Found this in the Wall Street Journal’s “Photo Journal” daily page.
The sculpture “What You see Might Not Be Real,” by Chen Wenling, was displayed at a Beijing gallery Sunday. The artwork is a critique of the global financial crisis, with the bull representing Wall Street and the man pinned to the wall representing Bernard Madoff. (Photo credit – Ng Han Guan/Associated Press)
I recently saw a few photos of the Chaiten Volcano eruption which occurred about a year and a half ago. Not sure why this item went unoticed, I think it must have something to do with the media giving most of its attention to the 2008 presidential elections.
The photos are fascinating, especially the lightning image.
The Chaiten Volcano is located in Chile, the recent eruption occurred in early May 2008—the volcano’s first activity in over 9,000 years.
Lightning picture taken May 2, 2008 by Carlos Gutierrez. The other two photographs are from Reuters.
Wow! So I made my most prized internet discovery today—completely by accident too. This is no secret stuff, it just happens to be the case that I was entirely unaware of it until now. This find confirms my belief that life in the 1930s and 40s was the most beautiful in all of history. Everything was made by professional designers. Hardly anyone was overweight. If you look at these photographs, literally everything is beautiful in my opinion. Life was full of modern convenience, but the aesthetic was still “Old World”. Everything has a naturalness which stems from a lack of plastic. I hate plastic.
Anyways, I stumbled upon the Library of Congress’ color photograph collection from the 1930s through 1940s. Mostly WPA stuff. Totally incredible! I nearly cried I wanted to live in that time so badly. You can dig and dig for hours and then do it all over again. Really really great stuff! Enjoy!
I thoroughly enjoy Morad Bouchakour’s Mennonites in Mexico project. There are some very intriguing images among the set. I have always been drawn to the culture and aesthetic of the Mennonites. Something about the “Wild-Westness” and the stoicism and the piety really impresses me. I have had an easy life but through the ethnic and geographic similarities between the Mennonites and myself I am able to imagine more vividly what it would have been like to live in the “Old World” or in the “Current World” without this computer, iPhone, wardrobe, urban apartment, etc.
These photos capture me because of their ability to offer my mind so much substance to imagine a completely different scenario for my own life. In this way they are very personal, subjectively malleable and jam-packed with functional value in the imaginative sense. The images are useful to me in some way. They provide a service to my mind in a way that I appreciate much more than an image that is simply “eye candy” or “sexy” like awesome architectural photography or a well done portrait by Karsh or something.
In this way I appreciate photo-journalistic art-photography so much more than any other form. I like photographs that present an open door invitation to wander imaginatively more than I like photographs that are blatantly powerful like someone being blown up or an epic vista of some remote land or some impoverished people pulling water from a primitive well. Of course the exotic is intriguing, but so much more fascinating is that subtly-active middle area between your own experience and those experiences that are not your own.
If you enjoy these photographs you will probably also enjoy the work of Larry Towell, a Magnum practitioner on the subtle end of the spectrum. He has a soft heart, slow pace and knows how to use a pen—valuable characteristics for any photographer.
By some uncertain stroke of luck I was able to visit the Cook County Law Library with my camera in hand. This morning’s visit is proof again that smiling and saying “please” can get you anything you want. I was told by the first batch of guardsmen that I spoke to that cameras were officiously forbidden. Perseverence prevailed.
Nearly every image turned out well—you couldn’t make a bad composition with all those wonderful lines and the plentiful natural light!
The building, built by none other than Mies van der Rohe is an impressive specimen of mid twentieth-century modernism. I have criticized the building in the past for its anti-humanist qualities, but today I changed my mind.
I rode the El down into the Loop at the crack of dawn this morning in order to arrive in time to make use of the rising sun. It was a very productive several hours—having found a handful of elevated vantage points from which to scour the city with my camera. The photos are mainly for a website currently in development, though I was having perhaps too much fun to think of it as work.
It’s called the magic hour for a reason.
I had to take some photos of a bunch of food for a website I’ve been working on. I hadn’t ever done any food photographs so I spent a day practicing.
The food shoot turned out well, I learned a lot from the mistakes I made, and I think I could do much better next time.
Overall it’s a fun subject to work with.