The difficulties of photographing Japan

It’s been more than one month since the 9.0 earthquake hit Japan, and the nuclear implications only seem to grow more harrowing by the day. Photographs documenting the disaster abound, and among the most striking are those by AP photographer David Guttenfelder, who lives in Japan with his family. He was away on an assignment when the earthquake hit but rushed back on the next flight he could get, not only to be with his family but to photograph the wreckage awaiting him at home.

Missing persons: the photography of Luca Zanier

The space that started it all, Communist Party HQ in Paris.

It took just one look at the impressive interior of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Communist Party headquarters for the so-called idea bulb to flash on in photographer Luca Zanier. Zanier, who just happened to be in Paris, decided to take a look inside the stunning building while it was empty. That’s when “the idea started. Immediately.” Spaces like the Communist Party HQ are imbued with meaning because of the building’s purpose, the people who’ve spoken in its halls and the important decisions made there. But what happens when the conference is over, the people go home and a once vibrant room is left empty?

Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet

I love the caption one Tumblr wrote to accompany this picture from a breathtaking Guardian series of NASA satellite images that “reveal the diversity of agricultural patterns as seen from space.” It’ll be your moment of meaningfulness today. As this photograph of a Dubai golf course being reclaimed by the dessert demonstrates: despite or in [...]

Black & WTF?

Every so often a blog surfaces from the mire that is the blogosphere, a blog brilliant in its clarity of voice and its efficacy at conveying the one simple pleasure it was created to purvey. I’m talking about the seemingly effortless genius that is Black and WTF? Created in 2009, Black and WTF? is chock-full of weird and wonderful gems from the eras of black and white photography. The single commonality all these images share is that taken out of context (assuming they had one to begin with) they make absolutely no sense.

Zions, and Mormons, and polygamists, oh my!

There seems to be Mormonism and polygamy in the air lately (at least for us), so we wanted to spread the love to you and you and you and…:

• Escape — Just finished this crazy page-turner of a memoir from Carolyn Jessop, one of the few women to escape The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or FLDS (of Warren Jeffs infamy) with her 8 kids (and 8 is a low number for this radical polygamist sect). She recounts how the cult basically imprisons women as sex/baby-making slaves — you’ll boggle over how something like this could exist in America in the 21st century. Katherine Heigl is slated to make the movie version of the book (which, we hate to admit, we’re morbidly excited about).
  
  

Photographing art audiences

Jessie Wender touches on one of the truisms about art: sometimes the audience can be just as, if not more interesting. For The New Yorker, she highlights a selection of photographs, including one of my favorites picture above (Elliott Erwitt, “57th Street Gallery, New York City, USA,” 1963) that reflects the lens back at the [...]

MyBadParent.com

Feeling bad about accidentally dropping your kid on his head? MyBadParent.com will make you feel better immediately. It’s a collection of kid and parent images (culled from various Internet sites as well as submissions) that you won‘t see in Parenting Magazine, ranging from the choreographed-for-a-laugh to someone-call-Social-Services-immediately. It’s like if FAILblog had a baby — and that baby was still in its infancy: MyBadParent has only been around for a few months; it can’t allow comments yet; it can’t spell very well; and it’s still figuring out how to tell a joke.

Your amazing photo of the day

Another winning find by Kottke from the annals of the Internet: Katherine Hepburn skateboarding.

Saddest dog portraits ever. Ever!

Martin Usborne’s photo essay of dogs left alone in their owners cars is a total heartbreaker for us dog people. You cat lovers can take your callous and cold indifference to another website. Kidding!

51 beautiful pictures of the supermoon

In case you were in a cave and missed it, the moon came closer to earth in its orbit this past Saturday than it had in the past 18 years and gave the night sky a scene reminiscent of a landscape out of a science fiction film or book cover. This occasion sent photographers scrambling [...]

Photo series of reality TV hopefuls

“Reality Wanted” is an ongoing project by former Star Magazine art director and now photographer David Kimelman, who is photo-documenting “a series of portraits of individuals who hope to be cast on a reality television show.” He provides minimal direction to each subject and none with regards to pose or their clothing. As a result, [...]

Steve Davis’ “As American Falls”

From Steve Davis’ series “As American Falls.” Click through for more images.

The New York Times recently interviewed photographer Steve Davis, whose latest project “As American Falls” took him back to his roots in American Falls, Idaho, a town that “seems to be dying a death that is as slow as it is unspectacular.” To hear Davis describe the 4,000-person former small farm-based economy (it’s steadily succumbed to “agribusiness and big-box retailers”), American Falls, with its cheerleaders, high school sports teams and fading hardware stores sounds like a stand-in for the town in LAST PICTURE SHOW. “The movie theatre burned down. The bowling alley burned down. A future coal gasification plant for fertilizer production is seen by many as the town’s best hope,” Davis said. “I felt like I was the only one noticing its collapse.”

