I was talking about.
Slate did a feature on this series last week.
While French balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon first photographed Paris by air in 1858, those photos were lost, and this photograph of Boston from 1860 by James Wallace Black is the earliest known aerial photo. The title is ‘Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.’ If I had to guess where in Boston this is, I’d say somewhere along Atlantic Ave.
Update: Several people have identified the steepled building at center left as the Old South Meeting House, which Wikipedia confirms: “Depicts area resembling Old South Meeting House; Milk Street; India Wharf, Central Wharf; and vicinity.” Looks a bit different these days.
But more importantly, a photo of Providence, RI taken by Black in August of 1860 predates his Boston photograph by two months. The print, which is part of the MoMA’s collection, is badly damaged but it looks like some detail would be discernable in person.
So for some sufficiently flexible definition of “surviving”, Black’s photo of Providence is the oldest surviving aerial photo. (thx, david)
Zoe Spawton often photographs a particularly well-dressed man who passes her cafe in Berlin each day. She’s documenting the results at What Ali Wore.
Wonderful. Ali used to be a doctor but is now working as a tailor.
Israeli artist Ronit Bigal does intricate calligraphy on the human body and photographs the results.
Update: I read the page wrong…the calligraphy is printed on the photographs to follow the contour of the skin, not on the skin itself. Still cool. (thx, @lorp)
Paris even does rainbows better than the rest of the world. This is a photo of a horizon rainbow taken over the Parisian skyline last week by Bertrand Kulik.
What the heck is going on there? Astronomy Picture of the Day explains:
Why is this horizon so colorful? Because, opposite the Sun, it is raining. What is pictured above is actually just a common rainbow. It’s uncommon appearance is caused by the Sun being unusually high in the sky during the rainbow’s creation. Since every rainbow’s center must be exactly opposite the Sun, a high Sun reflecting off of a distant rain will produce a low rainbow where only the very top is visible — because the rest of the rainbow is below the horizon.
(via @DavidGrann)
Technically this photo was taken several years (probably in 1986 or 1987) before Radiohead officially came to be, but it features four out of the five members, back when the group was called On a Friday.
From left to right, Thom Yorke, Phil Selway, Ed O’Brien, and Colin Greenwood. This occasion marked one of the last times that Yorke smiled for a photo. (via buzzfeed)
Maybe the most depressing part of this three part series of photographs of Iraq from the past ten years is not the photos of all the horrible things people are capable of doing to each other, not the [God, I can’t even think of the right set of rage-adjectives here] faces of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, but the fact that there is a part two to this series that starts in 2003, just after the fucking asinine MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner.
But maybe it was all worth it? To see these happy faces riding an amusement ride? Or these young people able to express themselves? Was it the right thing done the wrong way for the wrong reasons? I dunno. I just don’t know.
Gabriele Galimberti takes photos of kids with their most prized possessions.
But how they play can reveal a lot. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian, who would often join in with a child’s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”
This reminds me of Peter Menzel’s photos of what families from different parts of the world eat in a typical week. (via df)
Photographer Rebecca Martinez photographs reborn dolls and the people who collect/care for them.
Babies create strong emotions for the bearer, holder, and observer. I have discovered this holds true even when it is known the baby is not real.
I am photographing dolls that are created to look and feel like living babies. They are constructed and weighted to feel like infants, which includes a head that must be supported while in one’s arms. They are the most powerful objects I have ever worked with, I am struck by the strong and palpable emotional reactions they produce. They provoke the dominant biological instinct to nurture and the entire spectrum of human behavior.
Some of the collectors care for their reborn dolls as if they were their own children:
Many of the women involved have an especially strong passion for the stage of mothering babies and this is a method to keep this stage permanently in their lives. There is a wide range of personal stories and motivations for being involved in this community. Some create or collect these dolls because they cannot continue to give birth to living babies, or have lost a child, or cannot have one of their own. Some women admire the art form and are doll collectors, others create nurseries in their homes and integrate the babies as part of their families and lives.
Sometimes, women who have lost a newborn have commissioned artists to make a reborn doll that looks exactly like their deceased baby. Modeled after photographs of the real infant, these dolls are called portrait babies.
Mark Tipple takes underwater photos of people swimming under crashing waves, which happens to be my favorite genre of surfing photography.
Prints are available. (via @DavidGrann)
National Geographic has launched a new Tumblr site that features the less-celebrated-but-still-awesome parts of its vast photographic archive. I want this car:
(via the verge)
NYC Past has hundreds of large format historical photos of New York City. Like this one:
I’m not through all 49 pages yet, but I am getting pretty close.
If this photo series from 1950 of the interior of the White House being ripped out so that the building could be structurally reinforced isn’t an apt metaphor for the current state of American politics, I don’t know what is.
Experts called the third floor of the White House “an outstanding example of a firetrap.” The result of a federally commissioned report found the mansion’s plumbing “makeshift and unsanitary,” while “the structural deterioration [was] in ‘appalling degree,’ and threatening complete collapse.” The congressional commission on the matter was considering the option of abandoning the structure altogether in favor of a built-from-scratch mansion, but President Truman lobbied for the restoration.
“It perhaps would be more economical from a purely financial standpoint to raze the building and to rebuild completely,” he testified to Congress in February 1949. “In doing so, however, there would be destroyed a building of tremendous historical significance in the growth of the nation.”
So it had to be gutted. Completely. Every piece of the interior, including the walls, had to be removed and put in storage. The outside of the structure-reinforced by new concrete columns-was all that remained.
(via digg)
After working at it for three years, Octavio Aburto finally got his shot:
Beautiful. And holy crap, did you know that rays could fly?
