Also, while we’re on a gentle Friday Planet Earth kick: if you’ve missed the winners of August’s National Geographic Traveler photo contest, head over here and take a look.
- Maggie
Shantanu Starick is a young Australian photographer paying his way around the globe solely by use of his trade. In exchange for food, transportation, and a place to sleep, Starick offers his photography and editing skills to any subject in need of a close up. The result, then, is Pixel Trade, the lovely site where Starick catalogs the products of his photo-couch-surfing endeavor. Take a look; Starick has quite a beautiful, clever system going over there.
[Photo credit: Pixel Trade / Shantanu Starick]
- Maggie
Andy Baker brings to life the lone single “All That We’ve Become” from a new band named Society - known only by one mysteriously barren soundcloud page. In any case, “All That We’ve Become” has a great sound, and Baker’s sketchy black and white pencil animation fits perfectly with the song’s tone of isolation and unrefined teenage angst. I love the animation’s use of shadow, the movement of its character through shafts of light and darkness. Here’s hoping we’ll see/hear more from Society soon.
See more of Andy Baker’s work here.
- Maggie
Frans Hofmeester has filmed his son every week of the young boy’s life, from birth until his recent ninth birthday. “Portrait of Vince” is now making the internet rounds, and if you’re looking for a little fluff break from work, it’s pretty great to see a beautiful smiling baby grow into a young boy before your eyes. I love that it’s not just a photo each week - you see the sleepy mornings, the giggle fits, and the toddler tears - as Vince navigates the salty waters of tooth loss and childhood.
(Elsewhere: in the far-off, cobwebby corners of YouTube, a more sinister transformation is taking place.)
- Maggie
I recently came across an old journal of mine and spent the entire day pouring over it, fascinated. I remembered writing the words - I occupied the same physical space, shared the same bones - but the person who spoke them was a complete stranger. It’s amazing how continuous our experience of being feels, while every day is a constant process of changing; a scene, a movement, a thought - each moment leaves behind the person we were without it.
Photographer Bobby Neel Adams captures the raw physicality of this change in his project, Age Maps. He performs what he calls “photo-surgery,” a montage technique in which he merges a subject’s childhood photo with the adult self, “telescoping the slow process of aging into a single picture.” Preferring to avoid digital editing, Adams develops each photo to the same scale and then, simply tearing them, combines them as one:
“The point at which the images are physically torn together becomes the boundary… between decades of passing time.”
- Maggie
Following 2010’s Stockholm and 2011’s Copenhagen editions, the designers of Sweden’s jollygoodfellow are back with another beautiful edition of UrbnCal. With each month focused on one specific area of the city, 2012 documents their number study of Helsinki as they explored by bicycle; interested in every day details, each calendar date is a snapshot of the daily typography of numbers found within the Finnish capital. An appendix details the exact location of each photograph is included by month.
From designers Esa and Lisa Tanttu:
The idea from the beginning was to photograph many cities and compare the graphic impression of the numbers plates in different countries. … For us, the number plate is a marriage between architecture and typography, not always happy but always interesting.
Calendars are available for sale here, and be sure to check out the urbncal blog for their lovely daily photo posts.
[ Photo credit: Lisa & Esa Tanttu, jollygoodfellow ]
- Maggie
Photographer Nick Brandt first experienced the African landscape on a 1995 shoot for a music video, still working within his formal training in film. Upon shifting into photography, however, Brandt returned, hoping to capture the extraordinary continent’s wildlife and its heartbreaking decimation. Inundated with television and documentary series on the animal in action, Brandt prefers to speak through “that single dramatic moment” of his unbelievably intimate photographs. A nuanced documentation of the harshness of the animal kingdom in its decomposition, his latest series magnifies the sheer vastness of the African existence, juxtaposing the rippling and powerful muscle of life on its plains with the inevitability of its antithesis. In a tangled, twisted limb; by a bleached, dried bone; the stench of death hangs low in the African air, looming just beyond the periphery of Brandt’s immense black and white landscape.
(Brandt’s work is currently on display at Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.)
- Maggie