Cleaning up after Mardi Gras

(Patrick Semansky) MSNBC’s Photoblog has some morning after Mardi Gras pictures from this year’s event. Captain Obvious made the observation: Dang, that’s a lot of beads! I like how the guy in the photo above apparently didn’t get the last call memo. If you haven’t been to this wonderful city then do so in the [...]

LIFE: Classic Oscar photos

Browse through LIFE’s online archives of “Classic Oscar Photos” the 1970s and the 80s. From 1976 is the above red carpet photo of the always cool Jack Nicholson with Anjelica Huston. Nicholson won Best Actor for ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST that year while proving that one can indeed pull off a beret and [...]

Weegee disguised as an ice cream man

I love this photo of Weegee. It was a revelation when I first came across Weegee (Arthur Fellig) when there was an exhibition of his photography at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery. Although I couldn’t articulate why at the time, I distinctly recall the feeling of: Finally! Art and photography that for some reason [...]

Hundreds of tourist snapshots layered as one

For her intriguing series “Photo Opportunities,” artist Corinne Vionnet culled hundreds of photos from the Internet of tourist snapshots of famous landmarks from around the world and layered them to produce composite pictures of each popular sightseeing location. Although the artist’s curatorial hand influenced the final result of each image, there is still a remarkable [...]

Photo series of refugee boats

German photographer Heiko Schäfer’s photo series “Maritime Incidents” documents refugee boats intercepted off the coasts of Italy. Each stark picture is accompanied by details pertaining to each boat: type, propulsion, circumstance of and intercept location, country of origin, and number of refugees. And yet juxtaposed to these details, the photos themselves describe more and tell [...]

Photos from the very last Kodachrome roll

If veteran photographer Steve McCurry’s name sounds familiar, it may be because he was the man who shot the iconic photograph of the Afghan girl that appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic. That famous photograph was taken on Kodachrome film and when McCurry heard that Kodak was going to discontinue it, he [...]

Faces of people flying

When people fly, they always focus on the vast view out of their small passenger window and often their photographs reflect that. In the limited confines of a commercial airplane filled with dour passengers looking ahead there aren’t many photographic opportunities except for that sunset or cloud formation, which would be brilliant and unique if [...]

Pixar cast reunion for Vanity Fair

To accompany a recent spotlight in Vanity Fair of Pixar, the powerhouse animation studio produced this reunion picture of all alumni of Pixar films. The image was inspired by J. R. Eyerman’s iconic photograph of moviegoers watching a 3D film. Pixar’s Bob Pauley and Guido Quaroni discuss the challenges of composing this picture from getting the tone (“They don’t live in the same world, so we had to achieve this without making our teeth hurt.”) to the technical scale right.

Jonathan Andrews’ “WWII Bunkers”

British photographer Jonathan Andrews is best known for his large, evocative images of cold, deserted landscapes seemingly untouched by man, but his work that’s attracting the most attention now focuses on just the opposite: what man has built and left behind. Trekking through France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Andrews sought out abandoned WII bunkers and photographed them at night, lit eerily by what look like war-era search or emergency lights. The images are pretty frightening. The bunkers act not only as permanent reminders of war, but the buildings themselves are, on their own, an odd amalgam of architecture of the past and future. On the one hand the bunkers are very purpose-driven, minimal concrete blockades built to withstand bombs and gunfire, but they’re also bulky and functional in the same way as the pyramids, or as the Death Star from STAR WARS. So not only does the architecture of the bunkers inadvertently carry the weight of distinct historical (or imaginary) moments, but when seen in Andrews’ frightening light they act symbols of doom, haunting reminders of past misdeeds that live on.

New York Sleeps

Exhibiting currently at London’s Wapping Project Bankside is Christopher Thomas’ photo series of iconic landmarks in New York City devoid of people. The artist spent a few years on this project, which required a lot of early mornings while using a custom-made large format camera.

Mao impersonators

Wired features the photography of Tommaso Bonaventura who traveled to China to capture portraitures of Mao Zedong impersonators, many of whom freelance in “patriotic stage productions” and “work a lively circuit of banquets, holiday celebrations and weddings, at which they deliver famous Mao speeches in his dialect.” What’s interesting (to my western sensibility) is Wired’s [...]

7 minutes with The Sartorialist

This is a thoughtful and beautifully executed (much like his photos) 7 minute documentary and behind the scenes with Scott Schuman aka The Sartorialist. It’s a treat for any fan of his work. I especially liked the moment in the short film when he asked to take a photo of a fashionably dressed woman. You [...]

Photo of Mark Twain holding Tesla light

I love the element of danger and wonder in this photo of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab that was published in a 1895 article titled “Tesla’s Osillator and Other Inventions.”