From marcin76
Fotolog members have long struggled with the ethics—and the potential dangers—of taking photographs where some private or governmental organization has decreed such action verboten. With the explosion in popularity of digital cameras and camera-phones, the number of “No Photography” zones has also increased exponentially. The problem is that many of these so-called “official” regulations are arbitrary, and intend to govern true public spaces, where the laws of many nations allow unfettered photography. Add in the fact that governments and private companies everywhere are themselves photographing such spaces 24-7, and we’ve got a legal gray area that covers an ever-growing patch of ground.
The folks at the year-old site Strictly No Photography recognize the tensions involved in this new landscape, and they come down strictly on the side of the lone photographer. The site’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s forbidden visual information and make it universally accessible and useful”; but they also just want to have fun. The photos are organized into categories like Art Museums and Galleries, Govern-
ment, Royalty, Science and Technology, and even War. In and among the mundane shots are enough frissons of anti-establishmentarianism to keep it really interesting. As they say, remember to turn your flash off.
From onmywaytowork
From i_lovesnowb0ardd
Kolkata Metro: Photography Prohibited
by adventuremasala, on Strictly No Photography
no fotos - no Bombs
by bulad, on Strictly No Photography
More Strictly No Photography Read More »
Asako Narahashi, Kawaguchiko, from the series: half awake and half asleep in the water, 2003 © Asako Narahashi, courtesy Galerie Priska Pasquer, Köln
Paris Photo, one of the largest and best assemblages of photographic images and talent in the world, looks like it’s more exciting than ever this year, with 107 exhibitors—more than a third of them new to the fair—showing vintage, modern, and contemporary prints by more than 500 artists. Among the highlights should be the one-person exhibits for Martin Parr, Dayanita Singh, and Alec Soth, and the “Spotlight on Japan,” with works by 130 Japanese photographers from 1848 to the present. Check out lensculture for a great preview of 200 images.
Paris Photo, November 13 to 16, 2008, Carrousel du Louvre, 99 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France.
Denis Darzacq, Hyper n°3, 2007 © Courtesy Denis Darzacq et VU’La Galerie, Paris
Laura Letinsky, Untitled #117 (from Hardly More Than Ever), 2007 © Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery
Tsukada Mamoru, Identical Twins, 2003 © Courtesy of Tomio Koyama gallery
Adam Jeppesen, DK Orestaden, 2005 © Courtesy Kudlek van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne
Yang Yankang, A disciple spreading Longda, Sichuan, 2006 © Courtesy 798 Photo Gallery
Original on Fotolog
With the demise of Polaroid film just months away, if you want to keep enjoying this iconic genre, either you’ll have to go on a wild shopping spree immediately, or just resign yourself to faking it. Presuming you can’t spare the cash right now, there are a bunch of ways to make fake Polaroids out of all your ho-hum, soulless jpegs, but a beta app we just came across on Buzz Feed looks to be the simplest, coolest, and most fun way to do it (if you have a Mac; Windows functionality coming soon).
 
Download the free app from Poladroid, drag and drop your photo onto the Polaroid camera icon, and wait. After a few moments you hear the trademark click-bzzzz-whrrrrr and a Polaroid print pops out of the camera, slowly “developing” before your eyes. When it’s done a bell goes off and the new, medium-res “Polaroid print” opens up on screen. The differences from jpeg to Pola are striking: the colors are more saturated, shadows are deeper, focus is softer, vignetting might appear around the edges, and there’s even lots of dust, scratches, and stray fingerprints! And the most authentic touch is the perfectly reproduced texture of the white border frame. Click the photos here to check out the larger versions up close. Nothing will ever replace the tactile and beautiful essence of a real Polaroid, but Poladroid lets you recapture some of the whimsy of instant photography. If only they could figure out a way to let you shake it.
Svizzera, 1971-73
All works by Luigi Ghirri.
