In the middle of last year, The Economist released rankings for the world’s most livable cities, and Hong Kong was found at the top. What many people don’t know, however, is that there is a percentage of Hong Kong residents living in rather horrid conditions.
In an attempt to draw attention to the issue, human rights organization Society for Community Organization recently commissioned a series of photographs showing what a number of unacceptable living spaces look like when viewed from directly overhead. (Here’s a larger version of the photo above.) Read more…
I have been taking pictures for almost twenty years now and so much has changed over those years. Back in the beginning gas used to cost $1.00, Bill Clinton was president, and I was picking up a camera for the first time. I started out in high school playing with my father’s Nikon FM2 and taking pictures for the school newspaper. Today, I work with a medium format digital back shooting national ad campaigns, magazine articles, and catalogs. Some aspects of how I photograph have stayed unchanged, but a great deal has changed considerably. Read more…
For the past two years, 37-year-old photographer Tou Chih-kang has been capturing the last moments of dogs at Taoyuan Animal Shelter in Taiwan. His roughly 400 portraits show the dogs — most of them abandoned by their owners — moments before they’re put to sleep. His mission is to raise awareness and encourage responsibility among pet owners:
I believe something should not be told but should be felt. And I hope these images will arouse the viewers to contemplate and feel for these unfortunate lives, and understand the inhumanity we the society are putting them through.
70% of dogs in Taiwanese animal shelters are euthanized after a brief 12-day waiting period, and it’s estimated that around 80,000 dogs will be euthanized year alone — a high figure for a country that has a human population of only 23 million. Tou’s project, titled Memento Mori
, can be seen here.
Photographer Chris Jordan uses his photography to bring awareness to a problem that many people have never heard about — baby albatross dying in the middle of the Pacific due to their parents feeding them plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Jordan finds the carcasses of the baby birds scattered around the Midway Islands and captures how they died filled with plastic. Watching this video about his work will probably make you think twice about how you use and dispose of plastic.
