kottke.org posts about photography
Yesterday In Focus featured new work from photographer Camille Seaman: storm clouds in the skies of the Midwest.
Nice cumulonimbus mammatus in #s 4, 14, and 16. And by coincidence, the NY Times Lens blog also featured Seaman’s work yesterday, an earlier project that entailed shooting portraits of icebergs.
I like Seaman’s portraiture approach to things like clouds and icebergs:
“They are like humans in that each one reacts to its environment and its circumstances in its own way,” Camille Seaman, 42, said. “I’ve come across icebergs that were very stalwart and just refused to dissolve or break up. And there were others — massive, massive icebergs — that were like ‘I can’t take it anymore’ and in front of my eyes would just dissolve into the sea. There’s so many unique personalities. There’s a sadness to them.”
I love McLean Fahnestock’s series of modified photos of rocket launches without the rockets:
Fahnestock also did the video of all 135 Space Shuttle launches at once.
Artist Angelica Dass pairs photographs of people with the Pantone colors of their skin colors.
More of the project can be found on her Tumblr. (via designboom)
In an interview with Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh, photographer Edward Burtynsky talks about his use of film and drones, his current big project photographing water, and the challenges of finding ways to photograph the ubiquitous.
I’d say, actually, that I’ve been careful not to frame the work in an activist or political kind of way. That would be too restrictive in terms of how the work can be used in society and how it can be interpreted. I see the work as being a bit like a Rorschach test. If you see an oil field and you see industrial heroism, then perhaps you’re some kind of entrepreneur in the oil business and you’re thinking, “That’s great! That’s money being made there!” But, if you’re somebody from Greenpeace or whatever, you’re going to see it very differently. Humans can really reveal themselves through what they choose to see as the most important or meaningful detail in an image.
Burtynsky is a favorite around these parts.
Zhao Huasen takes photos of people on bicycles and erases the bicycles.
Photographer John Clang is using projected Skype video to make portraits of Singaporean families whose members are scattered around the globe.
In Singapore, it is a common practice for entire families to gather on special occasions for a formal picture, often at a studio, with the resulting image framed and prominently displayed at home. The growing tendency of younger family members to take jobs abroad, however, has left many modern portraits missing a relation or two. So the Singaporean photographer John Clang devised a solution, piggybacking on the video-calling technology that already helps ease the dislocation of separated family members: Skype.
(via @bdeskin)
If you make a series of horrifying photos of little girls dressed like Vegas cocktail waitresses, I will apparently always click through. First it was Susan Anderson’s High Glitz, a series of child beauty pageant contestants.
And then the last issue of the NY Times Magazine had a series of photos by Kenneth O Halloran of contestants at the World Irish Dancing Championships.
All I can think of when I see those spray tans is Homer’s makeup gun.
Why does McDonald’s food look so much better in the ads than at the restaurant? Watch as the director of marketing for McDonald’s Canada buys a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s and compares that to a burger prepared by a food stylist and retouched in post by an image editor.
Short answer: the burger at the restaurant is optimized for eating and the photo burger is optimized for looking delicious. (via ★interesting)
I’ve seen several versions of the iconic Tank Man photo but here’s a little-known wider view that shows just how many tanks the guy was holding up. Larger version here. There is also, amazingly, video of the incident:
You’ll note at the end that the man is hustled off by a group of people. See also the Tank Man of Tiananmen (via @polarben)
Update: There is also this view of Tank Man, taken from the ground level:
You can see how long he was standing there waiting for the arrival of the tanks.
One of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War is Nick Ut’s photo of a naked Kim Phuc running from her just-napalmed village.
I’ve seen that photo hundreds of times but I had no idea that video footage of the event also exists. In this clip shot by Alan Downes and Le Phuc Dinh, you see the napalm dropped on the village and then a bunch of people, Phuc among them, come running down the road. [Warning, this footage is graphic…severe burns and burnt skin hanging off of young children.]
Wow. Ut won the Pulitzer for the photo but Phuc took much longer to make her peace with the image.
