Photographer Lilly McElroy has a unique series of photos titled I Throw Myself At Men that consists of self-portraits showing her launching herself into the arms of strangers.
For this project I went to a lot of bars and I literally threw myself at men who I didn’t know. I used my body as a projectile, hurling myself toward strong, vulnerable men who were waiting to catch me. Poised in a perpetual state of social awkwardness and in full possession of the ability to subvert stereotypical gender roles, the photographs pose questions concerning relationships, social connection, sex, gender, and the desire to form relationships quickly that are both intense and long lasting.
The project got started after McElroy placed ads on Craigslist asking for men who’d be willing to meet blind date-style in bars and have McElroy throw herself at them. Read more…
YouTube member MJRecession came up with the idea of placing a digital camera onto the conveyor belt a sushi restaurant in Japan to record candid portraits of the other patrons in the restaurant. It’d be interesting to see this same thing done at sushi bars around the world to see how different cultures would react.
Candidtag is a new service designed to make it easy to earn a little cash by photographing strangers you meet out in public. The idea is that there are people (e.g. tourists) out there who are too busy enjoying their lives to carry a camera around, but at the same time would like memories of their experiences. If you always carry your camera around, you can offer to take pictures for strangers and then give them a card pointing them to your Candidtag “collection”. The client can later visit the website to view the photos you took and purchase prints or digital copies. Photographers are paid by commission when sales are made.
Adde Adesokan of Germany captures beautiful portraits of strangers by snapping three photographs of their head, hands, and feet. The frames are then arranged as triptychs that creatively reveal who the subjects are. Read more…
Social Lights is a project by photographer Seymour Templar that’s like a nighttime version of Joe Holmes’ Texting series that we featured earlier this year. Templar documented social life in NYC by snapping portraits of people interacting with others through their cell phones. Each individual unwittingly helps out by lighting their own faces with their phone displays. Read more…
This video shows a social experiment in which disposable cameras were left unattended in various public locations with a simple message: “Take a Photo”. Hidden cameras were stationed nearby to observe how people responded to the cameras, and to provide some behind-the-scenes footage to how the various photographs were captured.
A few weeks ago, Brooklyn resident Katie O’Beirne did a weekend project in which she left a disposable camera on a Prospect Park bench with a note asking passer-bys to snap a photograph. After getting the film developed and finding some cool photos, O’Beirne decided to continue with the project, leaving disposable cameras in a number of other spots around NYC. The resulting photographs can be seen on a Tumblr page she set up called “new york shots“. Read more…
If you want to do street photography, attacking people with cameras like Fabio Pires does in London probably isn’t the way you should go about doing it — unless you’re trying to give photography a bad name. Does anyone know of any good behind-the-scenes videos of good (and candid) street photography being done in a respectable way?
Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing Chinese photographer ERIC getting up close and personal with strangers on the streets of Hong Kong and Mainland China. He uses a Mamiya 7II and a large Metz flash, chewing through medium format film as though he was shooting digital. It’s interesting to see how people in China seem less defensive about this kind of photography compared to people in New York, Derby, or Hollywood.
Street photographer Eric Kim wanted to capture what it’s like to roam around on the streets and shoot photographs of complete strangers (without their permission), so he mounted a GoPro HD 960 video camera to the top of his Leica M9 and then walked the streets of LA. You can see some of the resulting photos over on Kim’s blog.
