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.
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.
I cut a lens out of Plexiglas with a knife, ground the lens, made a camera of wood and cardboard, and took pictures with that. Of course it worked. When I do something, it has to be precise. Truly, the lens was not precise, but maybe that’s where the art is… Then I grind the lens with various types of sandpapers, first coarse sandpaper, then finer and finer, until you can see through it beautifully. And then what? It needs to be polished, that isn’t a problem. You take toothpaste, mix it with cigarette ash, and then you polish it. And that’s what I photographed with.
Polish photographers Szymon Roginski and Kasia Korzeniecka have created an inventive, three-dimensional way to display their photos with their o mia o project. Roginski’s night photos are pretty cool too.
There’s been a lot of attention lately around the work of photographer Robert Bergman. There are three simultaneous shows of his portraits at the National Gallery of Art, P.S.1, and the Yossi Milo gallery in New York. The haunting, closeup photos seem to emulate the more gaunt and worn of American humanity as captured by Robert Frank. But there is something piercing about everyone of them.
There’s a crazy faux-archeological dig going on in New York Harbor right now. Belgian artist Geert Hautekiet is curating a dig on Governors Island which includes artifacts from the former Belgian/French settlers’ collection of commercially unsuccessful snow globes, like one depicting a small boy being chased by two polar bears. Read a full report in the New York Times or go to Hautekiet’s site, The Archaeological Dig to read more. For pictures of the site, check out this photo slideshow.
The site also includes a number of sculpturelike apparatuses for scaring off birds, the result — according to what Mr. Hautekiet said the archaeologists have pieced together — of a troubling period in the town’s history in 1953 called the Plague of Birds. A monthslong infestation was apparently caused when the Spanish gas station owner, distraught that his wife had left him for a trucker, built hundreds of intricate and alluring bird houses and placed them around his business, where they can now be seen.
Ottawa-based company, DNA11, has come up with a great concept commercial art concept. For as little as $200 you can hang attractive representations of your actually DNA or fingerprints on the wall. After you order online and choose your color and style, you get a DNA collection kit, send by your sample and wait 4-6 weeks for the art.
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. 
