Take Refuge is a series of large-scale photos by Kevin Cooley that depict the human struggle against nature’s harsher moments.
“This body of work was created in disparate locations including the Arctic territory of Spitsbergen and the American West as well in more ordinary places such as New York City and Los Angeles. Referencing the Romantic Movement in art and literature, the work attests to both the fear and longing nature inspires.”
(via ruineshumaines)
Quirky yet captivating portraits by Robbie Augspurger, a Portland, Oregon based photographer.
(Source: photojojo)
Photographic Collages Suspended in Plexiglas
Auckland-based artist Peter Madden gleans found images from old encyclopedias, back issues of National Geographic, and nature books to create his dense and nearly psychedelic collages suspended in perspex, also known as ‘safety glass’. Of his work Madden says “I consider myself a ‘Sculptographer’; a ‘post-conceptual photographer’. A mediator between genres and dimensions, between you, the other and I. I suppose I am an altogether different collagist, maybe a collagist of difference.” To see much more of his three dimensional work, check out this gallery. Images above courtesy Ryan Renshaw and EyeContact.
(Source: modernizing)
London in Puddles by Gavin Hammond
Given the infamous amount of rain that continuously falls on London, Nature might be trying to tell us to look at things from a slightly different perspective. And what better way than from the ground up, seeing the historic monuments of the city through the lens of fallen rain. You can check tons more of Gavin’s dark lomo photography over at his flickr.
Artist: tumblr (via: lostateminor)
(via vofka)
“These images are a part of a larger body of work titled Here and There, which aims to capture life today as I experience it. Using the camera to explore moments or objects that might otherwise be overlooked, I have attempted to create a visual diary of sorts. Here and There looks at color, nostalgia, composition and the relation of separate moments to create a series of photographs. Keeping in mind the pioneers of color art photography, these images are the evolution of a visual homage to their ideas and work.”
(Source: fitbfaphoto2012)
Jamie CAMPBELL, Beasts of Burden Series, 2006
(via pxrxllxls)
The other day you tweeted like 10 things in a row about printers. #photomajorlife
Tree, Line
Olsen Zander
‘This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest. These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.’
(Source: zanderolsen.com)
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse
Ponte City Windows, Televisions, Doors - Three Lightboxes
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse spent much of the years 2008, 2009 and 2010 engaged in the quixotic task of taking a photograph out of every window, of every internal door, and of every television-set in Ponte City. This circular 54-story building has been the subject of their three-year investigation of its structure and its position as the crucible of Johannesburg´s urban mythology.
The result is three light-boxes, each measuring almost four meters, which tower above the viewer in similar proportions to the building itself. The photographs, taken with as much formal consistency as was possible in a chaotic building, are presented exactly in order, floor above floor and flat by flat.
The first light-box, featuring the internal doors that open from the circular corridors into each apartment, at first looks like a giant stained-glass window - a seemingly composed arrangements of reds, pinks and blues. But in fact, the photographs are arranged accurately and truly to the building. The different colours are dictated by the building´s history - the old pink paint from its 1970s heyday still remains near the top, while recent renovations which started near the bottom included blue neon lights which cast a strange glow onto the black doors. Punctuating the closed doors of these various colours, one periodically comes across a door thrown open to reveal a portrait of that apartment´s residents. Working at night, the artists knocked on each door in the building to request this portrait, and then photographed the closed door if it was refused, or if the apartment was empty. Where a portrait was taken, the glare of the raw electric bulbs in the apartments is accentuated by backlighting of the light-boxes. These small squares of light and life jump out towards the viewer, giving the work a sense of depth which strains against the many closed doors that pull the eye back to its surface.
If one studies closely the striations of light and colour of the work, an archaeology of the building reveals itself. The ornate patterns of the doors and security gates on the higher floors are in stark contrast to the plain black wooden doors installed lower down during the building´s last failed renovation in 2007 and 2008. Floor 32 was photographed during this period when it housed the show apartments that were being used to advertise the renovated building. On some of the doors, the decor schemes that investors could choose from are clearly marked. “Future Slick”, Moroccan Delight”, “Glam Rock” and “Zen Like” are all at odds with the visions of the building that surround them. The comprehensive methodology of the photography reveals both these layers of history as well as individual fragments of interest. Right at the bottom, on the very last floor that the artists photographed, they came across the doors to what used to be the building´s public restrooms. Amazingly, these were still clearly marked with the exclusions of Apartheid - “European Here” and “European Dame” (European Gentleman and European Ladies).
