These astonishing macros of snoozing insects covered in dew were shot by amateur photographer Miroslaw Swietek, between 3am and 4am in a forest near his home in the village of Jaroszow, Poland. Swietek only took up photography two years ago, at 35 years of age. Using a flashlight, he “hunts out the motionless bugs in the darkness before setting up his camera and flash just millimetres from them.” More beautiful images of diamond-like, dewy bugs at MailOnline.
“Nouadhibou means ‘where the jackals get fat.’ It is also where ships go to die.” - Jan Smith
In 2008 photographer Jan Smith went to document the abandoned hulls of ships at Mauritania’s Nouadhibou Bay, the world’s largest ship graveyard. He would be turned away at the border, sleep in a minefield, and be accused of being a spy before he finally convinced them that his purposes were purely artistic. The government of Mauritania is, apparently, not too keen on allowing visitors in to see the collection of over 300 ships; the legacy of decades of corruption during which harbor officials were bribed into letting people simply abandon vessels, thereby allowing the owners to avoid the fees usually associated with discarding a ship.
Smith’s photos are hauntingly beautiful, stark black and white images that appear to be from another world entirely. Well worth sleeping in a minefield.
via Good Magazine
Mister David Graves does many things, but this post is about his gorgeous photography, and about his charity walk across Oregon in support of the Oregon Food Bank. More on that in a moment. In fact, this post is just about two aspects of his photo-repertoire, while there are several. For instance, Graves has taken plenty of photos of beautiful women and forgotten cemeteries, but today I’d rather show off his nuclear landscapes and life-worn faces.
The shot below is titled “They Make Milk Here”.
Arresting, yes? This is one of a series of vertical panoramas, another one of which is below the jump. Uncle Tarkovsky would approve.
Much of Graves’ work explores nature – sometimes coexisting in contrast with civilization, other times wild and exceeding all, with objects of human development becoming lifeless artifacts, left behind by an environmental revolution.
Dead House
Another dimension of Mister Graves’ work takes on cities, society, and its casualties. His photos of the homeless are, to me, among his best. On Flickr, these portraits are often accompanied by short blurbs of how the shot came about. This is Sally, captioned, “She asked for change, I asked for a picture in trade. She showed me her tattoo.”
Graves is far from a spectator with a camera. After years of working for various non-profits and going through a number of skin-thickening experiences like hitchhiking across parts of America, he’s decided to spend ninety days walking for charity. He leaves next week. On his website, WalkingOregon.com, David Graves states:
I believe that access to real food is a basic human right. This philosophy is in line with the work the Oregon Food Bank does, and therefore I have chosen them as my charity for this event. All donations, minus personal expense, will be given to the Oregon Food Bank to support their efforts throughout the state. It is my hope that through the kindness of individual donors, and aided by numerous radio interviews/newspaper articles, I can raise $40,000 for the Oregon Food Bank.
My walk will begin and end at the State Capitol building in Salem. The event is planned to last anywhere from 80 to 100 days, with a scheduled start date of April 5th. My planned rate of walking is 15 miles per day, but I am leaving room for various setbacks, such as sickness, closed roads, and theft/robbery. My walk will begin heading east from Salem until I reach John Day. From John Day, I will walk north to Umatilla, and back west to Portland. From Portland I will walk to the coast and continue south to Coos Bay. The final leg of my walk will take me from Coos Bay to Springfield and back north to Salem. Many of my nights on the road I will be camping, in an attempt to keep my personal expense as low as possible. Any couches/hotel rooms that can be offered along the way will be of great help.
David is taking his cameras along for this journey, and he’ll be documenting his adventure online, which I’m really looking forward to. You can follow his progress on the Walking Oregon Facebook page.
Click the jump for some of my favorite shots by Mister Graves.
Some more Serious Journalism from my time in Japan (see also: cat cafes). I previously mentioned Yaso Magazine in a post about Neon O’Clockworks – as promised in that post, here are some snapshots of Yaso for you to see! It’s a beautiful, hefty magazine with themed issues, published and distributed almost exclusively in Japan. I took some photos of three issues with the following themes: Vampire: Painful Eternity / Heartrendingness, Victorian: Influences & Metamorphoses of Victorian Culture in Today’s Japanese Sub-Cultures, and Sense of Beauty: Japanese Aesthetic. Other themed issues I didn’t get my hands on: Svankmajer (yes, an entire Svankmajer-themed issue), Gothic, Monster & Freaks [sic]. I also had a fourth issue called Doll, but gave it away to Ross because he is a doll fancier before I got a chance to snap some photos.
