Kenyan Women Photo Project — visible from outer space

The hip, young French photographer, JR, likes to make his photographs larger than life and visible from afar. His most recent project in the slums of Kenya are designed to be visible from Google Earth satellites as well as from the elevated train tracks that pass by the village twice a day. The intention is to draw attention to the persistent strength of women in these struggling, poverty-stricken areas.

2000 square meters of rusty corrugated metal rooftops are now covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, which is one of the largest slums of Africa. Most of the women have their own photos on their own rooftop, and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season.

The train that passes on the line through Kibera at least twice a day is covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces are pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.

JR is what I would call a 21st century concerned photographer. He wants to call attention to important social problems, and he uses unusual materials and extravagant means to get his message out into the world. He has completed other audacious projects with people in Brazil, India, Cambodia, and other parts of Africa. And he's pasted smiling portraits of Palestinians and Israelis on both sides of the wall that divides them — showing how similar and human those on the other side look in reality.

For more information, check out JR's website. http://28millimetres.com/women/?ke

by jimcasper

The Transparent City

Big cities can sometimes seem like immense visual abstractions. The jam-packed juxtapositions of diverse styles of architecture — all compressed into dense overlapping vertical spaces — can be seen as things of rare man-made beauty.

These soaring glass-walled environments also invite a sometimes perverse delight in voyeurism. Michael Wolf’s new photobook, The Transparent City, captures both of these aspects nearly perfectly in his recent photographic study of downtown Chicago.

Someone described this work as “Hopper meets Blade Runner,” and I might add a third reference: Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Wolf positions himself on rooftops or in the windows of opposing buildings to get the most amazing vantage points for each scene. He waits for perfect light at the time of day when twilight and interior light render the building walls nearly invisible. An incredible large format camera with a 112-megapixel digital back captures and reveals exquisite details. It's a stunning combination.

Midway through the project, which started with its focus on the architecture of Chicago, Wolf discovered that when he enlarged his photos he could actually see what was going on in nearly every window of every building. Indeed, one office worker in a huge building opposite Wolf’s camera was giving him the finger in a gesture of contempt for his supposed spying!

This after-the-fact discovery added a new dimension to the project for Wolf. He started to look inside as well as outside, and to play one aspect against the other. These sparkling, huge photos became complexly rich statements about daily urban life in the 21st century.

Natasha Egan writes in her introduction to the book:

While it has been more common for photographers to glorify Chicago’s unique architecture and environmental context, Wolf depicts the city more abstractly, focusing less on individual well-known structures and more on the contradictions of architectural styles when visually flattened in a photograph. Unlike the impermeable windows in his Hong Kong pictures, his photographs of Chicago look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the social constructs of living and working in an urban environment.

But far from titillation, Wolf discovers a rather mundane loneliness in his windows — people staring into computers or gazing at television sets or napping alone in armchairs. Many residents seem numbly isolated in sterile, generic boxes of rooms suspended in the sky away from any kind of grounded reality.

Writer and blogger Geoff Manaugh sees a direct correlation between these photographs and the psychological effect depicted in the 1975 novel by J. G. Ballard, High-Rise. Ballard suggested that the nature of these buildings produces a "new social type." Manaugh continues:

These people have "minimal needs for privacy," living more "like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere" of the building. Like an architectural mood stabilizer — or spatial Prozac — the building itself gives rise to an "unemotional personality," someone who spends time "waiting for something to happen" while doing nothing themselves.

Wolf accentuates this feeling of alienation and "no exit" with tight cropping of each photograph, so it is difficult to find any reassuring context even in a vast panorama. “You can never go off the building surface and find the sky,” Wolf says. “I make these images so that the only escape is to peer into one of the windows.”

It is especially disturbing to realize that these are the kind of views that urban dwellers experience every day.

The book is beautifully printed in a large, luxurious format on beautiful paper. Three insightful essays accompany the photographs helping to make the entire experience very rich and rewarding. Recommended.

— Jim Casper

The Transparent City

by Michael Wolf

Heavy Light

Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan provides a subjective and lively glimpse into contemporary Japanese lens-based art. In this book, Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku showcase the work of thirteen Japanese artists who participated in the 2008 ICP exhibit of the same name.

Heavy Light unites different generations of photographers working with different techniques, such as cityscapes, kitschy portraiture, video installations and fantastically-staged scenes. In their introduction, Phillips and Fuku explain that their focus is on three themes: urbanism and nature, individual versus collective identity, and the relation of the adult to the child. While these ideas seem relevant to almost every culture, in the pages that follow, the reader learns how the Japanese, specifically, address these conflicts.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa, for example, turns to vegetables. In Ozawa's series "Vegetable Weapon," female models pose with guns constructed from ears of corn, carrots, heads of lettuce, peppers and leeks. Ozawa combined his personal interests in eating, cooking, and women, with an external eye on the world's violence, creating a juxtaposition that provokes laughter along with pensiveness.

