Entries Tagged 'Photography' ↓

Journey to a Strange Planet.

alien-ice

The stunning frozen terrain, above, made of ice several feet thick, but clear as glass, was photographed by explorers on the surface of a planet millions of miles from our Sun.

Continue reading →

If He Attacks You, Honk His Nose.

1032008_2b4a_625x1000

He’s called “GreatWhite Clown,” by furfree, one of 48 entries from Worth1000.com’s recent “Animal Clowns” Photoshop competition. Plus, if you think that’s amazing, you should see this guy and 11 of his friends squeeze into a tiny car.

“I Don’t Know What It Is, Yanni, But, Somehow, Suddenly, I’m Strangely Attracted To You.”

a84_a2

While this juxtaposition of Yanni’s 1992 Dare To Dream and Ween’s 1994 Chocolate and Cheese CD covers, above, encourages a freaky moment of sexual ambiguity—due, depending on your orientation, to Mr. Chryssomallis’s striking ‘stache or model Ashley Savage’s bodacious ta-tas—it’s got nothing on this catalog of 15 unfortunately placed ads.

The lineup includes billboards for a juicer and a fitness center that should have got someone fired, and a subtle computer error jab. But, mostly, they appear to be combinations of content and advertising created by web-based optimizing software; the kind that, based on keywords, sticks a relevant advertisement on the page one is reading. Of course, as this coffee ad shows, sometimes the placement is just a little bit too relevant.

The Earth Just Had an Idea.

513829118_959af5aefd_o

German photographer Christian Knoch‘s ethereal Unwetter mit Blitzlicht (“Torrential rain with flash”) contrasts a dewy terrain against the still seething energy of a lighting storm in an ashen sky.

Investigating the Public Enemy Files.

hankwtmk0000

Before I started writing professionally, I took pictures of the stuff I was doing and people with whom I was mostly hanging out, the members of Long Island’s Spectrum City mobile d.j. crew. After I became a writer, I stopped shooting to a great extent, put my negatives in bags, congratulated myself on accumulating the world’s largest archive of Spectrum pics, and called it a day.

Subsequently, Spectrum reinvented themselves as the hip-hop crew Public Enemy. Much to my delight, people started asking to see those pictures.

Someone else just did. At 7:30 pm, tomorrow night, Wednesday, April 1, at the University of Iowa’s Iowa Memorial Union, I’ll be speaking as part of the University of Iowa Lecture Series.

For more than 30 years, The University of Iowa Lecture Committee has brought some of the world’s great thinkers to the University of Iowa campus. Speakers have included an impressive roster of national and international figures in science, politics, business, human rights, law, and the arts. Each year the University hosts from 6 to 10 thought-provoking lectures. These events help enrich Iowa’s academic environment and enhance its reputation as a prestigious Big Ten university.

My lecture is titled “Part of the Permanent Record,” and takes its name from the Eyejammie Fine Arts Gallery exhibition of my work in the summer of 2007. Wednesday night, I’ll be screening some of those photographs and talking about the journey through hip-hop I’ve been blessed to make with Chuck D, Flavor-Flav, Bomb Squad leader Hank Shocklee, above, and the rest. (An article in the local Corridor Buzz, previewing the lecture, goes into a lot of that.) I’m really honored to have this opportunity, and I’m looking forward to the talk. If you’re in Iowa, come through. Admission is free.

Chicken McCAT Scan.

screen13

Most third-year students of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College use a Computed Axial Tomography scanner for medical purposes. But for Satre Stuelke, the technology works best as a new form of camera. By running children’s toys, cell phones, and electrical appliances through this advanced scientific tool, Stuelke produces rather unearthly images, of a kind perhaps never before seen. Radiology Art, he calls it.

Continue reading →

Taking the Word “Kafkaesque” to a Grotesque New Level.