It’s a stunning magazine. Paging through it feels like like falling into a paper-fetish world that’s at once completely alien and intimately familiar.
The small pictures don’t do it justice, so click on through to the Coilhouse Flickr Set to see the full, annotated collection of images. This magazine cost around $15 in Japan, but I’m only finding it priced at $35 for those of us living in the US or in Europe. I’ve even seen copies appear and disappear for about $45 on Ebay. The magazine is almost entirely in Japanese, as is their site.
We are so inspired to see others publishing the kinds of things that we love, all over the word. We don’t know the people who do Yaso, but we are so, so grateful for them.
Meryem Yildiz’s world is a prescient place of whispered warnings, subtle secrets and an eerie language of memory, of reveries, of loss. Strange, stark, images of ostensibly quotidian objects – “mementos, hidden treasures, dusty mirrors, nonchalant cats, mason jars, pages lost and found” – are laden with layer upon fragile layer of ambiguous allegory and understated intent. There is a structured discontinuity here; moments fragmented, multiplied, merged yet again, that creates an uncanny whole – broken spaces full and empty, austere and adorned. A Delphian dream, interrupted, repeating itself over and over.
A bit of biography from Meryem’s website provides an intriguing glimpse into how her diverse background has influenced her work, manifests itself in current endeavors, and inspires future projects and collaborations – and the artist has herself kindly answered a few of our questions, elaborating on these points.
Born in Montréal from a French-Canadian mother and a Turkish father, Meryem was exposed to a variety of outlooks at a very young age, driving her to the diversity and malleability of perspectives … self-taught, Mme Yildiz’s work arises essentially from a wise use of unconventional resources. Throughout the creative process and at the heart of her work, Meryem Yildiz never forgets cognition, whether hers or others, nor the messages the human mind wishes to express (or to suppress). It is no surprise then, to learn that she majored in psychology at McGill University and completed a graduate diploma in translation at Concordia University.
COILHOUSE: The duality you feel influences your work - from your background and exposure to different and disparate outlooks – can you expound upon this?
MERYEM YILDIZ: With my upbringing, I was confronted to two different worlds. This duality is a functional one: I love each culture without subduing the other, and without melding them into an indiscernible hodgepodge. When one is removed from the other, my reality and my self no longer make sense. The same applies to how I approach most of my work. By favouring diptychs, I can illustrate two facets of a single story. Whether it is a moment cut in half, a before or an after, or elements of a same narrative: one could not be without the other.
In 1930, the MPAA drafted the Motion Picture Production Code, also called the Hays Code – named after its creator, Postmaster General-turned-Hollywood-censor William Hays. The original text can be found here. “Sex perversion” (aka homosexuality) was forbidden, as were scenes of miscegenation, safe-cracking, “dances which emphasize indecent movements,” surgical operations, and “white slavery.” The Hayes Code went into effect in 1934, ending the brief, unregulated era of talking pictures that had started in 1927 and was known as Pre-Code Hollywood. (Two great Top 10 lists of Pre-Code films can be found here and here). Over at Sociological Images, Gwen Sharp has uncovered a photo from the era that intentionally incorporates the code’s top 10 banned items into one image. “The photograph, [taken by A.L. Shafer, head of photography at Columbia], was clandestinely passed around among photographers and publicists in Hollywood as a method of symbolic protest to the Hays Code.”
Lee Evil and Dougy Gyro in his “Nautilus” costume.
The tenth Edwardian Ball crept up upon us unawares, while we were still sleepy from holiday overeating and adjusting to our regular work schedules again. All of a sudden everyone seemed to say “This weekend? But I haven’t a costume!” And thus began the yearly scramble, with last-minute runs to the fabric store and safety pins carefully tucked away inside as-yet unfinished garments. The Edwardian Ball is one of those rare events where everyone–not just the performers and regulars–dons a costume. For some of us this means little more than our everyday wear, while others brainstorm for weeks.
A contact juggler amongst the revelers.
Silent-era glam, Balkan patterns and futuristic, fortified silhouettes: this is the work of Lamija Suljevic, a 22-year-old designer based in Stockholm. In her new collection, shot by Emma Johnsson Dysell and unveiled last week, the Bosnian-born designer reflects on childhood memories of the home her family had to flee when she was five years old. “When I think of my hometown, I think of old techniques and handmade garments,” the designer told styleskilling blog. “Having that with me during my design process has become one of my strengths. If I’m working on my collections, I work wholeheartedly. Nothing else is good enough. If my grandmother were alive she would be proud, and things like that are very important to me.” Some of the old techniques incorporated into these garments include braiding, embroidery, pleating and crochet. Prior to this collection, Suljevicreleased some vintage-romantic looks on Lookbook under the label name Lamilla.
