sundance

Why all articles about sex use a photo of feet sticking out from the covers

While doing a little internet research, our intern Alyssa came across this article from the Telegraph UK entitled “Average Man Has 9 Sexual Partners in Lifetime, Women Have 4” accompanied by a photo like one of those above. Next to the link she sent, Alyssa wrote: “Random Side Note: Why do they always use photos of feet sticking out of a bed for these sex stories? Who has sex with cold feet like that? Doesn’t it make anyone else feel comfortable staring at these random people’s feet? Seriously!” It’s a legitimate (and funny) question.

Confessions of a serial restaurant dater

“Do you need help?” My date asked.

I shook my head. “No, I’m good – I do it all the time,” I answered brightly. I leaned in closer, examining my target carefully as I adjusted the white balance on my camera. Holding my cell phone light in one hand and my camera in the other, I zoomed in on the shrimp-topped squid ink pasta noodles and carefully snapped my first shot. And then a second. And then another from a different angle. Finally, after several more shots, I set my camera down next to my wine glass and looked up with a smile.

Erik Kessels’ 24 hours of Flickr

As part of its 10th anniversary celebration Foam, a photography museum in Amsterdam, is hosting “What’s Next? The Future of the Photography Museum” an exhibition that investigates the direction of the physicality of photography in public spaces (as opposed to viewing it online). I’m especially impressed with Erik Kessels’ contribution to the exhibit, which tackles the idea of “photography in abundance,” and which (as you can see pictured above) might give a neat freak a heart attack. For his installation, Kessels printed out every single image posted on Flickr in a 24-hour period and then randomly distributed the million+ images throughout the museum space for a completely visually arresting experience (except for the person who has to clean all this up)…

“52 bunches of flowers I bought myself”

Julia Schauenburg’s photo series “52 bunches of flowers I bought myself” is one of the saddest art projects I’ve ever seen. This German-born, Australian-based photographer bought flowers for herself each week for an entire year and photographed them as they wilted and died. This project reminds me of something Liz Lemon might do if she was an artist instead of a lead writer for a fictional TV show. You can purchase these photos as a limited edition postcard set if you feel like sending your depressing thoughts around or, as an antidote, I recommend this photograph of a flower that might be the most joyous ever.

Otherworldly light paintings, sans digital manipulation

Over the past few years, with the widespread growth of both digital cameras and the blogosphere, there’s been a rising trend among amateur and professional photographers experimenting with “light paintings” or rather, photographs in which a slow shutter speed captures a light source that is moved to create illuminated shapes and effects. Last year, I blogged here about Freddie Wong, an insanely popular YouTube filmmaker (his channel have over 2.4 million subscribers), who shot a crazy action sequence using this light painting technique…

Working Nikon camera aka best Halloween costume ever

Making of the Camera Costume from Tyler Card on Vimeo.

Michigan-based photographer Tyler Card took his craft to the next (and very literal) level with a Halloween costume that should be submitted to Make’s Halloween costume contest. With the help of Adam Barr, Tyler built this life-size costume of a Nikon D3 DSLR camera, which is impressive in and of itself, but what makes it mind-blowing is that it’s a fully functional, working camera with a “LCD display, built-in flash, and shutter-release button.”

Best of Kickstarter, 10/17

We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup.

FILM

Last Bohemia: Those who saw last year’s documentary on New York Times style photographer Bill Cunningham will remember the artist community living in lofts on top of Carnegie Hall, all of whom were evicted (Cunningham included) by the end of the film. A new documentary, LAST BOHEMIA, directed by Josef Astor – himself a former tenant of the Carnegie lofts – aims to document the community of actors, artists, dancers and musicians that were forced from their homes.

The uncanny world of Philipp Igumnov

I want to highlight Russian artist Philipp Igumnov and his intriguing collection of collages. His dream-like landscapes are oddly familiar; He takes an image as common as a family posing in a field and imbues it with a certain uncanny quality. My favorite is the one pictured above of a child leaping out of the back of a C-130 transport plane. It captures what it feels like to be a child joyously jumping into a pool, but Igumnov ups the stakes by launching the kid out the back of a plane.

Visiting North Korea with a Polaroid

I have to admit the novelty of seeing photos snapped by Western photographers visiting North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated locales, has worn off. I would argue that some photographers now almost fetishize the society’s strict, barren and guarded nature. All those visits are tightly controlled by the state and its minders who restrict not only where the photographers can go, see, and who they talk to, but also the specific angle at which they take a photo. If taking a photo of Kim Jong Il, for example, you must do so standing directly in front of him.

