Photographer’s venn
A diagram that shows the overlap of street photography, fine art photography, and photojournalism.
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kottke.org posts about photography
Vivian Maier, recently discovered street photographer
Vivian Maier was a street photographer from the 1950s-70s in Chicago whose extensive body of work (40,000 negatives) was recently discovered at an auction. This blog is presenting that work to the public for (I think) the first time.
(thx, frank)
Update: Blake Andrews discusses some other photographers who came late to the public eye.
The other X factor in recognition is a curatorial champion. Bellocq had Friedlander. Atget had Abbot. Disfarmer had Miller. Without their discoverers, these photographers might still be anonymous. For Maier it’s been John Maloof. An interesting mental experiment is to wonder what would’ve happened had Maier posted her own photos on a blog while still alive. Would they have the same impact? Or would they just be another series of old images from some self-promoting has-been?
Glaciers from space
Wired has a nice look at some glaciers as seen from space.
From the ground, glaciers can look like the Moon. And I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t tell you that: It’s very cold. In spaaaace.
Popes, they don’t make ‘em like they used to
Used to be, back in my day, that new Popes were elected by a conclave of cardinals holed up in the Sistine Chapel burning unsuccessful ballots with a chemical compound that produces black smoke until a two-thirds majority is achieved, at which point the ballots are pierced with a needle and thread and burned, producing white smoke that the assembled masses take as a sign that the cardinals have chosen, and the Pope-elect is asked if he wants to be the Pope and, if so, what his Pope-name will be and then he chooses his papal garments from a selection of small, medium, and large — *not* tall, grande, and venti as you might expect, that being Italy and all — dons a ring, and is announced to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square.
This new way seems much simpler.
Cool cats
Francis Wolff was an executive at Blue Note Records who also took tens of thousands of photos of the label’s musicians.
A selection of Wolff’s photos are available here and here.
Update: More photos.
From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome)
Wow. With PhotoSketch, you just draw a sketch, label each item, like so:
and then the system goes out, finds photos that match the sketched items and their labels, and automatically pastes it all together into one composite image:
The site is down right now but the paper is available for download and this video gives you a taste of how it works:
Again, wow. (via migurski)
Update: I’ve seen many references to Photosketch saying that it has to be fake (here’s a sampling). But it’s pretty obviously real. For one thing, here’s the source code; try it out (Windows only). It was presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009; here’s the listing of papers presented. The authors all have web pages on university sites and have published work using similar techniques and technology (Ping Tan and Ariel Shamir for example). And is what it does really that unbelievable? At the most basic level Photosketch is just find me a man that’s sorta shaped like this, a dog that looks like this, and paste them together with a background that looks like this. That the results are so impressive (especially for a demo) is a testament to the team’s execution and attention to the small details. Even if it turns out to be an elaborate hoax, I have no doubt that someone could actually build a working version of Photosketch…I mean, look at TinEye and Photosynth.
The most difficult photographs in nature
Outside magazine recently asked a handful of nature photographers to discuss the most difficult shots they ever captured. Philipp Engelhorn selected a photograph taken on the frozen tundra of China:
Winters in northern Xinjiang, China, rival those in Siberia: Forty below zero is normal. We’d gone in the fall to find an eagle hunter and make a handshake deal to follow him. But when we actually showed up two months later, he told us he never expected us to return and had no time for us. So we did the worst thing ever and set out by horse-drawn sleigh across the frozen countryside to find an eagle hunter.
The images that accompany the article are incredible and make most day jobs look like an all-day pancake buffet.
The oldest living things in the world, photographed
Rachel Sussman has travelled the world to take photographs of the oldest living things in the world. This is actinobacteria from Siberia; it’s 400,000 years old.
There’s a map and a progress blog and an unassociated Wikipedia entry that tells of the ocean-going species Turritopsis nutricula:
The Hydrozoan species Turritopsis nutricula is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again. This means that there may be no natural limit to its life span.
Who wants to bet that Ray Kurzweil drinks a Turritopsis nutricula smoothie every morning? (via @bobulate)
A little Grace Kelly
I love this shot of a woman in Milan from the Sartorialist.
As Schuman notes, there’s a sense of style here that tons of expensive flashy clothes can’t compete with.
Update: On the other hand, this sort of thing has its charms.
Early photorealism
At the end of the 19th century, Henry Harrison created color photographs by painting them on-site.
What do Stormtroopers do on their day off?
They play video games, dance, fish, hang out with Wall-E, and all kinds of other stuff. I can’t decide which is my favorite…this one, this one, or this one? No, it’s gotta be this one:
(via @ettagirl)
Is cropping a photo lying?
David Hume Kennerly took a photo of Dick Cheney and his family cooking a meal. Cheney is in the foreground on the right side of the frame, cutting some meat while some other family members chat and bustle in the background. Newsweek used the photo in their magazine, only they cropped out the family and just showed the former VP stabbing a bloody piece of meat with a knife to illustrate a Cheney quote about CIA interrogation methods. Kennerly cried foul.
The meat on the cutting board wasn’t the only thing butchered. In fact, Newsweek chose to crop out two-thirds of the original photograph, which showed Mrs. Cheney, both of their daughters, and one of their grandchildren, who were also in the kitchen, getting ready for a simple family dinner.
However, Newsweek’s objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.
