All photos © muggezifter
Here’s an eyebrow-raising site from the Dutch photoblogger and artist muggezifter: nothing but photos of himself running away from the camera, which is set to the 2-second self-timer mode. Wherever he travels (which appears to be all over the Netherlands), in all kinds of weather, he’ll set his camera down in the middle of the sidewalk, train station, park green, or beach, and just start running as fast as he can. It’s a silly yet appealingly pure pictorial obsession.
Photos submitted to Young Me Now Me by Onewithwings
This is cool. Almost beyond cool, verging on the sublime. Prolific Internet impresario and humorist Ze Frank’s latest project, a collaboration with developer Erik Kastner, is called Young Me Now Me. The concept is brilliantly simple: find a snapshot of you as a little kid—cute, goofy, serious, whatever, it all works—and then re-create that photo today. The more precisely detailed you are with your pose, clothes, hair, props, the more hilarious—and sometimes really eerie—it can be. The resemblances shouldn’t really be so startling, but they are; add to that the glee in re-animating our child selves, and the accumulated results (there are about 200 entries so far) really start to explore deep feelings of family, memory, and identity. I smell a bestselling coffee-table volume. Fotolog should start its own Young Me Now Me-inspired group log, pronto.
You can submit to Young Me Now Me on the site Color Wars 2008. To join, you need to also be a member of Twitter.
All photos © the respective members of Color Wars 2008
ronji
young ronji
now ronji
rmcw
sluggo
arnthorsnaer
From alicia_elfotolog on polaroids_only (left), and brillo (right).
With a quiet announcement last month, the Polaroid corporation may have signaled the end of a photographic era. Polaroid will stop producing all instant film by the end of this year:
Concord, Massachusetts-based Polaroid Corp. announced last week that it plans to close factories in Massachusetts as well as Mexico and the Netherlands that make film formats for industrial and consumer uses.
Polaroid instant film will be available in stores into next year, the company said. Meanwhile, Polaroid — which stopped making instant cameras over the past couple years — is seeking a partner to acquire licensing rights, in hopes that another firm will continue making the instant film and keep limited supplies available.
They discontinued the landmark SX-70 film a few years ago, but now there will be nothing: no more Spectra, 600, 690, 779, or any high-end professional films.
Fuji does still make an instant pack film, so that’s a small comfort. And Polaroid will license their technology to any company who wants to start manufacturing their instant films.
Even given the fact that Polaroid is no longer making instant cameras, the millions of cameras out there in the photo world’s bloodstream meant that Polaroid photography would likely continue for a couple more generations. But without film, the genre could be gone within ten years.
Two things you can do, people:
1. Stock up on your Polaroid. Keep it dry and refrigerated (not frozen!), and it’ll last many years.
2. Save Polaroid.
For more Polaroid love beyond the great pieces here, check out Polaroid Week, which we enjoyed on The Daily F’log exactly a year ago.
From meshel
From polaroid_billy
From dangerpaws
More Polaroids! Read More »
New post from shorpy, our favorite “100-year-old photo blog”: two curious kid giraffes at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. in 1926, getting ready for their closeups. I wonder if they thought the camera and tripod was some black sheep cousin. See it larger here.
NASA/JPL/MSSS (detail; click image for full version)
On Jan. 28, the Context Camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this pretty startling sight: a 3-kilometer wide crater smiling back at us out of the Martian twilight. Maybe the Red Planet won’t be such a forbidding place to visit after all. ;-)
All photos ©Michael David Murphy, all rights reserved.
So here in the U.S., today is Super Duper Tsunami Tuesday: citizens in 24 states, plus American Samoa and Americans Abroad, go to their polling or caucus sites to make their voices heard in the 2008 Presidential Primary Elections.
If you are one of these eligible voters, you have only two must-do obligations today:
1) if you haven’t already, go out and VOTE!
2) When you get home, check out Michael David Murphy’s fantastic dispatches from the 2008 campaign trail. Michael is a friend of and contributor to The Daily F’log, and an influential photographer and blogger (whileseated, 2point8). His political series, titled So Help Me…, is ongoing, and when it’s all over in November, his full pictorial account will be one of the freshest and most insightful of the entire season. At least, he’s got my vote.