Designer - Lamija Suljevic’. Stylist – Tekla Knaust @ new blood agency. Hair & make up – Nina Belkhir @ link details. Model – Olivia @ stockholmsgruppen. Photo – Emma Jonsson Dysell @ new blood agency
Please welcome two new guest bloggers to Coilhouse this week! Tomorrow, we have S. Elizabeth (who you may know as ghoulnexdoor on Tumblr) joining us for a fascinating look at Jane Quiet, Occult Detective. And today, we’re premiering a post from decadent fashion designer and long-time friend of Coilhouse, Kambriel. In addition to our two new guests, you will soon be treated to an account of San Francisco’s Edwardian Ball by Neil Girling, last seen on Coilhouse covering the Great Handcar Regatta of ’09. Without further ado, I give you Kambriel! – Nadya
“Beauty is the moment when you raise your head” – Serge Lutens
If there was one person who almost mystically inhabited the stylistic world of my own dream-mind starting in the mid-late ’80′s, it would be the seemingly not-of-this-world French visionary, Serge Lutens. If you remember the eye-catchingly surreal and over-the-top, yet starkly minimalist graphics he created for Shiseido cosmetics in that era, they embodied a fantastical mystery taken to the extreme ideal. Sometime around 1989, Serge partnered with Shiseido to develop an eyeshadow trio entitled “Black Variations”. Packaged in a Zen-like, sleek black case, it was comprised of three shades. The colours in question? Black, black, and… black! The set was said to be inspired by lava – something that’s often inspired me in my own design work as well, with its ever-changing play of light, contrasting the depth of ultra-matte and sultry shimmering highlights – all translated into a language of divine and utter blackness.
Wizard of variations in black, Serge Lutens also is a master of conjuring extremes in vivid hues of whimsy, creating a world inhabited by willowy court jesters descended to visit us awhile from another universe:
For those with a spare $400-$600 burning a hole in your velvet-lined pocket, an oversized coffee table book of Serge’s photographic, surrealistic splendor is available here.
More images by Lutens, after the cut.
Quickly! A sneak peek of some (very happy, glowy) people we’ll be featuring in Issue #05:
photo credit: Allan Amato/Coilhouse
(And everybody goes “AWWWWWWW.”)
So far, 2010 has indeed been a happy nude year for musician Amanda Palmer and her beau, author Neil Gaiman. On New Year’s Eve, Amanda joined the Boston Pops Orchestra for the second year running to perform both Dresden Dolls and solo material (as well as passionately ravish Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1), and at some point during the course of the night, Neil proposed. They publicly announced their engagement on January 15th. A day later, the lovebirds met up with our wondrous Mister Allan Amato in NYC, who took these photos for an upcoming Coilhouse Magazine feature on their creative life together. They like that top portrait so much, they’re using it as their official engagement press photo. Yay!
photo credit: Allan Amato/Coilhouse
At 4am the next morning, they boarded a plane to LA and went directly to the Golden Globes, where, as the Huffington Post put it, Amanda “immediately became the most interesting thing at the awards.” (Heeee hee hee hee hee. Some things never change.) Congratulations, you two.
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So, hey… things are kind of chaotic around here for the next few days, owing to the Whitechapel residency and all of us juggling multiple balls. Please forgive me for consolidating the following announcement with the Gaimanda Impending Nuptials Declaration, but my co-editors and I would also like to mention that Coilhouse Issue #04 has OFFICIALLY SOLD OUT in the online store.
Wow. It’s been what, a month?! We’re floored. Thank you for your overwhelming support and patronage! For those of you (in the States, at least) who missed the cutoff, fret not. There are still copies available in select Barnes & Noble stores across the country. Full list of stores here. Just be sure to call ahead to reserve your copy. There’s also Meltdown Comics in LA, Wildilocks in Australia, and… well… me in New Zealand. (Kiwis, just pipe up in comments and I’ll arrange to get your info.)
Onward and upward, comrades! Please do drop by the Whitechapel thread if you get the chance. There’s some really lively discussion happening over there, and we’d love to see more of our beloved blog readers chime in.
