I can’t say I’m necessarily a huge fan of the entirety of Hunter Freeman’s portfolio, but I do very much love this series of photos of an astronaut going about his or her day; my favorite being the bored, newspaper reading individual above. It strikes me as the sweet spot of juxtaposition between far out adventure and the everyday.
via Cgunit
Second-hand Tang Poem, Maleonn’s series from 2007, is only a small sample of a portfolio overflowing with surrealistic delights, but it is among my favorites. These black and white dioramas tell the story of a mystical, far off land — a tale both somber and silly. It’s a dichotomy seen throughout his work and he uses this balancing act to great effect. His work isn’t on exhibition in the US at the moment, but he does have a show at Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong.
The Tokyo Up, Down project comprises a series of black & white photographs taken inside and outside of elevators in Tokyo. The project explores vertical transportation in the intimacy of the elevator cabin, a moment of silence suspended in space and time, which nonetheless yields a rich array of subtle interactions between strangers on the shortest ever journey.
A seemingly simple idea that produced some stunning results. Some of them seem as though they are stills from a noir thriller, the figures frozen in lonely contemplation, framed by severe, modern architecture. Inside the elevators, the subjects either confront the camera or studiously avoid it. It calls to mind the sociological experiment of entering a crowded elevator and turning to face the rest of the people in the car instead of the door. When one’s personal space is shrunk down to mere centimeters eye contact becomes even more intimate, almost invasive, something that Xavier Comas uses to great effect.
via lens culture
Coilhouse Issue 02 alum Kate O’Brien just finished a Tom Banwell-and-Bioshock-inspired shoot, and a few dreamy images have trickled out into her Flickr stream over the past 24 hours.
Model: Isabelle, photo/styling/editing :Kate O’Brien
I remember her uploading a bunch of in-progress photos of the helmet featured in these shots, and me being verrry curious about the forthcoming images. Kate pours a massive amount of time, money, and energy into building her own props and sets, often documenting the process in her blog. You can read all about this gold leather helmet here.
Apologies for the black bars, but we’ve had a few complaints about posting teh n00dz on the front page before, so please click the jump for bar-free pretties.
An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), look circa 1910.
This series of exquisitely beautiful images from southern and central Russia is already all over the web via the Boston Globe, no rx but Coilhouse has to post a heads up in case anybody missed them. Absolutely stunning. Boston.com editor-in-chief, buy viagra Alan Taylor, says:
“With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.”
A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910.
“The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.”
The full gallery is viewable here, high res. Previously on Coilhouse:
Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan), full-length portrait, seated outdoors, ca. 1910.
Last month marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Czech artist Alphonse Maria Mucha, father of Art Nouveau. In celebration — and to advertise some, no doubt, absurdly priced wristwatches — photography studio Mierswa-Kluska put together a shoot chock full of decorative borders and swirly, tendril-like hair entitled “Temp Nouveau” for Plaza Watch a magazine dedicated, obviously, to the aforementioned timepieces. It’s mostly successful in replicating Mucha’s ornate style though when juxtaposed with a flesh and blood person some of his trademark design elements can seem a bit jarring. Mucha’s figures always felt integrated with his decorative flourishes and that feeling is lost here. Still, niggling criticisms aside, it’s a wonderfully imaginative concept. You can see these images and the rest of the set at a much higher resolution at the link below.
Via Wicked Halo : NOTCOT : Super Punch
Donald Weber takes a heart wrenching look at the city of Zholtye Vody in Ukraine. Located near two nuclear waste sites and an enrichment factory in the hub of the Soviet Union’s uranium mining and enrichment area, the homes were built using highly contaminated materials. With a higher radiation level than Chernobyl, over half the population of 60,000 people suffer from some sort of radiation sickness.
Upon first viewing this slide-show I was immediately struck with the strangest memory. Specifically, a memory of being a child, sitting in the ophthalmologist’s office and leafing through a copy of National Geographic which contained a large article on the Chernobyl disaster. The same hollow and broken faces are here in Weber’s essay. There is some joy here too, but it never seems to truly outshine the pain.
The image below was especially affecting and I had mixed feelings posting the set. It struck me that my vision of these post Soviet states is largely informed by images like this — a collection of gnarled women in babushkas, all furrowed brows and vacant stares, and emaciated youths, bald and hurting. It’s a world where lives are lived entirely within tiny, cramped apartments in stark, concrete tenements whose facades and walkways are slowly succumbing to an inexorable army of vegetation. I find myself thinking that there must be more to these people’s lives than this and fearing that there isn’t. I worry that I am passing on a misconception; proliferating a stereotype. I suppose that if the purpose of art is to make us question then, at least in my case, Daniel Weber has succeeded.
Most of you remember Manuel Albarran from photographer Gustavo Lopez Manas’ cover shoot for Issue 03, as well as multiple mentions on the blog. Recent updates to Albarran’s portfolio include the stunning shot below – a graceful companion to the portrait of Joshuadavid Reno by photographer Spencer Hansen featured in Issue 05’s article on the late Tiffa Novoa. After the jump, a couple of other shots from interesting recent Albarran collaborations, including a series called “Another World,” shot by Manas and featuring model/performer Johanna Constantine (you can find the extended set on Manas’ site), and a collaboration with an uncredited photographer featuring model Polly Fey. [via Aiko273]
Since I would merely be cribbing their words anyway I shall allow lens culture (who is also selling the DVD) explains the mechanics of photographer/animator Antonio Martinez’s Near the Egress:
First, Antonio Martinez spent a lot of time at a traveling circus, shooting dozens of rolls of 35mm black-and-white film. Then he made over 800 modern dryplate tintypes from the negatives, and then scanned them digitally, and then sequenced them artfully to produce this experimental stop-motion video.
The result of all this photography and video manipulation is a bizarre fever-dream of a circus, something one would imagine entertaining the dead in an afterlife set in a David Lynch film. In other words, it’s fantastic. The project took Martinez 4 years to complete and I would say that the end result has been absolutely worth the time and effort it took to create.
Model: Maggie of Lucent Dossier. Collar by Dream Rockwell.
LA-based Allan Barnes’ love of “Jurassic” image-making technologies – ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, instant film, and the like – lends itself well to his portraits of artists, models and performers from the LA scene. Recently, his work has displayed a greater degree of sartorial opulence thanks to contributions from the likes of Lucent Dossier’s Dream Rockwell (who created the collar above), Billy and Mellie (formerly) of Antiseptic, and one Miss Laila (responsible for the masks/headpieces below, though there’s no known URL for her work), among others. Sadly, many of the most stunning images are marred by what I consider to be a gruesome watermark, but that doesn’t dissuade me from sharing them after the jump. Barnes is also a teacher, so LA residents interested in learning old-timey processes are encouraged to follow him on Flickr for updates on workshops in the area.
[via httf]
Dr. Mangor and Laila. Wet plate collodion on aluminum. Makeup by Meg.
