The Silent Drama of Photography

Sebastião Salgado recently gave a brilliant TED talk on his story as a photographer and showed some images from his newest project, Genesis:

Brazilian-born Salgado, who shoots only using Kodak film, is known for his incredibly long-term projects, which require extensive travel and extreme lifestyle changes. Workers took seven years to complete and contained images of manual laborers from 26 countries, while Migrations took six years in 43 different countries on all seven continents. Most recently Salgado completed Genesis, an ambitious eight-year project that spanned 30 trips to the world’s most pristine territories, land untouched by technology and modern life. Among Salgado’s many travels for Genesis was a two-month hike through Ethiopia, spanning 500 miles with 18 pack donkeys and their riders. In the words of Brett Abbott, a Getty Museum curator, Salgado’s approach can only be described as “epic.”

Sebastião Salgado: The Silent Drama of Photography   [TED]

Children Playing on the Beach

This photograph was taken in 1947 at Omaha Beach, Normandy.

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Kids with their Most Prized Possessions

Photographer Gabriele Galimberti has created an interesting photo essay in which she’s travelled around the world photographing kids with their most prized possessions. She commented on the differences – and similarities – she observed over the course of the project:

But how they play can reveal a lot. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian, who would often join in with a child’s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”

Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day.

Pictured above is Maudy, from Kalulushi, Zambia. Below is Virginia, from American Fork, Utah.

Toy Stories   [Gabrielle Galimberti]

Where’s Momo?

Ontario-based graphic designer Andrew Knapp has a border collie named Momo who has a habit of hiding whenever a stick is thrown, rather than trying to fetch it. Because of this, he’s been making a series of Where’s Waldo-esque photographs of Momo (who really can be seen in each photograph).

More here.   [enpundit]

Sony Photography Awards

The shortlist of winners for the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards is out, and there are some brilliant ones. Above is a piece entitled Tradition, by Reza Nezamdust of Iran. Below, is Return to Childhood Landscapes, taken by Hajdu Tamas on the train from Bucharest to Baia Mare in Romania.

The 2013 Sony World Photography Awards   [TheAtlantic]

Composition

This beautifully-composed photograph depicts a winter scene in my favourite city, Krakow. the photographer is Martin Ryczek.

How Much Stuff Do You Have?

Two Beijing-based photographers, Huáng Qìngjūn and Mă Hóngjié, have been travelling around China getting peasant families to pose outside of their home with everything they own.

They arrange them in one single broad line, to make visible the most possible items, provided that they fit into one line, but usually they do. Normally they do not pile them up, but exhibit them one by one, just like they acquired them. The family is almost always sitting or standing in the middle, and even in the two or three exceptions they are shifted towards the house as a center. Wherever they have food reserves, rice sacks, corn pipes, they put them in the forefront as the symbol of abundance. As well as the animals…

Is it possible to live a whole life with so few things? While not so long ago a peasant household had about five hundred objects, most of which were used in daily activities, in an industrialized culture we are surrounded by even a hundred times more things per household. No matter how much we want to live a simple life and try to eliminate the unnecessary frippery around ourselves, a set of everyday objects reduced to this extreme implies poverty to us even without considering the condition of the houses.

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Death by Immersion

Interesting photograph by Johannes Bojesen, in National Geographic:

The sheep had drowned while trying to cross a small canal in the meadow-swamp ‘Tøndermasken’ in southern Jylland in Denmark. Birds had eaten every part above the surface and everything under was left totally untouched.

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Vietnam War Photographs

 

From a big collection of Vietnam War photographs, I find these two particularly arresting.

Vietnam War Photographs

Imaging at a Trillion Frames per Second

Fascinating discussion of a technique to photograph at an absolutely astonishing framerate. At that speed, you can see light itself moving. Incredible.

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