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kottke.org posts about photography

The craziest apartment in Manhattan

The Selby has some shots of Cindy Gallop’s apartment, which has to be one of most personality-drenched living spaces I’ve seen since Martha Stewart’s house. (Not that I’ve seen Martha Stewart’s house. But I can imagine.) Here is, for example, Gallop’s Gucci chainsaw:

Gucci chainsaw

There is also a video tour on Vimeo and a 2006 New York magazine article about how Gallop turned a former YMCA locker room into her “ultimate bachelorette pad”.

She had a specific vision for her new home. “I was looking for something dramatic,” she says. So she told her designer, Stefan Boublil of the Apartment, a creative agency in Soho, “When night falls, I want to feel like I’m in a bar in Shanghai.”


Sistine Chapel virtual panorama

This is probably the best way to see the Sistine Chapel aside from getting on a plane to Rome.


And the record goes to…

From The Big Picture, a bunch of photos of record setters. This girl has the world’s largest (non-virtual) Pokemon collection.

Pokemon collection

And the contenders for the silliest record are:

The Most Number of Dishes On Display, In a Single Day
The Largest Cycling Class
The Biggest Plate of Hummus
The Most People Running Dressed as Santa
The Largest Meatball

But I have to admit, this is almost poetic in its neat summary of the modern condition:

Sultan Kosen, the world’s tallest man, unveils the world’s largest gingerbread man at an Ikea store in Oslo.


Massive panorama of Paris

A 26-gigapixel image of Paris. Fully zoomable and pannable. Sacrรฉ-Coeur starts out as a tiny speck and you can zoom in to see a bunch of people sitting on the steps outside.


Extreme wildlife photography

Photographer Greg du Toit spent months in the disease-infested water of a Kenyan watering hole to catch intimate images of animals drinking.

Sitting in my hide, I would have to remain motionless for hours as I watched the zebra herd’s painfully tentative approach. The sound of my shutter alone, would send them running.

In addition to the photos (larger versions here), du Toit contracted snail fever, malaria (twice), hook worm, and several other parasites.


Bureaucrats and their offices

Jan Banning

From Jan Banning’s series entitled Bureaucratics.


Omar Little Richardson

For the ten of you who watch The Wire *and* know who Terry Richardson is, this is for you.

Omar Richardson


Beautiful Art Deco camera

This handsome fellow is the Kodak Bantam Special, a limited-edition camera from 1936.

Kodak Bantam Special

Manufactured by Kodak, designed by Teague. (via monoscope)


David Maisel’s aerial photography

David Maisel

God, I am such a sucker for aerial photography. David Maisel has some especially fine examples: The Mining Project, The Forest, The Lake Project, Terminal Mirage, and Oblivion.


The One Who Got Away

Another fantastic feature from Pictory: The One Who Got Away features lost loves, hard choices, and former friends.

My friend and I grew up together: went through big losses early, endured school, survived through everything. This is her writing her final essay for law school, in late summer. I used to love this photo because it meant that we made it, at last. Then, after she became a lawyer, she helped my neighbor sue my family. We just got the letter from her, no warning. If I try hard, I understand her point of view. Business is business. As another good friend said: Welcome to adult issues.


A new kind of beauty

Photographer Phillip Toledano explores the concept of human beauty at a time when people, through surgery and drugs, are able to re-make themselves.

Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?

NSFW.


World Press Photo 2010 winners

The winning photographs in the 2010 World Press Photo Contest.


Overcoming creative block

A number of designers, artists, and photographers share how they combat creative block. One solution begins:

Slice and chop 2 medium onions into small pieces.
Put a medium sized pan on a medium heat with a few glugs of olive oil.
Add the onions to the pan, and a pinch of salt and pepper.


From the blog of Terry Richardson

Celebrity photographer Terry Richardson has a blog to which he posts quick snaps. Sorta like everyone else on the planet except that oh, there’s Kate Moss and there’s Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and there’s Justin Theroux and there’s Doutzen Kroes and there’s Tracy Morgan.

Richardson Morgan

Somewhat NSFW in places.


