Photographer Adam Magyar uses scanner cameras to take these huge panoramic photos which are a little difficult to explain.
Adam uses the same technologies as the finish line cameras at the Olympic Games, which take thousands of images a second and records through a 1 pixel wide slit. The time and space slices are then placed next to one another to generate an image without perspective. This method is capable of recording movement only, with static objects and buildings appearing as stripes and lines.
Nick Gleis shoots the interiors of corporate jets owned by African dictators and other heads of state. I couldn’t decide which jet interior was the gaudiest, but this one is definitely a contender because of the classy naked ladies on the wall of the bedroom.
Who knew that African dictators were so nostalgic for the set design of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
These images are from a set of 1,075 photographs — shot over five days last year for the book and exhibition, “Contraband” — of items detained or seized from passengers or express mail entering the United States from abroad at the New York airport. The miscellany of prohibited objects — from the everyday to the illegal to the just plain odd — attests to a growing worldwide traffic in counterfeit goods and natural exotica and offers a snapshot of the United States as seen through its illicit material needs and desires.
Polar-to-cartesian unwrapping of flower photographs is the new flattening flowers between the pages of books. The Processing source code is available. NotCot applied the effect to chandeliers. I dorked around in Photoshop a little and you can get similar results using the “Polar Coordinates” filter…you just have to stretch out the image first. (via today and tomorrow)
From Oobject, a collection of “first” images: the first color photograph, the first photo taken in space, the first x-ray image, the first image of a molecule, etc.
Naef explains why he thinks that stereographs attributed to Muybridge were in fact taken by Watkins, who sold the negatives to Muybridge. Muybridge then printed and sold them under his own name. “I think from what I’ve seen and knowing what I know about Muybridge - and I’m not an expert on Watkins by any mean and Weston is - I think yes Muybridge published pictures by other people,” Brookman said. “Some by Watkins potentially, but I think Muybridge was also a photographer and a significant photographer.”
Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes has a three-part interview with photography curator Weston Naef about why he thinks this is so. Part one is here. (No word yet on why Muybridge has so many unnecessary letters in his name.)
Frustrated with the carefully chosen photos of Africans “dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with [looks] of desperation” used to symbolize poverty by development organizations, Duncan McNicholl has started a photography project in which he takes two photos of a person: one in a typical poverty pose and the other with the person “looking their very finest”.
The truth is that the development sector, just like any other business, needs revenue to survive. Too frequently, this quest for funding uses these kind of dehumanizing images to draw pity, charity, and eventually donations from a largely unsuspecting public. I found it outrageous that such an incomplete and often inaccurate story was being so widely perpetuated by the organizations on the ground — the very ones with the ability and the responsibility to communicate the realities of rural Africa accurately.
Locals and Tourists is a set of maps showing where people take photos in various cities around the world. The results are broken down into tourist photos and photos taken by locals. Here’s NYC:
Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
French photographer and biologist Laurent Ballesta captures the hour- long battle between a 15kg (33lb) carp and his brother at a small lake near Montpellier in southern France.
This photo looks totally fake. Nice job by the photographer for being in the right place with the right camera and the right lens. (via dens)
Albert Kahn was a French banker and philanthropist who financed an extensive photography project in the early 1900s. His photographers traveled all around the world, eventually amassing a collection 72,000 color photos.
Kahn’s project is the subject of a 9-part BBC documentary that’s showing on Ovation this week. All the episodes repeat on Saturday starting at noon. (via constant siege)
Jordan Matter’s Dancers Among Us series features dancers from the Paul Taylor and Martha Graham Dance Companies doing everyday out-and-about things in NYC while dancing. (via pdn)
This is a photographic print made by briefly exposing photosensitive paper to the light from a laptop screen and then developing the paper. No camera needed.
The creator calls prints like these Laptopograms. Here’s the code for the “shutter”:
#!/bin/sh vbetool dpms on ; sleep 2.0; sudo vbetool dpms off
Ideas for further exploration: make prints of screen-specific subjects (desktop, web sites, email inbox, etc.) and hi-res wallet-sized prints using the iPhone.
Oyster is a hotel review site. By far the best feature is that they take their own photos of the hotel rooms and facilities; the photos taken by the hotels make everything look bigger (wide-angle lenses) and brighter (professional lighting) than they usually are. (via svn)
At the behest of MoMA, photographer Marco Anelli has been taking photographs of all the people participating in Marina Abramović’s performance in the main atrium of the museum and posting them to Flickr. To review:
Abramović is seated in [the atrium] for the duration of the exhibition, performing her new work The Artist Is Present for seven hours, five days a week, and ten hours on Fridays. Visitors are invited to sit silently with the artist for a duration of their choosing.
The photographs are mesmerizing…face after face of intense concentration. A few of the participants even appear to be crying (this person and this one too) and several show up multiple times (the fellow pictured above sat across from Abramović at least half-a-dozen times). The photos are annotated with the duration of each seating. Most stay only a few minutes but this woman sat there for six and a half hours. This woman sat almost as long as was also dressed as the artist. (It would be neat to see graphs of the durations, both per day and as a distribution.)
Update: On the night of the opening exhibition, the third person to sit across from Abramović was her ex-boyfriend and collaborator of many years, Ulay (pictured here on Flickr). James Wescott reports on the scene:
When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay’s calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl — smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović’s cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene — as Abramović, of course, was well aware.
Here’s a description of one of the projects they did together in the 70s:
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual’s ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
Wescott also sat across from the artist:
I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain.
When I finally sat down before Abramovic, the bright lights blocked out the crowd, the hall’s boisterous chatter seemed to recede into the background, and time became elastic. (I have no idea how long I was there.)
Amir Baradaran turned the exhibition into a venue for a performance of his own…he even made Abramović laugh. Joe Holmes got a photo of the photographer in action. (thx, yasna & patrick)
At certain times I thought that we were really in sync. Other times I didn’t. Other times I was totally hallucinating. She looked like a childhood friend I once had. Then she looked like a baby. […] I thought time was flying by. Then time stopped. I lost track of everything. No hunger. No itching. No pain. I couldn’t feel my hands.
- Searching the Antarctic Peninsula by boat for 5,000-year-old moss - Backpacking in Tasmania and mainland Australia in search of several clonal shrubs in ranging from 10,000 to 43,000 years old - Visiting a sacred site in Sri Lanka for a nearly 2,300-year-old Banyan Fig tree - SCUBA diving in Spain to find the 100,000-year-old clonal sea grass
This photo was taken around 1940 and has not been digitally tampered with. So what’s the deal with the young man in the contemporary-looking sunglasses, t-shirt, and camera?
Proof of time travel? Forgetomori investigates. (After reading that page and looking at the photo several times, I half wondered whether this was one of those perception tests…”now, did you notice 12 pink polar bears in the photo?” It doesn’t appear to be.)
The beauty of this photo by The Sartorialist is not in the clothes or the model but in the way that everything in shot leans down and to the right: the sidewalk sloping away toward the curb, the higher cuff on her right leg, her left foot slightly in front of her right, hips slouched so that her belt is parallel to the sidewalk, the neckline on her shirt. And then that big wave of hair thrown over the other way, balancing everything else out.
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