If you admire William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, or Martin Parr for their seminal contributions to the art of color photography, then you must also acquaint yourself with the work of Luigi Ghirri. Ghirri died in 1992, at the age of 49; his vision has since been well-celebrated and documented in Europe, but he’s virtually unknown to the rest of the world. That’s a shame, because his early poetic explorations of his native Reggio Emilia and the places he studied in and visited, like Modena, Bologna, Capri, Venice, and Paris, as well as his later, more structured projects on architecture and the Italian countryside are gloriously infused at once with wit, buoyancy, and a stealthy seriousness. But we can stop worrying, because we now finally have the first comprehensive Ghirri collection, published this summer by Aperture: It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It… is a gorgeous, well-curated, and long-overdue tribute to an influential shaper of the modern photographic sensibility.
Parigi, 1979
Modena, 1972
More Luigi Ghirri Read More »
Split Rocker
From jeff_koons (yes, that Jeff Koons!)
For years, museum-going Fotolog members have been snapping pics of their friends and family interacting with the whimsical, post-ironic sculptures of the American contemporary artist Jeff Koons. Last year at this time, in fact, in a post titled Puppy Love, we documented several fond souvenirs of encounters with Koons’ Puppy: an enormous topiary of a West Highland White Terrier, installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
From sonoinciampato
And I’ve seen several shots of his Tulips and other installations, too:
From lulu69
From _vincenzo
From carriehs
So fittingly, Fotolog is happy to announce this week that Jeff Koons (or at least one of his representatives!) has joined us as a Fotolog member himself.
More Jeff Koons Read More »
Photogenetic Draft # 4 and Photogenetic Draft # 8
All works © Joachim Schmid
Via lensculture, a very interesting article on German artist Joachim Schmid, who uses other people’s discarded or lost photographs to make his own artworks. One amazing project from the early 90s, called “Photogenetic Drafts,” mixes and matches sliced negatives of professional studio portraits, to really creepy effect.
What Schmid discovered, happily, was that he could shuffle the left half of a negative with the right half of another negative to come up with bizarre composites that were uniformly lit and fit together in an uncanny way. It seems the photo studio always positioned its lights exactly the same way for years, and never moved the camera closer or further away from each model!
Check out the rest of Schmid’s oeuvre here. It’s a fascinating collection.
Photogenetic Draft # 24
Photogenetic Draft # 7
Photogenetic Draft # 32
Photogenetic Draft # 15
Sweet: Just came across a cool site where you can order a custom-made high-quality shower curtain emblazoned with your own favorite photo. PhotoShowerCurtain.com offers both a tub-sized curtain (70˝x72˝) and a shower stall-sized sheet (35˝x72˝), each in “100% polyester poplin, which can be laundered repeatedly with no shrinkage or fading.” The printing is done via a dye sublimation process, so the image and pigments are fused into the fabric—it’s not just a piece of vinyl ironed on.
The company insists that the “image will not fade, crack, or peel.” At the fairly steep prices of $220 (large) and $150 (small), they better not. (Free ground shipping is included in the price.) All in all, it’s a pretty fun splurge, and a great gift.
Here are a dozen Fotolog classics that I would love to see printed at 36 square feet in these photographers’ bathrooms!
From gilbertojr
From lauratitian
From eshepard
From cypher
More Shower Curtains Read More »
From whitejasmine
Finally. The Games of the XXIX Olympiad begin today, 8/8/08, at 8:08:08pm, in the extraordinary new “Bird’s Nest” Beijing National Stadium. More than 10,000 athletes are competing. Good luck to all involved!
From sharkool
From brumi_princess
From timfrost, on tickets
Apollo 16 NASA astronaut Charles Duke left this snapshot of himself and his family at the Descartes Highlands on the Moon on April 20, 1972.
This little-known but deeply moving bit of history was chronicled in the astonishingly beautiful, 200-picture-narrative book Full Moon, by Michael Light.
Thirty-nine years ago today, Neil Armstrong exited the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle, uttered his eternally famous words, and stepped onto the surface of the Moon. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin followed him about 15 minutes later, and took the iconic photo (below) of his bootprint, shot with a Hasselblad on 70mm transparency film.