Found functions

Photographs of curves found in nature and the graphs and functions that go with them.

Found Functions

(via snarkmarket)


Right side upside down

A collection of upside down faces presented as if they were right side up.

Upside Down Face

I like best the ones where the hair doesn’t give it away and you have to look to the cheeks or the eyes for evidence of upside down-ness. (via @brainpicker)


US National Archives on Flickr Commons

The US National Archives have added a number of photos to the Flickr Commons project. Flickr is quietly building the greatest collection of historical documents on the web.


Vans, vans, vans

Photos of vans and the places where they were. Suddenly, I want a van. (via matt)


The world’s tallest building, out of time

Martin Becka and Cedric Delsaux are a pair of photographers who feature Burj Dubai in their work. Becka’s Burj comes from his Dubai, Transmutations project in which he uses the photogravure processing technique to make images of brand-new Dubai that look as though they were taken in 1880.

Martin Becka Dubai

Delsaux’s Burj image comes from a project called The Dark Lens, which features images of Star Wars characters populating the circa-2008 Earth. I believe that’s the Millennium Falcon docking at the Burj:

Cedric Delsaux Dubai

Many more of The Dark Lens images are available on Delsaux’s site.


Garry Winogrand interview

A 1970 interview with photographer Garry Winogrand on how he’s not trying to say anything with his work. Instead, he sets up photographic challenges for himself, which he then attempts to solve.

My only interest in photographing is photography.


Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA

Upcoming at MoMA: a retrospective of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs โ€” and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.

After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.


The fake colors of Hubble photography

Those wildly colorful Hubble telescope photos…how do they get them to look like that?

The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren’t always what we’d see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object’s detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.

See also this informative Reddit thread.


Color photo of The Beatles in 1957

The Beatles in 1957

Well, not so much The Beatles as The Quarrymen, a band formed by John Lennon and some schoolmates that was the precursor to The Beatles. (via @brainpicker)


On the moon without being on the moon

Vincent Fournier has made a series of photos of astronauts training and of the interiors of the Chinese, Russian and US space agencies.

Vincent Fournier

Looks alien, doesn’t it?


American Pixels

American Pixels

American Pixels is a project by Joerg Colberg that uses jpeg compression algorithms to create compelling images. From the technical notes:

ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting. As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real - so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible - ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.


2000 / 2010

Rachel Loshak is posting two photos a day on her A Year in the Day - 2010 blog; one taken in 2000 and one taken in 2010. The juxtaposition, as they say in the art world, is interesting. (via @ironicsans)


The Office intern’s photo blog

Ryan (the intern) from The Office has a photo blog.

Yes, acceptance is a theme of this photo, as well as all my photos; even the photos I take that capture isolationism have a theme of acceptance, a lack of acceptance. It is the ultimate compliment that this photo not only captured my soul, but yours as well.


William S. Burroughs’ stuff

The apartment that American writer William S. Burroughs inhabited while he lived in New York has been preserved since his death in 1997. Photographer Peter Ross took some photos of some of the contents, including a worn pair of shoes, some nunchucks, and a book called Medical Implications of Karate Blows.

Well, I bet I’ll go through half a dozen iPhones in the time it would have taken Burroughs to resole those shoes. That makes me feel greedy, wasteful, and self-indulgent. Maybe I’d be better off keeping the modern world out. Maybe we all would. Let’s all just grab our nunchucks, put on our shoes and hat and walk the streets of Manhattan.


Biosphere 2 in decline

Photographer Noah Sheldon took a series of photos of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. BLDGBLOG has more info.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature โ€” wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings” โ€” and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.


Paris, 1962

Images from Paris cafes and nightlife in 1962, the same week Yves St. Laurent’s runway show vaulted Dior to new heights. Many scenes around Les Halles (which no longer exists as it did then).

From the collection, a photo of some Les Halles butchers enjoying a drink at Au Pied de Cochon:

Au Pied De Cochon 1962

Update: As Wikipedia notes, Saint Laurent’s fabled show took place in 1958; Dior was gone from Dior by ‘62. Not sure whether the caption is wrong or the photos are really from 1958. (thx, alex)