The photo was famous, but Phuc largely remained unknown except to those living in her tiny village near the Cambodian border. Ut and a few other journalists sometimes visited her, but that stopped after northern communist forces seized control of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, ending the war.
Life under the new regime became tough. Medical treatment and painkillers were expensive and hard to find for the teenager, who still suffered extreme headaches and pain.
She worked hard and was accepted into medical school to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But all that ended once the new communist leaders realized the propaganda value of the “napalm girl” in the photo.
She was forced to quit college and return to her home province, where she was trotted out to meet foreign journalists. The visits were monitored and controlled, her words scripted. She smiled and played her role, but the rage inside began to build and consume her.
“I wanted to escape that picture,” she said. “I got burned by napalm, and I became a victim of war … but growing up then, I became another kind of victim.”
Phuc now lives in Ontario with her husband and has two children.
Since the companies mining the oil from the sands of Alberta wouldn’t provide access to their operations to a reporter, he rented a plane and took a bunch of photos.
As Stewart said, “Better than I thought”.
Cory Poole made this video of the annular solar ecplise yesterday using 700 photographs from a telescope with “a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it.”
Cory says: “The filter only allows light that is created when hydrogen atoms go from the 2nd excited state to the 1st excited state.” Very cool.
Tadao Cern sets people up in front of powerful fans and takes their pictures. Instant fun house:
Many more of Cern’s photos are available on Facebook. (via colossal)
A group photograph of MGM’s stars and starlets under contract, taken for the studio’s 20th anniversary in 1943.
The full-size photo is available at Mlkshk or at Wikipedia for stargazing. Here’s who’s in the photo:
Front Row: James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Lucille Ball, Hedy Lamarr, Katharine Hepburn, Louis B Mayer, Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Susan Peters, Ginny Simms, Lionel Barrymore
Second Row: Harry James, Brian Donlevy, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Pierre Aumont, Lewis Stone, Gene Kelly, Jackie Jenkins
Third Row: Tommy Dorsey, George Murphy, Jean Rogers, James Craig, Donna Reed, Van Johnson, Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Ruth Hussey, Marjorie Main, Robert Benchley
Fourth Row: Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Keenan Wynn, Diana Lewis, Marilyn Maxwell, Esther Williams, Ann Richards, Marta Linden, Lee Bowman, Richard Carlson, Mary Astor
Fifth Row: Blanche Ring, Sara Haden, Fay Holden, Bert Lahr, Frances Gifford, June Allyson, Richard Whorf, Frances Rafferty, Spring Byington, Connie Gilchrist, Gladys Cooper
Sixth Row:
Ben Blue, Chill Wills, Keye Luke, Barry Nelson, Desi Arnaz, Henry O’Neill, Bob Crosby, Rags Ragland
Not sure if these are straight photos or digital composites or whatever, but I like the images from Paul Octavious’ Puffin Clouds series.
(via @itscolossal)
A collection of vintage mugshots from the 1920s. Crime used to be a lot more civilized.
(thx, david)
Yesterday I linked to the massive trove of photos recently put online by the NYC Department of Records. Alan Taylor from In Focus went through a large chunk of the archive and pulled out some real gems. Great stuff.
The New York City Department of Records has put a huge portion of the Municipal Archive’s collection of photos online, more than 870,000 in all. The server is overwhelmed at times due to heavy usage, the searching/browsing interface is not what you’d call cutting edge, and many of the photos are available in thumbnail size only, but this is still an incredible resource.
Painters on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1914:
The unfinished Manhattan Bridge in 1908:
A pair of men lay dead in an elevator shaft after a failed robbery attempt:
Looking east on 42nd Street, circa 1890:
More of these photos can be seen at The Daily Mail. (thx, miro)
Using a digital camera, Mechanical Turk, and a thermal printer, Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera outputs descriptions of photos instead of the photos themselves.
After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still “developing” in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.