More Michael David Murphy Read More »
All works © Martin Klimas
While he’s obviously influenced by such pioneers as Eadweard Muybridge and Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the German photographer Martin Klimas combines high-speed photography with a modern conceptual and sculptural sensibility, creating fascinating freeze-frame images of unreproducible slivers of time. He drops countless kitschy porcelain figures onto the floor of a pitch-black studio, capturing the moment of impact illuminated by a sound-sensitive array of high-speed strobe lights. The results, only the very best of which he chooses to print, are eerie amalgams of calm and chaos, intent and chance. Klimas says, “The hardest part of my work is to smash so many figurines until I find one that truly is showing me something new. I am in that sense a sculptor, but I have only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture.”
New Bond Street
All photos courtesy of and © Matt Stuart.
Just came across a great street photographer whose work I’d never seen. Whether he waits in one spot for hours or shoots off the cuff at sidewalk passersby, Matt Stuart’s preparation and perseverance seem to put him in the right place at the right time more than most. His dispatches from the streets of London are usually witty, in the tradition of Elliott Erwitt; sometimes deliciously off-kilter, hinting at an affection for Garry Winogrand; and always sharply observant, calling to mind Joel Meyerowitz’ New York work. Check out Stuart’s site for more good stuff, especially the black-and-white images, and also In-Public, an online home for street photographers that he founded several years ago.
Oxford Street
London Wall
More Matt Stuart Read More »
“A Statement of Meaningless 360 Pieces”
All works © Gwon Osang and Arario Gallery
Thirty-three-year-old Korean artist Gwon Osang makes sculptures composed almost entirely of hundreds of photographic prints (they are affixed to a metal armature inside). They have an eerie effect: the imperfect translation from 2-D to 3-D is Picassoesque, opening up some space for the imagination to roam. Via Dark Roasted Blend.
“Fear of 280 Pieces”
“A Traveler’s Suitcase”
More Gwon Osang Read More »
Video-game series photos ©Rosemarie Fiore
Two recent multiple-exposure photography projects explore questions of time, action, and accumulated knowledge, from slightly different perspectives. New York artist Rosemarie Fiore shoots hundreds of frames of vintage 80s video games like Tempest, Gyrus, and Quantum, while she’s actually playing them. The single-print results are crazy and colorful temporal space soufflés. Pretty rad.
At the other end of the cultural spectrum is Doug Keyes, whose series “Collective Memory” is as cerebral as Fiore’s is kinetic. Keyes, an artist and graphic designer from New Mexico, painstakingly photographs every double-page spread of selected books, then stacks the images together to create one “condensed document of the ideas contained within as well as the physical identity of the book itself.” He favors art monographs and popular science texts (like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”), but has also depicted a 1950 edition of The Bible and my fave, Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.” The series’ brilliance is that its inherent irony—showing everything ends up obscuring everything—frees up the imagination to fill in the blanks. That’s time well spent.
“Collective Memory” photos ©Doug Keyes
From hanalita
After the Union Jack and the Beefeater, probably the most widely recognized symbol of Great Britain is the iconic red telephone box. Stalwart, elegant, even lovable, this 20th-century icon has also now become—in our 24/7 21st Century of GPS, GSM, AT&T, and SMS—a symbol of a faded past, a lost golden epoch of proper, civilized communications. Or something.
Actually for about 20 years now, these most famous telephone booths (Kiosks, if you please) in the world have become increasingly endangered: by the privatization of British Telecom, which wanted to sack them completely; by the rising hegemony of email and cellular communications; and of course by the perennial besotted pubcrawler, seeking a safe place to relieve himself. According to The Guardian, at least 75,000 call boxes still survive throughout the UK, but they are money-losers for BT, and most could face total retirement within a decade.
From johannaneurath
In the mid-1980s, The Twentieth-Century Society mobilized an initial campaign to save the boxes from oblivion; more than 2,000 of the oldest cast-iron kiosks in Greater London were granted a reprieve, by actually being “Listed”—added to the ranks of the United Kingdom’s protected historical buildings of cultural significance. And buildings they are: formally known as “unattended public call offices,” they indeed have four walls, a roof, a door, and often a specially made foundation. However, thousands of modernized travesties of the peerless Kiosk design have already popped up on the streets of London. While the authentic Red Telephone Box will endure, it may soon be stripped of its land lines and cease to function, which would deprive it of its greatest meaning: the embodiment of sterling British utility. That would be uncool, Britannia. Quite.
Scores of Fotolog fanatics seem also to be Red Kiosk aficionados, as you can see from their loving evidence here. Most of these Kiosks are in London, but two are further afield, locations noted in the captions.
