Hilarious picture
Not only does this gym have escalators going up to the door, but it’s also open 24 hours a day. I don’t know where it is, but someone should tell me.
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Plastic bag leadership nowhere to be found
When I was in South Africa a few summers ago I was really happy to notice that the stores charged extra for plastic bags. The result: everyone had re-usable cloth/thick plastic bags to carry their shopping with them. Since then I’ve learned that they were just one of the first to start the ball rolling on something most of the world has now taken on, the banning of the disposable bag.
Environmentalist uber-blog Inhabitat has a great article about the move away from throw-away plastic in Africa and I’m just left wondering, outside of San Francisco where is this movement in the United States. Like a lot of environmental movements, we in the States are in a great position to take the helm on this and yet we sit with our heads so firmly stuck in the sand I’m not even sure we can feel the winds of change blowing around us.
The above picture is taken from an awesome contributor-based photography site called the Plastic Bag Gallery. Individual credit goes to Jessica Backhaus from the UK.
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Street Fashion
Number 35 in AskMen.com ‘s Top 49 Men list, Scott Schuman is a man of the people. Or at least as much as someone in the fashion industry can be. Scott has found a way to use his love of photography and his fashion experience to bring the world’s sense of street chic to the masses. His blog, The Sartorialist, is a well of inspiration as to what the cool people actually are wearing and is very much a joy to browse with pictures from Paris, China, Manhattan and more. I highly recommend a visit.
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Thousands pose nude for photo
17 to 18 thousand people turned out in Mexico City the other day to take their kit off and pose for the world’s largest nude photo shoot. The photographer, Spencer Tunick, had previously taken similar pictures in Barcelona with 7,000 people posing. The throng posed in a number of configurations including this one with the entire naked crowd saluting the Mexican flag.
More at the Daily Mail.
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Retro Robots Recorded
It’s a miracle how social networking can lead to such wonderful treasures as those killer robot pictures above. I followed a link trail from one of my Last.fm neighbours and somehow ended up at LeSophie’s Flickr stream. The highlight of the stream was this set featuring retro robot pictures taken with a digital SLR through an old Kodak Dualflex camera viewfinder. That’s why each of these super-sweet robot pictures lies within that retro-looking frame and has a grain to it.
These pictures are so cool that LeSophie ended up turning them into greeting cards for friends. I’ve never wanted to be someone’s friend so much.
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Yahoo!’s Week in Photos
In an awe-inspiring slide show, Yahoo!’s Week in Photos details twelve worldly events each Sunday from the previous week. These eye-candy shots can be viewed with captions to snippet the news event that’s featured or solo. For the more popular ones, there’s an option to purchase a poster and/or a smaller sized printout.
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Photoblog Perfection
Every once in a while you stumble across something so beautiful that your jaw drops and stays ajar. Now imagine having that experience repeatedly as you page photo by photo through a stunning exposition of verdant vistas, stark machinery, luminescent locales, and shadowy cityscapes. Exploring Julien Roumagnac’s variegated adventure through some of the most visually appealing scenes that life has to offer has truly been a joy.
I simply cannot get enough of the above picture, and it will live as my desktop background for a long, long time. Roumagnac utilizes Adobe Photoshop to create some of the effects seen in his photos, but I believe that this adds an interesting layer to the art. The photoblog is well-organized and easy to navigate; visit it at http://www.j-roumagnac.net/
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The real point of the internet
According to Avenue Q, the bawdy Broadway satire of Sesame Street, the internet is for porn. But if you’ve been around long enough in this web-tastic world, you know that the internet is really just an elaborate vehicle for the dissemination of funny pictures. There are the thousands of lolcatz pictures, the overly cute pictures, and now, for some reason published in Russian, the transportation pictures. I’ve put my favorite below, but it’s well-worth looking at all of them, and then e-mailing them to loved ones. There’s nothing people like more than an inbox full of hilarious pictures, especially if it means they miss an important dental appointment because of it.
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Interactive photography exhibit online
The Smithsonian Photography Initiative ‘invites you to explore the world of Smithsonian photography’ by creating sequences of user-tagged images and sharing them with others. Of the hundreds of available photographs to manipulate, order, and play with, I couldn’t find one that wasn’t absolutely beautiful. This site is worth visiting just for the great pictures, but the very interactive way in which the photos are presented makes it even more fun, transforming a traditionally passively-enjoyed art form into something more communicative.