He also took a “before” picture of the undisturbed lunar soil a few seconds earlier, and the two images are presented in Full Moon side by side. It is a simultaneously thrilling and chilling commentary on humanity.
What will the next generation bring to the Moon—iPods and Xboxes?
Photo used courtesy of NASA
Lake Carnegie, Australia
All photos courtesy of NASA
Sometimes you’ve got to step back a bit and get a broader point of view to appreciate things. Yann Arthus-Bertrand does that beautifully in his Earth From Above series, shot from airplanes and helicopters while traveling over 100 countries. But the photos here take the idea just a couple steps further: they were snapped by the Landsat 7 satellite, 438 miles above the surface of the earth. Landsat 7, which is administered by NASA, is in a polar, sun-synchronous orbit, allowing it to cover the entire planet, and it has captured some astonishingly beautiful sights, many of which approach the level of abstract art. Here are just a handful; you can see dozens more at the cool blog Environmental Graffiti. (via Kottke.)
Garden City, Kansas, USA
Ocean Sands, Bahamas
More Earth Works Read More »
A Lego recreation of Jeff Widener’s 1989 photograph of “The unknown rebel”.
All photos © Mike Stimpson
There’s not much more to say about English photographer Mike Stimpson’s Lego re-creations of iconic 20th-century photographs except: bloody brilliant.
A Lego recreation of Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph “Raising the flag on Iwo Jima”.
A lego reconstruction of the famous 1932 photograph of construction workers at lunch atop a skyscraper, by Charles Ebbets.
Lego recreation of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1932 photograph “Behind the Gare Saint Lazare”.
A Lego version of Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal during the quarter finals of the 1986 World cup between England and Argentina.
From aaba
Congratulations to Spain and Germany for reaching the Championship Match of Euro 2008.
Many congratulations also to the valiant runners up, Turkey and Russia.
The two finalists face off Sunday evening (CEST). Who will you be supporting?
From antjuhh
From jamiejones
From erotips
From la_avariciosa
From dasbunnyhaeschen
From iuki_boio
From xemminha
Untitled, (Crowd 2), 1993
All photographs © Alexey Titarenko
Via a recent post at BLDGBLOG comes word of an old series by a great Russian photographer who’s finally getting the exposure he deserves. In late 1991, 29-year-old Alexey Titarenko was shooting with his Hasselblad in the streets of his native St. Petersburg, which had just been re-christened from Leningrad in September, after the first Russian presidential elections that summer. But the photographer encountered nothing like the spontaneous joy that prevailed in Moscow and elsewhere just a few months earlier. Here he describes his landscape in an interview from a few years ago:
In the winter of 1991-1992, one cold and gloomy day, I strolled sadly down a street which used to be packed with people, which used to be full of joyful vibrancy and dynamism. It was poorly lit; evening was settling in. There was not a single car visible. The depressing and strange quietness was interrupted by the sounds of banging grocery store and bakery doors, stores in which the shelves were absolutely empty. I saw people on the verge of insanity, in confusion: unattractively dressed men and women with eyes full of sorrow and desperation, tottering on their routine dreary routes with their last ounce of strength, in search of some food which could prolong their lives and the lives of their families. They looked like shadows, undernourished and worn out.
Nothing like that had occurred since World War II, when the Nazis blockaded the city. My impressions as well as my emotional state were enormously powerful and long lasting. I felt an intense desire to articulate these sufferings and grieving, to visualize them through my photographs, to awaken empathy and love for my native city’s inhabitants, people who have been constantly victimized and ruined during the course of the 20th Century.
Untitled, (Heads), 1992
In the resulting series, City of Shadows, what Titarenko articulated, with a deftly implemented long-exposure technique, was an Impressionist, communitarian vision of the end of Communism. The images’ gorgeous mid-range tones and velvety blacks combined with the uniformity of dress and architecture evoke a modern purgatory: an in-between metropolis, at once lighter than air and plaintively, mortally, solid.
A recent series, Alexey Titarenko: Havana is currently on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, through July 12.
Untitled, (Two Heads), 1992
Untitled, (Crowd 3), 1993
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
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