Back in March, we shared a time-lapse that showed photographer Liu Bolin — also known as the “invisible man” — disappearing into the stage at TED 2013. The time-lapse showed what he goes through for every project: days of preparation followed by hours of standing still while artists paint him “into” the background.
His talk during that conference, however, went into much more detail. He talks about the process of creating some of his best shots, about his start, and about the motivation behind his most impressive work. Fair warning: the talk is given with an interpreter but you’ll find you need to activate and lean mostly on the closed captions as the interpreter only gets the occasional word in. Read more…
Here’s a TEDx talk photographer Brandon Stanton gave at Columbia University last October about “how our worldview is negatively affected by good stories.” Stanton is the photographer behind the website Humans of New York. Read more…
The photographic story of Sebastião Salgado doesn’t begin when he was handed a camera as a child. It, like a few others we’ve shared, begins much later in life (after a PhD in economics) when photography, as Salgado puts it, “made a total invasion into [his] life.” Read more…
If you’ve never heard a basic overview of the history of photography, then this cute little animated video from TED-Ed is here for you. It covers everything from the invention of the camera obscura, to the battle between the calotype and the daguerreotype, to the rise of portable cameras. Read more…
Edith Widder is one of the three scientists that managed to capture the first high-resolution video footage of an actual giant squid. And about a month ago, her TED talk describing how she and her team did it (embedded above) was finally posted online.
Almost 2 stories tall, you would think that something that massive would have already been photographed or video taped. But it was Widder’s common-sense approach that would yield the groundbreaking footage. So, how did scientists manage to finally catch a giant squid on camera? One word: quietly. Read more…
Director Cesar Kuriyama received a good bit of attention on the Internet last year for capturing 1 second of video on each day of his 30th year of life, and then turning the snippets into a beautiful recap of his year. The video premiered during a TED talk Kuriyama gave in March. That talk has just been published by TED, and can be seen above. Read more…
Photographer Clyde Butcher shoots big photos, and we mean big. He develops large format black-and-white prints that range in size from your standard 8″x10″ all the way up to 5×8… feet! This phenomenal photographer’s journey and the type of photography he’s become famous for are an inspiration to the people out there who want to see the extent to which the medium can be pushed. Read more…
Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld. When asked what he felt like when the project was just starting out, Kusters states,
I was extremely nervous. Since they are gangsters, I thought I should be very careful, in case I shot something I wasn’t supposed to see. But this actually upset the gang. They saw my nervousness as disrespectful. I remember one time early on this guy pulled me aside and said, “You are here to take pictures. Act like a professional.” It turned out they respected me if I was really aggressive about getting a certain shot. To not take photos was a sign of weakness.
As his surname suggests, Kusters is not from Japan (he’s from Belgium). It took 10 months of negotiations before he and his brother were given an unprecedented access into the closed world of Japanese organized crime. Read more…
Try imagining a make-believe creature that has absolutely no basis in reality. Can you? Not really. The truth is, everything imaginary is simply a rehash of things that actually exist… just in a combination that doesn’t exist. Aliens are simply strange combinations of humans and other creatures that we know. Unicorns are horses with horns. Bigfoot is some guy that accidentally spilled Rogaine all over his body.
This is the basis for writer Kirby Ferguson’s big idea: that “everything is a remix.” He created a popular four part video series on this topic over the past year, and recently he was invited by TED to give the condensed, sub-10-minute version of it that’s shown above. Read more…
San Francisco-based photographer Lisa Kristine has spent the past 28 years documenting indigenous cultures in 70 countries on 6 continents around the world. More recently, she has been working with the organization Free the Slaves, using her photography to document the monstrosity that is modern day slavery.
The video above is a powerfully moving talk Kristine recently gave at TEDxMaui about the subject and her photography that is meant to make a difference. Read more…
