For the past year, South African photographer Pieter Hugo has been photographing Agbogbloshie, a dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. It’s a wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology. It’s a haunting and dismal glimpse at what becomes of the 50 million tons of digital waste produced each year in the Western world. The exhibit, called Permanent Error, opens tomorrow at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Capetown, South Africa and runs until September.
From Beck’s Record Club, an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time.
Raina Lee’s parents were pack rats. And when they died she inherited 35 years worth of her parents’ stuff crammed into a 3-car garage in Southern California. The garage was a mythic place where as I child I could find anything– gadgets, kitchen wares, stamp collections, bags of money, and clothes. Now that my parents are gone, I’m clearing out their mess but discovering more than ever about their lives. She’s posting her finds on her Infinite Garage project daily and selling some of it on Etsy.
It’s like a Goya monster coming over the hills or something. French design studio Helmo has made these great collages for les Pronomade(s) en Haute-Garonne, an annual street arts festival in rural France.
I really like James Cooper’s photos. He’s a photographer from Bermuda who takes some of the most funny and creative underwater photos you’ve ever seen. Check out more photos at his image blog.
German photographer Nathalie Grenzhaeuser has taken some beautiful photos of the Arctic. In the series The Construction of the Quiet Earth, she has taken dramatic photos of mining and research facilities in the Arctic Archipelago, Spitzbergen. And in The Islands you can see the relentless lonesomeness of the tiny Arctic shacks built by hunters and trappers over the past century.
Ross Ching shows how attractive L.A. is when you get rid of the cars in Running on Empty. Ching was inspired by a similar project of still photographs, Empty L.A., from L.A. photographer Matt Logue.
So there was that week in the 90s when I was the editor of US magazine and I was all, “let’s run these photos I found of celebrities!” and they were, like, “I thought you worked in the parking garage– how’d you get in here.” Well, thank God at least somebody saved a few of the photos.
Interesting series from Brooklyn writer Ryan Bradley, where he chronicles a 70-mile walk roundtrip across the L.A. Basin. And he’s not the first to try this stunt. In 2007 British novelist Will Self walked from LAX to his downtown hotel 17 miles away.
Fresno’s been hit hard by the bursting of the housing bubble, where 12% of the homes there had some type of foreclosure filing in 2009. Few have benefited from this abundance of vacant homes like skaters. Cannonball, from the great new short film blog California is a place, shows how the backyards of Fresno have become one, big skater amusement park.
For the past year, South African photographer Pieter Hugo has been photographing Agbogbloshie, a dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. It’s a wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology. It’s a haunting and dismal glimpse at what becomes of the 50 million tons of digital waste produced each year in the Western world. The exhibit, called Permanent Error, opens tomorrow at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Capetown, South Africa and runs until September. 
