Aspect, photo organization redefined – Bildhuus
For twenty years we have been using star ratings and color labels to organize our photos. We think it’s time for something better. Novel collection based organization approach; peer-to-peer synchronization across devices; transparent and automated photo storage; standard metadata and open formats; no subscriptions, no cloud.
Legendary photographer Martin Parr on the secret to a good picture – Esquire
You’ve got to have a story. You’ve got to say something in photography. Unless you do that, it’s not going to work. So that’s the priority. What are you trying to say with your photographs? Stories are the backbone of good photography. You look at the world, it’s a funny old weird place. So inevitably, if I’m doing my interpretation of what’s out there, then humour will be part of it. Because the world makes me laugh, and cry at the same time. … When starting out, copy other people. Look at the history of photography. And when you’ve got the right subject matter, dive into that. Once you get engrossed in it, that’s when it’s likely that your own style will start to emerge. … I take a lot of shots, because to get that good one, you need to have some momentum behind you. You have to keep shooting. Wait for that perfect shot to emerge, or it may not emerge. You just don’t know until you start shooting it.
How France uncovered the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris – NPR
“There was a small group of people who worked together and knew there was a kind of resistance through the pictures,” he says. But he says among the resistants at the store, there must have been at least one traitor, because in early 1943, someone denounced both Raoul and Marthe Minot in an anonymous letter to the police. […]
Broussard’s four-year investigation appeared as a series of articles in Le Monde in September. His stories recounting his sometimes frustrating search raised Minot out of obscurity. The late camera-slinging department store employee has now been officially recognized by the French government as a “résistant” — a high national honor — who died for France, bearing witness to the reality of Nazi Occupation.
What is it like to be a bass? Fish-eye view photography (1919–22) – The Public Domain Review
In a series of publications spanning the 1910s and 1920s, anglers attempted to crack the puzzle of fishing — what makes a fish bite, or not — through photography. Fisherman-scientists experimented with the cameras of their day to capture the world as seen from the fish’s eye. They created above-ground observation tanks, cordoned off sections of streams, and submerged “periscope”-like devices encased in glass. They grappled with dilemmas of distortion and refraction. Ultimately, the images they produced — of flies (real and fake) suspended on the water’s surface, of fishing line, and sometimes even of the photographers themselves — have their own avant-garde quality. These photos are an exercise in cross-species empathy: they are an effort to enter the mind of the fish through the lens of the camera.
How would he define his style? “It’s the palette of bright colours, and getting in close to your subject matter. The colour helps to take it one step away from reality. I guess that’s a part of my, erm… ‘vision’ sounds a bit pretentious. And humour. Life is funny. I try to bring that into the images.” His pictures are balanced between documentary, satire and commentary, serious stuff disguised as entertainment, turning the familiar into something alien, making you look harder. … He resists defining his work but has said, “I create fiction out of reality.” What does that mean? “It’s the subjective nature of photography. The only thing that matters is your relationship to the subject. That’s what you’re in control of. It’s all true, but it’s my truth. My personal truth.”
The horizon line – The Noah Kalina Newsletter
Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, when everything around me seems overwhelming, when I feel like I have nothing important enough to say or like I have nothing interesting enough going on, I drive to the water and make a photograph of the water and the horizon and the sky.
Deepfake videos are getting shockingly good – TechCrunch
Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date. … According to the ByteDance researchers, OmniHuman-1 only needs a single reference image and audio, like speech or vocals, to generate a clip of an arbitrary length. The output video’s aspect ratio is adjustable, as is the subject’s “body proportion” — i.e. how much of their body is shown in the fake footage. […]
The implications are worrisome. Last year, political deepfakes spread like wildfire around the globe. On election day in Taiwan, a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated group posted AI-generated, misleading audio of a politician throwing his support behind a pro-China candidate. In Moldova, deepfake videos depicted the country’s president, Maia Sandu, resigning. And in South Africa, a deepfake of rapper Eminem supporting a South African opposition party circulated ahead of the country’s election.
Strange, surreal and sexy: 31 images that changed the way we see our bodies – The Guardian
These photographs show us our bodies as we have never seen them before. Edward Weston’s captures a transcendental elegance in his lover Charis, as she dips her face from view like a resting swan tucking its head beneath a wing. The late Ren Hang, whose nude portraits of queer Chinese youth challenged government censors, lines up a mountain range of undulating bottoms. Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s self-portrait, pale limbs sandwiched between those of a silver birch, has a mischievous otherworldliness. It is as if you could step inside the frame, and into a magical world. There is nothing like an image of a body to expand your mind.