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To find beauty in the hideous
This is street art in it’s truest sense. Tim Meier of Berlin has this to say about his beautiful photo Parking Blog:
Strange but true it became a passion for me to photograph parking lots. I spent quiet some time in these concrete colossi, so I decided to do my diploma work in photography about it as well.
Once again, thanks to Regina over at we make money not art for so many great links.
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Browser based image editing
Jeremy Rue at the Cool Tools blog points out this amazing website that offers multi-functional, useful, and speedy image editing tools, all for free. It’s called Picnik.com and, while still in Beta (what isn’t these days?) is actually very useful. For more about the site, I recommend reading Jeremy’s article at Cool Tools, or you could just go ahead and try it yourself. I was able to do this in no time at all.
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In Katrina's Wake
Absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking, those are the words that come to mind looking through Chris Jordan’s web-preview of his book, In Katrina’s Wake.
The Hurricane Katrina is one of those important events that gets completely ignored by the generation that lived through it only to be memorialised by their less-guilty-feeling children. The reason for the guilt? While we continue to consume at an almost inhuman pace, fight wars all over the world, and thumb our noses at global warming, proof that not all is right sits there in the heart of the United States where the Mississippi meets the Gulf and we’re almost straining ourselves to not look at it.
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Armed in America
I try very hard to avoid just repeating what you can and may read elsewhere but this is something I had to highlight. Photographer Kyle Cassidy has released preview photos from an upcoming book entitled “Armed in America: Portraits of gun owners in their homes.” They are, in a word, stunning. The American fetish for firearms is something I never understood and though I’m probably no closer now than before, these pictures moved me to place myself a little closer to those I’d always feared.
The thing that really surprised me is how very normally-American all these people look. Often pictured with their little children or pets in suburban living rooms, these are no gun nuts. And yet, for a lot of the subjects, toting an assault rifle looks just as natural as a TV remote.
This online exhibition has acted to further solidify my love for portraiture. There’s something so intrinsically human about looking at another person without pretension and in their own milieu. A few weeks ago I blogged about another portrait series that’s also an internet-photography must-see featuring gangsters in New Guinea and militant Palestinians. Check that out here
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This week in photography
Below are links to some of the coolest photography sites I found this week. The first two are along the same vein with the artists (Li Wei and Denis Darzacq) placing people in improbable or impossible positions within the urban landscape:
Li Wei Li Wei Falls to the Hong Kong
The next photo set is truly world class. They are the winners of the annual World Press Photo competition and though they were released last week, I thought there could be some people out there who hadn’t seen them. This photo is of a man in Nigeria rinsing his face just after an oil pipeline explosiong. Brilliant work.
World Press Photo competition winners
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Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau has to have been the most famous and accomplished photographer of the 20th century. For 60 years, the artist brought Paris to the world with such pictures as ‘Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville’ (the Kiss by the Hotel de Ville) and “the musician in the rain.’ Pictured below.
For anyone lucky enough to have seen it, a comprehensive Doisneau exhibit just closed this past Saturday at the Hotel de Ville in Paris. In addition to the more famous photographs (like the ones above), it was wonderful to see the more humorous pictures that seemed to really show the man behind the camera. My personal favorites of the exhibit were a series he took of pedestrians walking by a small gallery and looking in at a female nude. The facial reactions to the painting are priceless and I’ve posted my favorite below.
For more Doisneau photographs you can feel free to use Google Image Search but you’ll get far too many copies of Kiss at the Hotel de Ville than would be good for you. Instead try this website sponsored by Ace murder mystery games.
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The human face of violence
Stephen Dupont and Kristen Ashburn have put together one of the more powerful photography exhibits I have seen in a while. Focusing exclusively on portraits of gang members and suiciced bombers (and their families) the photographers bring a sense of humanity to what all-too-often is reduced to a good guy vs. bad guy dichotomy. To see the whole collection with introduction go to this site. To skip the intro and go straight to a collection of thumbnails, go here.
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