The Williamsburg Bridge Riders
Adam DiCarlo takes photos of commuters (mostly bikers) as they exit the Williamsburg Bridge bike path on the Manhattan side and posts them to his Instagram account. (via @BAMstutz)
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kottke.org posts about photography
Astronomy Photographer of the Year for 2024
Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. You can also check out some of the shortlist entries and runners-up in each category (Moon, Sun, etc.)
Photos above by (from top to bottom): Tom Williams, Peter Ward, Ryan Imperio, and Tom Rae.
Irving Penn: Small Trades
In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.
Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.
Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.
Penn said of the project:
Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist.
A possible companion to Penn’s photographs: Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. (Fun fact: Terkel and his editor got the idea for Working from Richard Scarry’s children’s book, What Do People Do All Day?)
Vivian Maier: Unseen Work
The first major US retrospective of Vivian Maier’s photography is currently on display at Fotografiska New York through Sept 29. Maier was a street photographer whose work was discovered in 2007 and is now recognized “alongside the greatest masters of the twentieth century”.
You can see much more of Maier’s work on this website of her work.
The Disciples
For his project The Disciples, photographer James Mollison took photo montages of fans outside of music concerts. See if you can guess which concerts these groups of fans attended:
Here’s Mollison on the project:
Over three years I photographed fans outside different concerts. I am fascinated by the different tribes of people that attend them, and how people emulate celebrity to form their identity.
As I photographed the project I began to see how the concerts became events for people to come together with surrogate ‘families’, a chance to relive their youth or try and be part of a scene that happened before they were born.
Fascinating! From top to bottom: Lady Gaga, Merle Haggard, 50 Cent, The Casualties, and Tori Amos. Here’s a video featuring some of the photos accompanied by music from the corresponding artists:
Mollison published a book featuring the photos; a signed copy is available from his website.
Baltic Ice
Oh, I really like this particular image from Bernhard Lang’s series of aerial photographs of sea ice in the Baltic (part one, part two). (via colossal)
Riding With the Street Demon
Photographer Ryan Weideman worked as a NYC taxi driver for 35 years (1981-2016) and photographed his passengers while on the job.
Huck did a profile of Weideman and his work several years ago.
“I drove a Checker cab but I usually got the wrecks because I only drove three or four nights a week,” he remembers wistfully. “I spent the rest of the time in my darkroom, printing and developing film.”
The quintessential New York cabbie, with a wisecracking mouth and lead foot on the gas pedal, Weideman carefully covered the first three letters of his license so that only the letters ‘DEMAN’ were visible. When passengers entered the cab, he would proudly announce, “You’re riding with the Street Demon.”
“I was on the edge of my seat most of the time because I was caught up in the rush of the ride,” he recalls. Although the 12-hour shifts were grueling, he never drank coffee or took drugs.
“It was all the adrenalin that flowed from my driving style. I enjoyed the thrill of driving and the sense of competitiveness. Some people really loved it; others were scared and wanted out so I would have to drop them off. Once in a while I would have a passenger that really enjoyed it. One guy jumped out of the cab and said, ‘My God, that was a religious experience!’”
A Massive Trove of Aerial Photos of Glaciers
Over at Beautiful Public Data, Jon Keegan shares some details about two huge collections of aerial photos of glaciers.
As scientists study the effects of global warming, one of the most visible and alarming indicators is the rapid shrinking of glaciers. Government scientists have been documenting the size, shape, and movement of glaciers since the 1950s employing techniques ranging from direct field observations to aerial photography.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has one of the largest collections of aerial glacier photographs. Over 40 years, the USGS’ North American Glacier Aerial Photography (NAGAP) project captured thousands of striking high-resolution photos of glaciers and their surroundings.
