This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.
Adrian Fisk recently traveled through China asking the young people there to write anything they wanted down on a piece of paper. The results are interesting.
“After watching television I have many ideas, but am unable to realize them.” Yunnan, Luo Zheng Chui, 30 years old, farmer.
“I’d like to see any supernatural thing such as alien, UFO, mysterious thing.” Chan Jie Fang, 28 years old, supervisor in bag making company in Guangdong province but learning English in Guangxi province.
“We are the lost generation. I’m confused about the world.” Guangxi, Avril Lui, 22-years-old, post-grad student.
More are available on Fisk’s site (click on New Stories and then Ispeak China). (via @bryce)
Watch as Vladimir Putin rides a horse, drives a race car, tags a tiger, does judo, goes on archeological dives, looks at leopards, stands on a boat, arm wrestles, attempts to bend a frying pan, rides a snowmobile, flies a plane, hugs a dog, rides a motorcycle, looks at a bear, swims the butterfly, signs autographs, shoots a whale with a crossbow, plays the piano, feeds a moose, talks with a biker gang, steers a boat, walks through brush with a gun, sits in a tank, blacksmiths, plays hockey, hugs a horse, dives almost a mile in a submersible, and adjusts sunglasses.
He has made many more important posts on In Focus and Big Picture over the years, but Alan Taylor has really outdone himself with this one…each photo is somehow more wonderfully unlikely than the previous one. See also Kim Jong-il Looking at Things.
Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary film about the unassuming king of street fashion photography, is out on DVD today.
“We all get dressed for Bill,” says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The Bill in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends he spots emerging from Manhattan sidewalks and high society charity soirees for his beloved Style section columns On The Street and Evening Hours.
Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. The range of people he snaps uptown fixtures like Wintour, Brooke Astor, Tom Wolfe and Annette de la Renta (who appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between reveals a delirious and delicious romp through New York. But rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as Bill, who lived a monk-like existence in the same Carnegie Hall studio at for fifty years, never eats in restaurants and gets around solely on bike number 29 (28 having been stolen).
4. Stick to one lens Although Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with several different lenses while on-assignment working for Magnum, he would only shoot with a 50mm if he was shooting for himself. By being faithful to that lens for decades, the camera truly became “an extension of his eye”.
Mastergram takes photos from well-regarded photographers (Capa, Burtynksy, Weegee, etc.) and runs them through Instagram filters.
If the Instagram effect can make mundane images appear to be works of art, what happens when we apply the same filters to images that have historically been held in high regard? Is the imagery degraded or enhanced as a result?
Photos from the book are disappearing from various sites around the web as takedown notices are sent out, but you can get the gist of the book by watching this video by Wehrli about how one of the photos was made:
Ulric Collette’s Genetic Portraits series features combined photos of family members (father/son, mother/daughter, etc.) that emphasize the facial similarities between them.
Even the lens is homemade; it’s just plexiglass ground into shape with fine-grit sandpaper. I misunderstood: the lens is store-bought but the focusing screen is made of plexi. (via ★alexandra)
Where Children Sleep is a book of photographs by James Mollison of kids and the rooms they sleep in.
The caption for the photo above is: “Joey, 11, killed his first deer at the age of 7. He lives with his family in Kentucky.” The diversity in living environments is amazing. (via lens)
Although Mr. Silva can walk, he still needs a cane, which he holds in his right hand. When he wants to shoot, he must transfer the cane to his left arm so he can pick up the camera. He also conceded that he was frustrated about not yet being able to move as nimbly as he once could. But all in all, he said he was happy with his first day’s work.
“It was a matter of making the best of what I had,” he said. “There will come a time when I can run, but now I can walk.”
We were a bit surprised to receive a notice on Monday from Caters News, telling us they represented David Slater with respect to the syndication of those photos, and asking us to take down the photos. The notice was not a DMCA takedown notice. It doesn’t even mention copyright, though that seems like the only basis upon which they would make such a takedown request. And, to be clear, it was not in the least bit threatening. There is no legal language and no threat at all in the note.
When asked for clarification by Techdirt, a representative from Caters replied:
Michael, regardless of the issue of who does and doesn’t own the copyright — it is 100% clear that the copyright owner is not yourself. You have blatantly ‘lifted’ these photographs from somewhere — I presume the Daily Mail online. On the presumption that you do not like to encourage copyright theft (regardless of who owns it) then please remove the photographs.
Onionesque. Please someone interview the monkey about his/her views on this.
Barrymore, 14, and Feldman, 17, were dating at the time. At this point, Barrymore had been in rehab twice for drugs/alcohol and is two months away from a failed suicide attempt. Light also got photos of Lucille Ball a month before she died, Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers, Mayim Bialik, Jodie Foster (who won the Best Actress Oscar that year for The Accused) and, my favorite for some reason, River Phoenix.
Technically, in most cases, whoever makes the actual work gets the copyright. That is, if you hand your camera to a stranger to take your photo, technically that stranger holds the copyright on the photo, though no one ever enforces this.
Forget the million monkeys at a million typewriters eventually pounding out Shakespeare. Watch out Cartier Bresson (or perhaps Jill Greenberg), they’ve moved on to photography. A crested black macaque grabbed a photographer’s camera and shot dozens of shots, including this fine self-portrait:
I think that is my new favorite photo by my new favorite photographer.
When I came to photograph Eva, she was at home with her two nannies, one British and one Russian. She had planned everything in advance: the dress she had chosen hung already perfectly ironed and pressed with matching tights and shoes carefully next to it. I felt that I had been hired by Eva to do this shoot rather than the other way around. She was experienced and knowledgeable as she showed me the rooms we were allowed to photograph. She placed herself carefully on the edge of a couch, stood in front of her favorite painting, and posed in her parents’ library. At the end of this photo session she was exhausted and lay down on the sofa. Finally I was able to take the only photograph that I had composed myself.
My standard operating procedure is to use an ultra-high resolution camera combined with a top-of-the-line macro lens to photograph tintypes. I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce “hard” light, much like the sun on a clear day. In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail.
The original photo is on the left and an intermediate step on the right; you’ll need to click through to see the finished product.
Update:This is a better restoration…the one above is too airbrushed, like the photo on the cover of a fashion magazine.
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