The winners of Rest of World’s photography contest – Rest of World
Sandra Singh; Italy. A group of refugees is photographed a few minutes after landing on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the closest part of the European Union that can be reached via a perilous boat journey from Libya or Tunisia. The Mediterranean Sea is the deadliest migration route for those fleeing persecution and poverty in their home countries. Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey. Their own phones had either been soaked during their crossing or had run out of battery during the long days spent on the sea.
My machine and me – Los Angeles Review of Books
Mark Fisher described his millennial students as “a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” For the next generation, the concept of time is segmented into even shorter media blocks. When is there the opportunity to feel sentimental? Should I feel sentimental about screen time? It is odd to be grateful to the laptop you paid $2,499 for, in 12 monthly installments, for reminding you of your physicality. I doubt Fisher would approve. The laptop gives the illusion of control over work-time when in fact it facilitates the erosion of a distinction between work and life. Still, I will take the help applying pressure to the hemorrhage. I want to be startled out of the trance, to pull my shoulders back and heave myself from bed. I want to remember that I am a body.
The photographs that defined 2024 – and the stories behind them – The Guardian
You could hear it first – the thundering of hooves – and these two horses appeared at the top of the road. People must have stopped and slowed down to let these horses bolt straight through. I ran to the pavement edge, whipped up the camera and managed to get a few frames as they sped past. I initially thought that the red colour on one of the horses was paint. Only when it got nearer did I realise it was blood.
Have a weird Christmas with our album of vintage photo oddities – Flashbak
There’s a weird vibe running through this album of Christmas images. Harvested from Robert E. Jackson’s phenomenal collection of snapshots we see all kinds of unusual goings on. One Christmas card features a photo of the sender covered in rats; on another a man canoodles a chimpanzee.
Associated Press 100 Photos of 2024: An epic catalog of humanity – Associated Press
They assembled a visual catalog of our civilization as life in 2024 hurtled directly at us at every speed and in every imaginable color and flavor — dizzying, unremitting, challenging the human race to make sense of it. And behind it all, the unspoken questions: How do you stop time? How do you preserve moments? Amid all the quick cuts that cut to the quick, how do you absorb what needs to be seen and remembered?
Photographs of sunsets as reflected through shattered mirrors by Bing Wright – Colossal
Broken Mirror/Evening Sky is a series of images by New York photographer Bing Wright who captured the reflections of sunsets on shattered mirrors. The final prints are displayed quite large, measuring nearly 4′ across by 6′ tall, creating what I can only imagine to be the appearance of stained glass windows.
Amazon’s Temu competitor Haul is an AI image wasteland – Modern Retail
In Hensell’s view, the proliferation of these shoddy images is indicative of the type of seller Amazon has been recruiting for Haul. “A lot of these Chinese manufacturers, they’re built for volume,” she said. The fact that Amazon has so far allowed these listings to remain up, she went on, is a bad look for brands on Amazon’s dominant marketplace. “It degrades Amazon as a platform when you allow that kind of stuff to happen.”
‘The most expensive photos ever taken’: the space shots that changed humanity’s view of itself – The Guardian
It was one of history’s monumental moments – but if John Glenn hadn’t popped into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board the Friendship 7, there may have been no visual document of it. The photographs the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule as he orbited Earth on 20 February 1962 gave an unprecedented testimony of the Mercury Project’s first orbital mission.
Endless fields of detritus blanket Cássio Vasconcellos’s aerial composites – Colossal
“These photos may look like post-apocalyptic scenarios, but they could be our future,” the artist says in a statement. “We still have to learn that by throwing things away and taking them out of our sight, we don’t make them disappear. In fact, they keep existing somewhere else, outliving us most of the time.” Vasconcellos cuts out individual shipping containers, trucks, dumpsters, and piles of detritus in a meticulous and time-consuming digital process. He never repeats an element in a composition, and each piece is scaled and situated so that the shadows align with the directionality of the light. He then adds dust and dirt to the surfaces, simultaneously emphasizing the patina of time and an eerie sense of timelessness.
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