Gregor Samsa blows it all on hookers and coke

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

With that disorienting, opening sentence, Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis begins its dreadful spiral into insanity. But to photographer Marc Paeps, and Air, a Brussels ad agency tasked with getting readers into local Filigranes Bookstores, Kakfa’s text inspires this image, above: That of a despondent, six-legged Samsa, cut off from the world in a sleazy motel, wasting his few remaining days and dollars on booze, hookers, and coke. (Click on the picture to see the much larger version’s sordid details.) The campaign’s theme is, “Make your own movie: Read a book.” Man, if that’s what’s inside books, I’m just gonna keep on watching American Idol.

[via Ads of the World]

No Future In Your Store Frontin’.

dauria

Husband-and-wife photography team James T. & Karla L. Murray give detailed, even affectionate, attention to the parts of New York City that most people merely dismiss as eyesores. In their earlier books, Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC and Burning New York, they recorded the craft of the aerosol artist, recording not only their masterworks but their words and intentions.

In their new volume, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, they document the most vulnerable structures in the urban landscape’s topography: The small, typically family-owned, street-level proprietorship. Historically, notes the web site, not only did these shopkeepers add life and vitality to, and in real ways bind together, these neighborhoods. As well, the corner stores served as economic stepping stones for “New York’s early immigrant population, a wild mix of Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Eastern Europeans and later Hispanics and Chinese.”

D. D’Auria and Sons Pork Store is a typical example. Founded in 1938, set in the Belmont section of the Bronx—that borough’s Little Italy—it closed in 2007, three years after the above photo was made. Subsequently, and in an ironic reordering of community priorities, a cell phone store replaced it. Then, says Karla, “that went out of business last year, and now the space is empty.”

Add to the mix whale-like box stores, gentrification, the skyrocketing cost of NYC real estate, and a host of other potent, seemingly random forces, and what you have in these small businesses, literally, is a dying way of life. Meanwhile, Jim and Karla Murray race to visually preserve the last of their spaces, using their “trusty old Canon 35mm film camera,” itself now a relic, to capture the look, character, color, and texture of the places where our great city was, in many senses, built.

Jim & Karla Murray are exhibiting selections from their Store Front photos at the Brooklyn Historical Society (128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, NY; 718-222-4111) through March 29. As well, they’re guests today on NONFICTION, my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, this afternoon, Friday, March 6, at 2 pm ET.

You can hear this thoughtful and creative couple’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state area, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

Don’t Mess with Texas.

Exline Park, R. C. Hickman (1955)
Exline Park by R. C. Hickman (1955)
From the R. C. Hickman Photographic Archive at the
Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin

I’m giving you really short notice, as this show will only be up until Sunday, March 8. But if you’re anywhere near the Irving Arts Center (3333 N. MacArthur Blvd) in Irving TX between now and then, make it your business to stop by and see Behold the People: R.C. Hickman’s Photographs of Black Dallas, which features 56 black and white photographs from his eponymous archive at the University of Texas at Austin.

For those who, like I, had never heard of the man,

Continue reading →

Beauty and the Blow.

Laura Elena Zuniga Huizar, 23, taking home the crown at the Nuestra Belleza Sinaloa 2008 in July.Zuniga Huizar after her arrest in December.

As these photos, above, demonstrate, Mexican beauty contest winner Laura Elena Zuniga Huizar, 23, doesn’t flash her terawatt smile in all of her pictures. That’s Zuniga, atop, beaming broadly, after taking home the crown at the Nuestra Belleza Sinaloa (“Our Sinaloa Beauty”) 2008 contest in July.

But that’s also Zuniga, directly above, moments after her December arrest, in what the Associated Press called a “gun-filled truck,” one of two rolling in lockstep, weighted down with “a large stash of weapons, including two AR-15 assault rifles, 38 specials, 9mm handguns, nine magazines, 633 cartridges and $53,300 in U.S. currency.” (Seven alleged gunmen were also captured in the sting.)

Zuniga told police that she was planning on traveling to Bolivia and Colombia with the men to go shopping, [Jalisco state police director, Francisco Alejandro] Solorio said.

Continue reading →