But Reuters photographer Carlos Barria traveled to North Korea and broke this mold…

Men-ups!

We once did a photo shoot for The Sun, the super trashy but widely popular UK newspaper (you know, the one with the “Page 3 girl”). We were promoting the British edition of our book, The Big Bang. We were young and naive, the photographer was old and pushy, and as he gradually encouraged us to get into sillier and sillier poses, our publicist was there pressing us on. We felt like Coco in the original “Fame.” Don’t get us wrong: we were dressed. But at one point we reluctantly ended up on a bed with one of us holding the other’s bare leg straight up in the air like a lightening rod. It was not what we’d consider sexy, feminine, or us. Fortunately, our inner horror must have radiated out of every pore, because they ultimately ran the article without the pics. (There was a God that day.)

Cirque du Soleil performers: before-and-after

Los Angeles Times photographer Jay L. Clendenin took these portraits of the talented performers in the new LA-based Cirque du Soleil show “Iris,” before and after their make-up and costume transformations (like Caroline Lauzon, pictured above). There’s something so consistently fascinating about before-and-after photograph (which is probably why it’s a staple in the direct marketers’ tool bag, as in all those weight loss, anti-acne and hair loss infomercials). While we understand that there’s a technical explanation for how the transformation took place, we’re still always amazed at the makeover. On a slight tangent, but related to hair loss, one of my favorite jokes on this topic was delivered by comic Sheng Wang: “I’m a positive person. To me going bald isn’t about hair loss. It’s about FACE GAIN. It’s exciting.”

Famous photographs with Instagram filters

In a fusion of the old and new, analog and digital, Mastergram is a relatively new Tumblr that takes iconic photographs and applies filters from the popular iPhone social app, Instagram. There’s an irony in this exercise, which I find practically blasphemous, because many of the Instagram filters attempt to mimic a pre-digital quality and add a false sense of depth and artistry to often prosaic photos. I was pleased though to see on the site that my all-time favorite photographer Weegee is included. As I previously wrote here, I consider Weegee to be “the godfather of the 21st-century urban blogger.”

How to dork out at your wedding without losing your cool

These days it seems like there are more “unique” weddings than there are traditional ones — nobody wants to get married like their parents did anymore. And thanks to the Internets, those of us who are less creative can take inspiration from others and steal the best ideas — or just laugh at them in a gently condescending manner. (Like the insta-viral wedding entrance dance routines that you can’t decide whether to love or hate.) But here’s a set of actually unique wedding photos that we just plain love – because they’re funny and dorky yet also artsy and beautiful (and how awesome is it that the bride gets to carry the shovel and deal the fatal blow?). We can just imagine this couple totally dorking out together over their shared zombie obsession. And what’s more romantic than that? Here are some of our favorites (you can see more here).

Woody Allen having fun at The Met

I absolutely love this photograph taken of Woody Allen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Ruth Orkin in 1963 for so many reasons. How do I love thee? Let me blog the ways.

A picture tells a thousand puns

As a lover of puns (an unfortunate quality of mine for my pun-hating friends), I love this entry at Lenscratch, which compiled this ode to puns, intentional and otherwise, snapped by various photographers with a sense of humor. I especially like the 50 Cent image (above), taken “on the mean streets of Portland by Neil DaCosta. The painting elevates it to the realm of “art,” but it does remind me a lot of the “sleeveface” phenomenon a while ago, where people photographed themselves holding record cover sleeves in a similar manner.

Ulric Collette’s “Genetic Portraits” fuse family members’ faces

Genetics are some kind of crazy, aren’t they? Somehow, filtered through infinite chains of protein codons, I wound up with my mom’s eyes and my dad’s stubbornly straight hair, a strong resemblance to either parent obscured by vague similarities to both. In his new photo series, “Genetic Portraits”, Quebecois photographer, Ulric Collette, elucidates the jumbled likenesses – both obvious and subtle – between family members by splitting their faces and digitally fusing them together. Occasionally, it seems as if he’s fashioned entirely new relatives, Frankenstein-style, in the process.

Butt up, legs out: the photographs of Guy Bourdin

See more sexy after the jump.

