If you had to quickly flee both your home and country, what one possession would you make sure you take with you? It’s a question that reveals a lot about your life and values, and, unfortunately, is one that many people around the world actually have to answer.
NYC-based photographer Brian Sokol has been working on a project supported by the UN Refugee Agency titled “The Most Important Thing.” It consists of portraits of refugees in which the subjects pose with the one thing they couldn’t let go of when running away from home. Read more…
Photographer Matthew Brandt takes a unique approach to photography, where the subject of the photographs take second place to the methods he uses to print them. His photography — ranging in subject from lakes to buildings to bees — have been printed using everything from dust, to Kool-Aid, to human tears. Read more…
Rusidah Badawi lost her forearms in a tragic accident 32 years ago at the age of 12. After the amputation, the 44-year-old Indonesian woman was introduced to photography through a vocational rehabilitation centre for the handicapped. She immediately fell in love with it, and began a career working as a wedding and party photographer. Working primarily with film photography up until 2010, she switched over to digital when Canon sponsored her endeavors by gifting her with a digital Canon 550D DSLR and a Speedlite flash. Read more…
French artist Philippe Ramette captures surreal self-portraits in which he appears to be defying gravity. Rather than use digital trickery, Ramette — who started his career as a sculptor — builds metal support structures that allow him to stand or sit at impossible angles. Read more…
Don Hong-Oai was a San Francisco-based Chinese photographer who created beautiful images that resembled traditional Chinese paintings.
The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography, which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San (who died in the 1990s at the age of 104) with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to create a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.
Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to use this technique, and was also arguably the best. Read more…
Before We Begin is a project by photographer Christopher Jonassen (whose frying pan photos we featured here) that consists of diptychs showing clouds and cloud watchers. The images capture peaceful “moments of reflection between thought and action.” Read more…
Norwegian photographer Rune Guneriussen photographs man-made objects in nature as if they belonged there. The objects are arranged to look like packs of animals, humans, and natural formations. Read more…
After finding out that he was going to become a father, photographer Tom Robinson decided to make a creative photo project out of the task of telling his family and friends by capturing their expressions at the moment of hearing the news. Read more…
The photographs in Adam Magyar‘s Square series appear to show crowds of people bustling about in open town squares, seen from a height that makes them look almost like ants. In reality, each photograph is actually a composite of hundreds of individual photos, and none of the squares actually exist. Magyar photographed strangers walking on sidewalks from only 3-4 meters off the ground, and then blended the photographs together to make them seem like they were captured from a fake height! Read more…
Photographer Murray Fredericks took sixteen solo trips over eight years to the center of Lake Eyre in Australia, the largest lake in the country and one that forms salt flats every year when the water evaporates. These salt flats provide a perfectly flat, featureless landscape that extends to infinity in every direction, and allow for beautiful abstract photographs. Read more…