From mia
From sharonwatt
From eliahu; Studland Beach, Dorset
More Red Telephone Boxes Read More »
“Plattsmouth, Nebraska, Carts #1,” by Kate Bingaman-Burt
“Live with Art—It’s Good for You,” says the cute little sticker that comes with every print you purchase from the new online art emporium 20×200. That imperative sentence may be familiar to readers of The Daily F’log: it’s the personal motto of gallery owner Jen Bekman, who Jenni Holder interviewed for the F’log last fall.
Now with 20×200, Bekman is making it easier than ever for us to obey her directive. Each week she offers two new works of art—not just photographs but also paintings, drawings, and graphic designs—at what she calls “ridiculously affordable prices.” And who can argue? Each work is available in three differently sized editions: the small size, usually around 8.5˝x11˝, are just $20 each. And there are 200 of them. (Nice truth in advertising.) Twenty medium-size prints sell for $200 each; and there are just two large prints (often at 30˝x40˝, true gallery wall candy), available for $2,000. In today’s art world, even that can be a serious bargain.
The prints themselves are expertly made, in a variety of processes, including archival ink prints, digital c-prints, hand-inked prints, and letterpress works. 20×200 is clear and well-designed, with helpful, precise information about the prints and artists and, on the site’s blog, extended descriptions written by Bekman. Here she is on today’s offering (shown above), by Kate Bingaman-Burt:
I’m so glad to able to offer this photo via 20×200. It’s always a heartbreaker when I see someone come into the gallery and fall in love with a piece of art, but they simply can’t justify the expense. I’ve exhibited this photo on a few occasions, and several people have been disappointed to find it out of their reach. Now that it’s freed from the walls of the gallery and reinvented as 20×200 edition, lots of people can live with lots of carts. And that makes me a happy gallerist.
To judge from the growing stable of artists and prints—some of which you can see below, all still available—20×200 is well on its way to making a lot of art lovers happy collectors.
 
“Breath Portrait (favorite colors),” by Ann Tarantino (left); “Bags,” by Beth Dow (right)
Untitled (Hanoi no.2), by Kelly Shimoda
 
“Manshroom,” by Amy Ross (left); Untitled, by Mike Monteiro (right)
More 20×200 Prints Read More »
All photos © Justin Quinnell
While we’re on the subject of chompers, can we take a short leap from very cute to… cheerfully creepy? Justin Quinnell, a charming bloke from Bristol, England, has a predilection for taking photos from inside his mouth. To accomplish this jaw-dropping feat, he’s developed what he calls the “Smileycam”: a metal plate with a precision-drilled pinhole, attached directly to a roll of 110 film (kind of rare these days). The shutter is a piece of electrician’s tape. Open wide and say “cheese.” The resulting snapshots are a cheeky tonsils’-eye-view of Justin’s world while site-seeing, at the dentist, eating breakfast, taking a bath, and much more. Quinnell, who is a recognized expert in the field of pinhole photography, published 60 of these gems last year in his book Mouthpiece, which has just now come out in the U.S. and Canada. Check out some more intra-oral Smileycam shots, along with a lot of other fun stuff, at his site, pinholephotography.org.
 
More Smileycam Shots Read More »
René, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Here’s a pretty cool, counterintuitive idea: start a Web site for all those gajillions of pictures taken every day that probably won’t be uploaded anywhere else. Too blurry, overexposed, underexposed, badly composed, way out of focus—anything you might think of as not being “good” enough to share with the world. Of course, we here at Fotolog know that sometimes there’s actually a lot of good in the “bad,” or the “wrong,” or the “mistake.” But the folks at Deleted Images, a new blog-like site, are celebrating that fact. Subtitled “The Junkyard of Art,” it’s a fun place to find some great pictures, like the ones I’ve reblogged here. You may also wind up thinking that everything looks kind of familiar: “Oh yeah, I’ve got way too many of those.”
(All photos from Deleted Images © their respective owners.)
Trop gros plan; Linda, Courrires, France
When Good Tripods Go Bad, John Grantner, Skokie, IL USA
Fenway Seats, Doug Klesch, Greensboro, NC USA
Avellana, Xevixein, Almusafes, Spain
More Deleted Images Read More »
From sonoinciampato
Whether you find it beautiful or simply banal, one thing is certainly true about Jeff Koons’ 43-foot-tall topiary of a West Highland White Terrier, permanently installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao: it’s photogenic. Here are a few recent shots from our fellow Fotolog museumgoers.
From fasollasi
From kolorezko_muxuak, on your_city
From fenderstrato
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