Photography

Artist Sarah Ross created some interesting designs of clothes to circumvent cities’ hostile architecture:

Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.

Via Kottke.org.

An article from Slate.com describes photography technique used by photographer Jay Mark Johnson to “emphasize time over space”:

[H]e uses a slit camera that emphasizes time over space. Whatever remains still is smeared into stripes, while the motion of crashing waves, cars and a Tai Chi master’s hands are registered moment by moment, as they pass his camera by. Like an EKG showing successive heartbeats, the width of an object corresponds not to distance or size, but the rate of movement. Viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward in space but backward in time.

Fascinating photography in this series: “China Says Goodbye to Crypto Mining”

Dozens of cryptocurrency mining centers were shuttered last month in Southwest China’s Sichuan province in the wake of a June 18 clean-up notice from local authorities as the country intensified its crackdown on cryptocurrency trading and mining. Sichuan is China’s second-biggest Bitcoin mining province, where most miners take advantage of the mountainous region’s abundant sources of hydropower to run their electricity-hungry computers.

An article from Open Culture describes why “A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph” is peculiar in the history of photography:

For one thing, we are not used to seeing them in old photographs, especially ones from the 19th century. When photography was first invented, exposures could take 45 minutes. Having a portrait taken meant sitting stock still for a very long time, so smiling was right out. It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway. Photographs were seen by many people as a “passage to immortality” and seriousness was seen as less ephemeral.

Allowed to grow old is a project by photographer Isa Leshko. In this project she made photographic portraits of farm animals. These animals usually never have the chance to grow old and I found them very moving.

The title of the following Vox video is a bit misleading. In fact, the video provides an excellent history on the creation of the fisheye lens and its use in music photography and videos. At the end of the video it even goes into a bit of semiotics, with the images allowing multiple or mediated interpretations for different people.

Photographer Ignacio Evangelista has made a beautiful series titled “After Schengen” where he photographed old border control checkpoints between EU Member States that are no longer in service since the Schengen agreement. See the full series here.

These places that prior the Schengen treaty, delimited territories and in which the traveler had to stop and show his documents, currently appear as abandoned places, located in a space-time limbo, out of use and out of the time for which they were designed, as these states have opened their borders to the free movement of people. The observation of these places in the present time, gives them a dimension related to viewing and reading of some episodes in recent history, with the passing of time and memory in the landscape. These quasi- archaeological ruins have become part of the current landscape, forming a presence of the past that lies dormant in the present.

Read more about the project in this article from Bloomberg.

Have a look at this video on Youtube from The Nerdwriter. A great video essay on how photographer Dorothea Lange made her photogrpah “Dorothea Lange”.

The photography project "Wasteland" by Kadir van Lohuizen contains some very powerful images of large cities and how they manage their waste. I think that the waste managment and recycling process has been going on too much in the background, and the only way out is to reduce our trash. See also this article in the Financial Times on why the recycling system became more visible. In the word of Kadir: “If the world is not prepared to think about waste reduction and actually treat waste as a resource, next generations will drown in their own waste.”

Just love this picture of Moai at Rano Raraku, Easter Island by Horacio Fernandez, how they are just scattered seemingly randomly and half disappearing into the ground. Reminds me also of the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;