The next light-box, featuring photographs of the building´s windows, is a fragmented landscape. One can trace the structure of adjacent buildings upwards, photo by photo, from their foundations which are seen through Ponte´s parking-floor windows, to the point where their pinnacles disappear from view as Ponte towers above them. Horizontally, the twelve photographs of each floor roughly stitch together an overlapping panorama as seen from this centre-point of Johannesburg´s skyline. But it is when the windows are blocked that the most interesting details emerge. The bright colours of closed curtains, the stacked furniture of an overcrowded apartment, and the silhouettes of many residents all interrupt the fragmented landscape, turning the exterior gaze of the work in on itself. The ´windows´ work unfolds the building onto a flat surface which maps its internal structure and the relationships between lives’ lived stacked together and on top of each-other.
While the artists where drawn at first to photograph the windows and their spectacular views, they soon noticed that the residents of the building were much more pre-occupied with their television screens. So soon these alternative windows were included in Subotzky and Waterhouse´s list of typologies, and this third light-box becomes another colourful mosaic of light and colour. Local soap operas, Congolese music videos, and Nollywood movies dominate the screens. Every television reveals a different fantasy - both the real and the mythical places where these images come from trace the journeys of the residents from their homelands to the building, and then perhaps onwards to the places to which they aspire.
These three towering light-boxes present three distinct yet overlapping directions of view. The internal, the external, and the imagined are separated by the typological method that made the three works, but confused in each instance by the richness of detail that each one includes in its 600-odd photographs. But step back from each, and they become almost completely abstract, fractals of colour and light that make it hard to believe that they are organized true to the building rather then the artist´s design.
Such is War
Cynthia Bittenfield
This project explores life on the home front while war is continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(Source: lenscratch.com)
Bachelor Portraits
Justyna Badach
I came to this country as a refugee I am still trying to make sense of why it is that I do not feel at home in the world. I am interested in people who are also grappling with loneliness, marginalization, and how they deal with the idea of home. The domestic space is a highly charged place for women but what is it for a man? For the past 5 years I have been working on a series of portraits of bachelors in their homes. These men tend to exist on the margins of culture and are often considered invisible by society. I usually meet the men for the first time when I arrive at their home to collaborate on a picture. The images we construct together depict the safety of places where they withdraw from the world to think, meditate and act out their fantasies. I am interested in the way that these personal spaces serve as both portrait and the junction between masculine and feminine, the man and myself. The process of making these images embodies a form of role reversal, a feminine penetration into a masculine space. The text that accompanies the images further blurs the line between subject and photographer.
http://justynabadach.com/3/artist.asp?ArtistID=32256&Akey=45XCHL8A
(Source: photolucida.org)
Adam Magyar
Squares
While spending extensive time in cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kolkata and New York, I was getting increasingly fascinated by man-made structures. I consider all man’s scientific achievements an integral part of human evolution. So, to me the city is not less of a natural environment than the rainforest. It is an ever-present human desire to go further and leave some trace behind in the fraction of the time we are given.
My drive is not different. I aim to grasp the devices at hand, push towards new frontiers by converting already existing technologies for photography in the hope of coming up with something new, a new device, a new language, a new frontier.
The factor of time is essential both in our private history and for humanity as a community. I am more interested in the drama of our own transience. In my works I capture man’s finite time in infinity. In my images I “stage” a situation where people are seen from a distance and I depict them as particles in a system. The observer of this scene is an imaginary person, looking at the whole as an outsider, as if being exempt from the laws of time.
I also perceive time and events taking place subjectively, consequently inappropriately. I find particular events more important than others, so I would instinctively emphasize them in my compositions. To eliminate this problem, I am experimenting with systems that relate to reality like watches and record series of events objectively. I build digital camera systems, adopt industrial machine-vision cameras and set up script-driven post processing methods.
Perspective and depth are missing from these photos, people are like beads on a string. As if predestinated, they follow the same track, heading to the same destination.
SQUARES is a series of non-existent urban places. I created fake aerial photos and city vertigos by sequencing the same section of sidewalks and meticulously assembling collections of people.
http://www.magyaradam.com/
Each of David’s projects paired with his writing has made me more globally and locally aware of events happening in my city (Chicago), my hometown (Detroit), and the world extended. His style of documentary photography perfectly demonstrates the power of words with an image to help further tell its story.