That sucker must be 10 feet out of the water! (via the telegraph)
Chris Buck takes pictures of celebrities after giving them 30 seconds to hide. Here’s Cindy Sherman:
Buck’s photos are on display in NYC for a couple more days at Foley but are also available in book form. (via digg)
I love these 50th anniversary yearly round-ups that Alan Taylor is doing over at In Focus. This year marks the 50th anniversary of 1963:
The documentary about recently discovered street photographer Vivian Maier that was funded via Kickstarter almost two years ago is finally getting somewhere. Here’s the trailer for the film, which appears to involve a crazy twist in Maier’s story.
Seeing so many CSI and police procedural shows on TV today, it’s easy to take for granted being able to rapidly and accurately identify criminals. Fingerprinting, as probably the biggest technological advancement in identifying criminals, is a big part of that. But what’d we have before fingerprinting?
According to the National Law Enforcement Museum:
Alphonse Bertillon was a French criminologist who first developed this anthropometric system of physical measurements of body parts, especially components of the head and face, to produce a detailed description of an individual. This system, invented in 1879, became known as the Bertillon system, or bertillonage, and quickly gained wide acceptance as a reliable, scientific method of criminal investigation. In 1884 alone, French police used Bertillon’s system to help capture 241 repeat offenders, which helped establish the system’s effectiveness. Primarily, investigators used the Bertillon system to determine if a suspect in custody had been involved in previous crimes. Law enforcement agencies began to create archives of records of known criminals, which contained his or her anthropometric measurements, as well as full-face and profile photographs of the perpetrator (now commonly known as “mugshots,” which are still in use today).
It was essentially a criminal justice Dewey Decimal System, the first step in taking police out of the dark ages. Before Bertillion standardized measurements, police just had a jumble of descriptions and photographs with no way to organize them so they’d almost never be able to cross reference existing records when people were arrested.
Of course Bertillion’s system was just a stop-gap measure. The system was only really in use for about 30 years before fingerprints became the dominant identification method.
In 1903, a man named Will West was committed to the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was photographed and measured using the Bertillon system. Will West’s measurements were found to be almost identical to a criminal at the same penitentiary named William West, who was committed for murder in 1901 and was serving a life sentence. Furthermore, their photographs showed that the two men bore a close physical resemblance to one another, although it was not clear that they were even related. In the ensuing confusion surrounding the true identities of the two men, their fingerprints conclusively identified them and demonstrated clearly that the adoption of a fingerprint identification system was more reliable than the older Bertillon system.
The guy in this photo is John Welshouse who was convicted in 1914 for violating the White Slave Act (prostitution). (via @pruned)
Photos from the shortlist of winners of the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards. Some stunning shots in there.
Edith, Hellrider, and Dadmonster pose for a photograph. In Botswana, heavy metal music has landed. Metal groups are now performing in nightclubs, concerts, festivals. The ranks of their fans have expanded dramatically. These fans wear black leather pants and jackets, studded belts, boots and cowboy hats. On their t-shirts stand out skulls, obscenities, historical covers of hard-rock groups popular in the seventies and eighties, such as Iron Maiden, Metallica, and AC/DC. They have created their own style, inspired by classic metal symbolism, but also borrowing heavily from the iconography of western films and the traditional rural world of Botswana. Their nicknames, Gunsmoke, Rockfather, Carrott Warmachine, Hellrider, Hardcore, Dignified Queen, may appear subversive and disturbing as their clothing, but they are peaceful and gentle. “We like to get dressed,, drink meet friends and feel free , this music is so powerful . We are lucky to live in a country tolerant and open” argues one of the leaders. A precious rarity for Africa.
Botswanian heavy metal fans and other great selections from the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards
From 1948, this is L Motors, located at 175th and Broadway in Manhattan.
Can’t believe I’d forgotten about Shorpy! Click through for a larger view. The Dodge/Plymouth dealership is long gone; that spot is now occupied by Bravo Super Markets. (via @claytoncubitt)
So far, humans have taken photos from the surfaces of Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars. But I had no idea that a photo from the surface of Titan existed:
The photo of the Saturnian moon was taken in 2005 by the Huygens probe, which was designed to land safely on the moon’s surface. From Wikipedia:
After landing, Huygens photographed a dark plain covered in small rocks and pebbles, which are composed of water ice. The two rocks just below the middle of the image on the right are smaller than they may appear: the left-hand one is 15 centimeters across, and the one in the center is 4 centimeters across, at a distance of about 85 centimeters from Huygens. There is evidence of erosion at the base of the rocks, indicating possible fluvial activity. The surface is darker than originally expected, consisting of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. The assumption is that the “soil” visible in the images is precipitation from the hydrocarbon haze above.
And a special close-but-no-cigar award goes to the NEAR Shoemaker probe, which snapped this photo from about 400 feet above the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Eros:
The probe landed on the surface of Eros in February 2001 and transmitted usable data for about two weeks afterwards, none of which was photographic in nature.
It would look something like this:
That’s from a series called Darkened Skies by Thierry Cohen; he photographed various cities (NYC, Paris, Tokyo, SF) and matched them up with starry skies from more remote places like Montana, Nevada, and the Sahara. New Yorkers can see Cohen’s work at the Danziger Gallery starting March 28.
See also Imagining Earth with Saturn’s Rings.
There’s some weird perspective stuff going on with this photo (do those waves break right on shore?) but holy crap look at the size of that fucking wave!
The teeny speck speeding down that wall of water is Garrett McNamara, who already holds the world record for the largest wave ever surfed and will likely extend that record with this estimated 100-footer.
There’s no video of the ride but in this promotional video, I think you can briefly see McNamara riding the monster wave at 38 seconds and perhaps again at 42 seconds.
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)
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