This seems like a distant cousin of Unphotographable. (via hacker news)
As Allen Fuqua travels around, he looks for movie locations and attempts to duplicate scenes from them. For instance, here’s Allen and a friend reenacting a scene from Drive:
(thx, stephen)
I was under the impression that not many photographs of the Titanic existed…especially those taken on the ship. But amateur photographer Francis Browne was aboard the Titanic from Southampton to Cobh, Ireland and captured many images of the ship’s interior, exterior, and voyage. The photos were widely known in the aftermath of the sinking but have been little seen since then.
Browne took this as he was boarding the ship:
The infamous deck chairs:
Browne traveled on a first class ticket…this is a view of some passengers on the second class promenade:
This was taken shortly after the ship dropped anchor in Cobh. Browne obviously did not take this photo because he was still aboard the ship…he acquired it from a photography friend after the fact:
And this is one of the last photos taken of Titanic before Bob Ballard and his team found the wreckage in the mid-80s:
These photos will be a big blow to the remaining folks who believe that the Titanic was fictional:
The Collective Snapshot is a photographic series by Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa which blends “together dozens of snapshots to create an abstraction of the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen.” He layers multiple pictures from several angles to create one image familiar and foreign at the same time.
His ‘Reconstructed Works’ aren’t bad either. And, oh, look at these carousels. (via My Modern Met)
If you’re an aspiring photographer, here are ten photographers that you should ignore, presumably so that you can develop your own voice and style instead.
Robert Frank was a one-man revolution. Before him pictures for the most part were pretty and clean and pre-visualized, and shot from a tripod. Frank came along and tore a new A-hole in that aesthetic. Fortunately he had something to replace it with: a strong personal vision. Most young photographers who follow in his footsteps don’t. They mistake grain, guts, and verve with substance. Sorry folks, but hitting three out of four doesn’t count. I know it took cajones to shoot that cowboy bar at 1 am pushing your film to 3200, but that doesn’t keep your photo from being boring. Time to shoot something you care about, and don’t try to convince me it’s flags or the underclass.
This follows a list of “harmful” novels for aspiring writers.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Mark Twain made the American vernacular a literary language; Salinger tried to do the same for the American adolescent whine. We who read Catcher as teenagers in the 1950s and ’60s at once considered ourselves free to babble on paper just the way we did over coffee and cigarettes. It was certainly easier than learning how to write a straightforward sentence expressing something more than teen angst.
I wonder if there might be a similar list for designers or artists?
For her project My Pie Town, Debbie Grossman modified Depression-era photos to depict all-female families.
Joan Myers’ biography of Doris Caudill (Doris is in many of the pictures), Pie Town Woman, describes her husband, Faro, as less than helpful on the homestead. I had downloaded a portrait of Doris and Faro from the Library of Congress website, and because it was so high-resolution, it occurred to me that I had enough pixels to work with that I could alter the image. I removed Faro, and I loved the opportunity to look at Doris on her own and imagine a different life for her. I thought it would be fun to remake the whole town in a way that reflected my own family, and I imagined a Pie Town filled with women.
The main reason for doing so was to give us the unusual experience of getting to see a contemporary idea of family (female married couples as parents, for example) as if it were historical. But I am also very interested in using Photoshop to create imaginary or impossible images-this is something I have done in other work as well.
(via @riondotnu)
This is the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria, built in 1981 in honor of Communism. After Bulgaria turned away from Communism in 1989, it fell to ruin.
I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria. Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting ‘Bulgaria from the Air’. Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.
The Holga is a cheap toy camera with a simple lens that takes pictures prized by some for their happy accidents (light leaks, distortions, etc.). The Holga D is a concept that translates the Holga experience to digital.
From the front it may look like just another digital camera, may be a bit minimal, but the backside is surprising, as it does not have a display!
Even though Holga D is a digital camera, in order to achieve its simplicity, it reduces the feature set to absolute minimum.
Even the display is not there! So your photographs remain mysterious until you download the images. This makes the experience quite similar to the good old film based cameras.
(via buzzfeed fwd)
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