This is hardly photo fakery. Crops aren’t lies. Full-frame photos aren’t the truth. Kennerley himself could have easily taken that exact picture in the moment. A spokesman for Newsweek defended the magazine’s action:
Yes, the picture has been cropped, an accepted practice of photographers, editors and designers since the invention of the medium. We cropped the photograph using editorial judgment to show the most interesting part of it. Is it a picture of the former vice president cutting meat? Yes, it is. Has it been altered? No. Did we use the image to make an editorial point — in this case, about the former vice president’s red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values? Yes, we did.
Given Cheney’s reputation, the cropped photo of him is not an outlandish or biased depiction of the man…in fact, it’s a pretty good visual metaphor of the former VP. If there’s one thing that both Cheney’s supporters and detractors can agree on, it’s that he’s a “red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated [defender] of his views and values”.
I wonder what Errol Morris and Ricky Jay would make of this?
Update: Or maybe it is. (thx, frank)
The dashing young men of fashion (and Dumb Donald)
Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil Blog caught the lineup of models before they walked the runway for Thom Browne.
This photo alone could be the springboard for an entire novel.
Captive electricity
Dazzling work by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.
See also Peter Miller’s Polariod experiments.
Update: Robert Buelteman uses electricity to take photos of flowers.
Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners
The Royal Observatory has announced the winners of its Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest.
I had no idea that images this sharp and detailed could be taken with non-pro ground telescopes…particularly these shots of the Horsehead Nebula and the surface of the Moon. More winners listed here.
Update: Jonathan Crowe notes that the gear used to take these photos isn’t cheap.
The winner’s photo of the Horsehead Nebula (mpastro2001 also had a second photo in the top five) used a 12 1/2” Ritchey-Chretien telescope ($21,500) and an SBIG STL11000 camera ($7,195 and up) with an AO-L adaptive optics accessory ($1,795) on a Paramount ME mount ($14,500). Total cost for just the equipment mentioned here: $44,990.
Early color photography
The color photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who plied his trade in Russia in the early 1900s, is making the rounds online again. It’s always worth a look. Prokudin-Gorskii made color photographs using a clever filtering system years before color photography would be widely available. As a result, his work goes on the list of things that seem contemporary but really aren’t.
As Mike notes, I first linked to Prokudin-Gorskii’s work more than 8 years ago (!!).
Update: Clayton James Cubitt reminded me that Prokudin-Gorskii took a color portrait of Leo Tolstoy in 1908. (thx, clayton)
MJ tshirts are the new Obama tshirt
A collection of Michael Jackson tribute shirts worn to the recent Spike Lee-hosted birthday party for Jackson.
Beach parkour in Kazakhstan
My pal Mouser is in Kazakhstan and took a bunch of photos of kids doing parkour on the beach. This shot is my favorite.
Will parkour eventually join soccer as one of the world’s most egalitarian sports? You don’t even need a homemade ball to play, just stuff to jump over, through, and off. The whole world’s a course.
Always on cameras
Adam Lisagor notices that the iPhone 3GS camera might always be buffering images so that when you press that shutter button, you get the photo that you wanted, not the one delayed by slow software or a slow shutter. Adam’s observation gives me the opportunity to trot out one of my recent favorite informational factoids about the super high-speed cameras used to capture jumping great white sharks:
In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering…that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.
Google Street View as documentary photography
An assessment: what sort of photographer is the Google Street View car?
Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality — as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.
Models with no makeup
Tired of retouched women in magazines looking like “objects from Mars”, photographer Peter Lindbergh captured eight models without makeup or excessive retouching for Harper’s Bazaar’s September issue. (via fashionologie)
Men at their most masculine
The Morning News has an interview with Chad States about his series of photographs of Men at Their Most Masculine. Some of the photos are NSFW.
I found all my subjects through Craigslist. I began by asking the question “Are you masculine?” in the heading. In the body of the posting I talked briefly about the project. Much to the effect of: “I am doing a photography project on masculinity. If you identify as being masculine, please get back to me.”
Masculinity seems to involve a lot of shirtlessness (and pantslessness). This one is kind of amazing.
“I am masculine because I abandon women after taking their love. Because when you study Freud, you don’t let him study you. Because I study philosophy, not literature.”
More of States’ masculinity photos can be found on his web site.
The mighty flat mountains
I love JK Keller’s Tatamount project.
Photographs of mountains are computationally altered to flatten the mountain’s elevations, while an ocean horizon is altered to mimic the mountain’s original topography.
In the comments, he mentions that the effect is done with a combination of JavaScript and Photoshop…which I didn’t even know was a thing. (via today and tomorrow)
Hiroshima, 64 years ago
In remembrance of the mass destruction of life and property due to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 64 years ago today, The Big Picture presents a typically excellent selection of photos.
Update: From Design Observer about a year ago, Hiroshima, The Lost Photographs.
Balloons gather
Man and nature conspire to create something that looks straight out of a Pixar film.
Worth viewing large. (via flickr blog)
Our three Suns
In early July, a photographer took a picture of what appears to be three Suns rising over Gdansk Bay in Poland.
The photographer insists that the effect was not created by the camera and was visible to the naked eye. The early consensus in the forums is that the photo was taken through a double-paned window.
The face of child beauty pageants
High Glitz is Susan Anderson’s portrait series depicting “the extravagant world of child beauty pageants”.
Hours of preparation are spent on each child’s appearance, and her camera records it all in graphic detail. Children’s pageants are a fascinating subculture, but more than anything they represent a strange microcosm of America itself. Our own values of beauty, success and glamour reflected in the dreams of thousands of young girls…
Sweet Jesus, I’m gonna have some nightmares tonight. Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me, can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me… (via conscientious)
Update: Colby Katz has done a similar project. (thx, chris)
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