From 1960 to 1983, self-taught glaciologist Austin Post used a 63-pound World War II-era Fairchild K-17 aerial reconnaissance camera to shoot over 100,000 glacier photos in the western US and Alaska. One of the bush pilots Post teamed up with was William R. Fairchild, who flew a Beech 18 twin engine airplane equipped with five K-17 cameras-one mounted on the nose, two in the belly of the plane, and one on each side.
The 2024 Drone Photos Awards
The nominees for the 2024 Drone Photos Awards have been announced; here are a few that caught my eye:
Photos by (from top to bottom) Sheng Jiang, Roberto Hernandez, Silke Hullmann, and Hüseyin Karahan.
“The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age”
A group of photographers, editors, and curators recently convened to choose a list of “the 25 most significant photographs since 1955”. Choosing just 25 photos to represent 70 years of the richest visual era in human history is just an impossible task, so there’s bound to be some grousing about individual choices. (I love Beyoncé but really?) But the selection is fascinating, includes a few images I’d never seen before, and the accompanying discussion is worth reading.
I would love to see a process that asks for nominations across a
larger & broader range of folks and then whittle it down through ranked choice voting or pairwise ranking. Paging The Pudding…
“Planet of the Apes” Goes to a 70s Mall
From Life magazine and photographer Ralph Crane, a gallery of outtakes from the filming of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in 1972.
The Century City mall, selected for its futuristic appearance, was a primary battleground in the plot. LIFE staff photographer Ralph Crane came to the set and took pictures of the costumed actors in the mall, trying on shoes and making eyes at the lingerie store display, as well as eating in the mess hall with their masks half off. The pictures make for easy laughs, capturing the kind of shenanigans that help liven up a fourth Apes film in as many years.
(via daniel benneworth–gray)
The Sky Was Purple and Red and Yellow and On Fire
There was a big solar storm this weekend and photos of the aurora borealis took over social media; it was delightful. For round-ups, check out the NY Times, the Guardian, @itsjackcohen, PBS NewsHour, Spaceweather.com, Forbes, and MSN.
The photos above are by Albert Dros and Sean O’ Riordan (prints here). O’ Riordan took his shot in Tasmania and actually had to tone it down for publication:
When the clouds are glowing red you know something is off the charts, I tried my best to desaturate this and make it look some bit like a photo and not a science fiction scene!
Fantastical Portraits of Cate Blanchett
I love these (haunting? are they haunting?) photos of Cate Blanchett taken by Jack Davison for this 2022 profile in the NY Times Magazine.
When the magazine asked the photographer Jack Davison to create the art for this story, he took inspiration from Cate Blanchett’s legendary gift at transforming herself on film. Over the course of a four-hour shoot, across nine different setups, Davison made the fantastical, perspective-bending portraits that appear here.
(via @gray)
An Update on the Beloved Broccoli Tree
Do you remember the Broccoli Tree? Photographer Patrik Svedberg photographed a Swedish tree that resembled a broccoli floret over a number of years, posted the results to Instagram, and made the tree internet famous. Then some asshole vandal sawed through the branches of the tree and it had to be chopped down. John Green eulogized the Broccoli Tree in a video:
To share something is to risk losing it, especially in a world where sharing occurs at tremendous scale and where everyone seems to want to be noticed, even if only for cutting down a beloved tree.
Well, the stump of the tree was left in the hopes that it would grow again and I’m pleased to say that it has — here’s a photo from three years ago:
You can even see it on Google Maps. I’m glad the tree is growing again but wish the destruction hadn’t happened in the first place.
Helsinki Bus Station Theory of Creativity
Several years ago in the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman wrote a piece called This column will change your life: Helsinki Bus Station Theory. It’s about how difficult it can be as a creative person to find your way to making work that feels like it’s uniquely yours.
There are two dozen platforms, Minkkinen explains, from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter, for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. “Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction — maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes — and set off. Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. “You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.” Penn’s bus, it turns out, was on the same route. Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, “you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform”. Three years later, something similar happens. “This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.” What’s the answer? “It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”
(via phil gyford)
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