A black Baptist minister and a group of Ku Klux Klan white supremacists. You wouldn’t expect to see them together, but that’s precisely why they’re found side-by-side in photographer Mark Laita‘s project Created Equal. Laita spent eight years shooting black-and-white portraits of Americans that are on opposite ends of various cultural spectrums. The images are then placed into diptychs that are both jarring in their juxtapositions and powerful reminders of our shared humanity.
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The words “grandma’s cooking” often elicits warm feelings and pangs of nostalgia in people, as they’re reminded of delicious meals prepared by their grandmother’s loving and experienced hands. Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti wanted to learn what these memories are for people in different cultures and contexts, so he set out to document grandmas and their dishes in countries all across the globe. The result is a project titled “Delicatessen with love.”
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Here’s an update on photographer Dennis Manarchy‘s Vanishing Cultures project, which we featured at the beginning of the year. Manarchy has just released the new video above that sheds some light on how the idea came about and how everything came together. After building the world’s biggest film camera, Manarchy has been using the “largest-format camera” to document 50 different cultures all across the United States in an epic 20,000-mile road trip. The resulting portraits will be displayed in an equally epic exhibition titled “The Vanishing Cultures: An American Portrait.”
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Starting in 2004, British photographer Julian Germain began a photo project shooting portraits of classrooms in North East England. The next year, he began doing the same thing for schools across the UK. It soon turned into an international project, as he began traveling to schools across the globe to document the environments young people are learning in. He calls the series Classroom Portraits. The photograph above shows a 4th grade math class in Cusco, Peru.
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