Prison visiting rooms are often home to large-scale paintings that are enjoyed by only a few. Often created by the inmates themselves, the artworks serve as the photographic backdrops of a portrait studio as inmates pose in front of them for pictures that are given to loved ones as mementos.
Since these intricate drawings are generally only seen by inmates, visitors, and employees, photographer Alyse Emdur decided that she wanted to document them for a wider audience. She spent years creating a project titled Prison Landscapes, featuring photos of these idealized backdrops that, for a moment, transport the inmates to faraway places.
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We’ve been seeing more and more of this concept lately, but this one is still nicely done: Springfield, Missouri-based photographer Kent Frost created this 6.5-minute recap of his life in 2012 using one second of footage recorded each day. It’s titled, “Just a Second.”
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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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Some might say that the city of Rochester, New York is struggling; others might say that it’s evolving. One thing’s for sure though: Rochester — nicknamed The World’s Image Centre — is changing. Because of this, and because of the city’s rich photographical history (think Kodak), ten of Magnum Photos’ photographers have chosen Rochester as one of three locations currently being documented across the United States.
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Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker who launched a project in the early 1909 that aimed to create a photographic record of the world. The first commercially successful color photography process, Autochrome Lumière, had just arrived two years earlier, and Kahn decided to use the medium to both document human life and to promote peace. He sent out an army of photographers to 50 different countries, amassing 72,000 photos and 100 hours (183,000 meters) of film that became one of the most important collections of images in human history.
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Artist Jonathan Keller Keller first started taking a self-portrait of himself every day starting in 2000, and later created a time-lapse video showing eight years of his life passing in less than two minutes (similar to Noah Kalina’s famous everyday video). What’s neat is that Keller maintains a directory of other similar photo projects out there. All the projects either deal with the passage of time or the obsessive documentation of something.
Examples include the Golberg’s yearly family portrait project done since 1976, the Brown sisters photographed every year for 25 years, and Ellie Harrison’s documentation of everything she ate during an entire year.
Related Photo Projects [Jonathan Keller Keller]
