Category : photography

Jesse Chehak’s Fool’s Gold is an amazing portrait of the West. Read a brief profile of Chehak in the New York Times’ Lens.

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.

There are lots of photo essays documenting the growing fallowness of Detroit, but Andrew Moore’s photos of Motown ruins are my favorite.

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.

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.

The four-story townhouse where the late Richard Avedon had his studio and home for more than 30 years is now on the market for $12 million. Currently owned by Olivier Sarkozy, the half-brother of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the ground-floor studio where Avedon made his photos has been left unchanged since the Sarkozys moved in 2005, the year after Avedon’s death. And it’s a pretty interesting studio space too. In this photo you can see how the walls of the studio curve into the floor, creating a backdrop with an illusion of unlimited space.

German photographer Robert Voit has taken a terrific series of photos of what he calls New Trees, examples of cellphone antennae camouflaged as trees.

They are nothing if not passionate in Kiev. While debating the seemingly innocuous subject of lease renewal for a Russian naval base this week, all hell broke loose. Check out the photos of the chaos. The chamber’s speaker had to be shielded by umbrellas as he was pelted with eggs, while smoke bombs exploded and politicians brawled, reports the BBC.

Joni Sternbach makes beautiful large-format tintype photos, especially her Surfers series.

A new exhibit of the work of reclusive Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý has recently opened at ICP in New York. The handmade cameras he makes are nearly as beautiful as the photos the cameras produce.

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.

See more photos of Tichý and his cameras. And go to Tichý’s website to see more of his photos.

Go along on a roadtrip with one of the world’s greatest living photographers and you’ll see it’s all about the crackers.

Photographer Matthew Albanese uses household items like grout, paprika and steel wool to build elaborate little miniature worlds to photograph. Read more about how the photos are made.

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.

San Francisco photographer Alex Fradkin has made some beautiful photos of concrete bunkers ruins around the San Francisco Bay Area. Built by the U.S. military to defend against an enemy that never came., some have fallen into the Pacific Ocean and some just sit quietly as they are absorbed back into the earth.

The annual “New Photography” exhibit at MoMA is getting some nice reviews. The New Yorker’s Vince Aletti calls it the best one in years. The MoMA site has only one photo a piece from the six artists in the installation, so check these links to see more work from Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, Sara VanDerBeek.

While working as a bartender at McGlinchey’s Tavern in Philadelphia, photographer Sara Stolfa took some great photographs of the regulars on the otherside of the bar. Take a look at her work at Gallery 339 in Philadelphia and at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York.

Check out this collection of Barack Obama during his freshman year at Occidental College. The photos were taken in 1980 by then photography student Lisa Jack and they are now on exhibit at the M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. Read more about Jack’s photos.