Guy Bourdin (1928-91) is one of those rare fashion photographers who straddled the line between art and commerce, ultimately leaving his mark in both worlds. Bourdin got an unusual start, receiving his first formal photographic training while serving in the military in Senegal in the late 40s. A few years later, when he came back to Paris, his photographs were exhibited in a show for which Man Ray wrote the catalogue’s introduction – a helluva start for a newbie. He was quickly whisked away to French Vogue, where his love of Man Ray’s surrealism made a marked impact on his fashion editorials.

Weekly Kickstarter Picks, 8/15/11

We’re starting off the week with our second batch of donation-worthy Kickstarter projects. What’s this all about, you ask? Well, it seems like everyone is pitching their idea to Kickstarter. We think that’s great, but with great power comes great responsibility, and while the 23-person Kickstarter team does their best to filter out the winning projects from the thousands and thousands of proposals they receive, there are still literally tens of thousands of new projects that launch each week. That’s a lot of ways to spend your hard-earned five bucks. Too many ways, actually. How can one person sort through it all? Relax, we’ll do it all for you, starting right now with this week’s Kickstarter Picks.

Ezra Shaw’s unique perspective on divers

This photo series, published in The Wall Street Journal and snapped by Getty Images photographer Ezra Shaw at the 14th FINA World Championships, would be smack in the middle of a Venn diagram charting fans of sports, photography, and “LOLs.” Shaw pointed his lens at the these graceful divers and presented viewers with a slightly different perspective on the sport with a hilarious (unintentional at least from the athletes’ perspective) result. Of course we admire their talents and poise as they slip into the water, like (bad analogy alert) a knife through butter, but I dare you to look at these photographs of them underwater and not laugh.

“The New York Times Magazine Photographs” goes beyond celebrity

Cropped from the original

Celebrity portraiture can seem like an easy way for a photographer to make a buck, and maybe that’s what makes it so challenging – to do something new and exciting in such well-trodden territory. Kathy Ryan, the director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, is such an avid proponent of the “good” celebrity portrait that she wrote a book on the subject, “The New York Times Magazine Photographs,” a “wonderfully heavy” tome out next month, the result of six years of research poring through 1,700 issues of the magazine.

#BikeNYC photo series

Flickr’s official blog highlighted Dmitry Gudkov’s photo project titled “#BikeNYC” that was inspired by his own personal transformative experience with how he engaged with New York City after he purchased a bicycle. He became curious about his fellow bicyclists and reached out to them, first through Twitter (hence the hashtag origin of the photo series’ name) and began snapping portraits of New Yorkers with their bikes along with an accompanying profile. He explains:

Passport photos and reality

“Passport and Reality” is a photography project by Suren Manvelyan and Biayna Mahari “about how different a person can look in real life and his own passport photo.” The contrast is made all the more striking when you consider that passports often don’t expire for years. Case in point: I don’t think the guy pictured above grew into his features too early (pun totally intended). It’s probably because most of the subjects are smiling in their non-passport photo, but reality seems so much more pleasant. I finally had to renew my passport last year and gladly forked over the money to the US government because it meant I could finally update the photo of me with the buzzed look I thought was a really swell idea back in college.

Exercise makes you ugly, and other important lessons from photographer Sacha Goldberger

French photographer Sacha Goldberger assembled an indoor studio at the Bois de Bologne in Paris, a park two-and-a-half times the size of Central Park, where he stopped joggers mid-workout and asked them do a sprint and then pose for a portrait immediately afterwards. The result? We look wretched when we work out, a fact anyone whose eyes have ever wandered in the gym can attest to. But that wasn’t the only point Goldberger wanted to make. After immortalizing his subjects’ blotchy, red-faced, sweat-soaked visages on film, he asked them to come to his studio the following week, where, using the same lighting, the same pose and similarly-colored clothing he took another portrait.

Wedding photos from New York’s first day of legal gay marriage

Our photographer friend David Jacobs (he took our deceptively flattering bio pic) was hired by Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, to document New York’s first day of legal gay marriage this past Monday at Manhattan’s City Hall. HRC will soon have more on their site, but for now here’s a round-up of the day’s events by their National Field Director, Marty Rouse. And below is our friend Dave’s take on events (he’s not gay, but he’s married and does rock the occasional pink shirt with flare), followed by more of his cool photos of the happy couples.

Caption this photo of a whale shark

Photographer Mauricio Handler snapped this remarkable photograph of a whale shark feeding near Isla Mujeres, Mexico for National Geographic piece on one of the largest swarms of whale sharks ever spotted in 2009. Lucky for the diver in this picture that they only feast on plankton and tiny fish eggs.