In 2000, photographer Noah Kalina started his everyday self-portrait project that spawned a viral video (and countless copycats) six years later. He’s now twelve and a half years into the project now, and shows no signs of slowing down. The image above shows the 4,514 pictures he snapped of himself between January 11, 2000 and June 30, 2012. Kalina is also planning to release an updated version of the video that runs 7:41 min — 10 frames per second and 1 month every 3 seconds.
Artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen have a two-year-long project titled 100 Posterworks that features B&W portraits in various locations, with standard compositions, featuring witty messages on hand-painted signs.
Through the posters we address philosophical questions, comment on political or artistic issues, quote, complain, poke fun and indirectly document our lives. They can be read as a kind of cumulative (and often contradictory) artist statement.
Everyday People is a photo project for Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World by photographer John Clanton. The goal is to meet one new person in the community every day of the year, create a portrait of them, and display the image along with a short blurb about who they are. Clanton writes,
Looking at the 2012 calendar and trying to imagine getting a portrait every single day seemed daunting before I started. Photo Editor Christopher Smith and I refined the idea through several conversations at the end of last year. We picked a consistent, vertical composition, always using a 50mm lens and decided that the discipline of looking for a picture every single day was of utmost importance. I’m not allowed to stockpile pictures and then release them on a different day.
I’m not looking for people who stand out in a crowd. The majority aren’t famous or in positions of power. They’re just Everyday People, like me. They are your neighbors, your co-workers, your kids’ teachers, the guy who prepared your food or the people you drove past on your way to work. They are people who love their work or live for their past-times. They are people with plenty to say or just enough time for a picture. Through these portraits I’m getting to know the city.
You probably know of the iconic photograph titled Migrant Mother, but do you know the government photo project that led to its creation? Between 1935 and 1943, the US Government launched the largest photo project in the history of the country through its Resettlement Administration (RA) — later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The project enlisted the likes of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to help educate citizens in the East about what was going on in the West, and the giant PR campaign ended up producing over 170,000 photos and one of the most important photo collections in the US. The lecture above by Yale student Lauren Tilton offers a brief history lesson on this project.
Seattle-based techie Matt Harding became an Internet celebrity back in 2005 after a video of him dancing in various locations around the world went viral online. Now he’s back again with a new 2012 edition that’s sure to go just as viral. Harding spent months traveling to tens of countries around the world, capturing short clips of himself dancing with thousands of people. The project is titled, “Where the Hell is Matt?“. Read more…
200 Yards is a neat photo project based in San Francisco that centers around the idea of having photographers point cameras at a small section of a particular city. For each cycle, organizers pick a particular “alternative gallery space” and invite photographers to create photographs within a 200-yard radius of that location (this translates to roughly one block in each direction). Submissions are then whittled down until 12 photographers remain, and these artists are invited to the resulting exhibition at the gallery space.
Camera hoarder Stacie Grissom of Stars for Streetlights received a massive collection of old cameras from her uncle a couple years ago. She soon discovered that she wouldn’t possibly have time to use all of them, so she took a few of the neglected and worn down ones and made a one-of-a-kind lamp for her home. The cameras were turned into the lamp base using a pipe and some cold weld, and the lamp shade was made using color slide film. If you have some broken cameras lying around and want to make your own, Grissom has detailed her entire process over on her blog.
The United States is a diverse country, but there are few places in the US as diverse as New York City: “the greatest city on earth.” In many ways The City’s diversity makes it a street photographer’s gold-mine, and it’s this mine that photographer Brandon Stanton has been meticulously digging through over the last couple of years. Read more…
Created by Chris Bell, Liangjie Xia, and Mike Kelberman, Rotobooth is a novel new photo booth with a twist — literally. It’s powered by a hacked rotary phone and shoots a photo after the user dials their cell phone number. The image is then automatically uploaded to Flickr and a link to the photo is sent as a text message to the phone number provided. Check out this interview with Kelberman to learn more about the project and this Flickr set to see some behind-the-scenes photos.
After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander. Read more…