Perhaps better-known and slightly more conventional are the portraits by Hiroh Kikai. For decades, Kikai has taken street photographs of people passing by a temple in Asakusa. Kikai provides brief character sketches in his captions, such as, "A maintenance man for industrial dishwashers" or "A man who said he'd just had a drunken quarrel." His raw, honest images convey the personal preoccupations of the quotidian Japanese passers-by.

On the other end of the spectrum is the imaginative and unsettling photography of Miwa Yanagi. Yanagi stages intricate, black-and-white reenactments of traditional fairy tales. In "Gretel," a dazed young girl chews the finger of a veiny, spindly arm. Yanagi explores the antagonistic and ambiguous relationship between the characters.

One of the great things about this compendium is the revealing interview with each photographer. In addition to being able to see an overview of their work, we get to know the personality and ambition of each photographer through this conversational exchange.

Asako Narahashi, for one, explains how she went from creating B-movies to shooting photography with her "eyes deliberately out of focus." She made her ethereal urban landscape series "half awake and half asleep in the water" without once looking into the camera's viewfinder. In her interview with Fuku, she remarks, "I choose a spot, go into the water, snap the shutter, and leave the rest to the camera. It's like I say, 'Okay Mr. Camera, treat me well!' I also pray that the camera doesn't break." Narahashi's humility underlines her creative genius.

The book also includes the work of Makoto Aida, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Kajitani, Midori Komatsubara, Yukio Nakagawa, Tomoko Sawada, Risaku Suzuki, Kenji Yanobe and Masayuki Yoshinaga. Heavy Light makes for a great introduction to the recent and contemporary photography scene in Japan -- from quirky to serious images, all rooted somehow to the history of Japanese art.

— Hilary Moss

Heavy Light:

Recent Photography and Video from Japan

by Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku

Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986

Thousands of contemporary photographers and photography-lovers know Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss as the high-energy couple who curate, organize and host FotoFest, the world’s best international photo festival and portfolio review that takes place every two years in Houston, Texas.

Fred and Wendy are also happy globe-trotters, constantly traveling around the world to participate in photography festivals, conferences and portfolio reviews — looking at new work, encouraging promising photographers, and helping to introduce like-minded people to each other wherever they go. They are highly-respected and well-loved by many, many people in the world of photography.

What comes as a pleasant surprise, however, is to discover the tremendous photographic output that the two have generated themselves, over the past 40 years, working individually and together as photographers, journalists and activists for human rights and social justice. A retrospective of several photographic series that they made in the United States is being shown for the first time at the large and wonderful new wing of Le Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium.

Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986 is an extended look at cultural and political life in the United States over nearly three decades of change and stability. A book of the same title has been published to coincide with the exhibition.

The work on display touches on some of the most important historic events of the last half century in the U.S. — the Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan, Vietnam War, American drug culture, Feminism, and local and national politics, to name a few. They traveled with and photographed well-known figures from that era, including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

Beyond the big stories, they immersed themselves in local issues in various parts of the South. They documented rural life, poverty, and the struggles for survival and dignity in small communities throughout Texas over an extended period of 13 years of self-initiated investigations.

The photos are rich in humanity, and very quiet in drama. They are not typical news photographs. Instead, they reveal complex stories in a matter-of-fact way that is quite refreshing. Xavier Canonne, director of the museum in Charleroi who spear-headed this retrospective, writes in his introduction: "The subjects photographed in each area were not predefined by the photographers. Instead, they worked in concentric circles, discovering and recording moments of daily life, the evidences of social class, and the ceremonies – religious, scholarly,social and sportive – that shape collective existence and reflect its origins. Everything in this work has informative value: people’s dress, their hair, their food, their way of standing in front of the lens or ignoring it...”

In an excellent interview, Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss talk about lots of issues, and they speak articulately and passionately about their personal beliefs. When asked what lessons they learned from their long journey in Texas, Wendy replied:

In all these works, there is an understanding of the importance of history and the record of that history. We have a deep understanding of the depth of human struggle and the need to continually document, expand the memory of this struggle and move forward with it.

What is depicted in these works is still relevant to U.S. contemporary history. With the Civil Rights Movement, one of the young African American men who assisted Fred in working with the Civil Rights Movement in Savannah was the first black student to integrate Armstrong Junior College in Savannah. This man is now Mayor of Savannah. This story is very relevant to the current U.S. presidential election and what Barack Obama says he stands for.

The realities and results of the Vietnam War interconnect with much of what is happening to U.S. soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – and certainly the official treatment of veterans’ health and psychological problems related to these wars and the first Gulf War. Once the visible combat wounds are treated, and hopefully, healed, current treatment of U.S. veterans is not dissimilar to what happened to U.S. veterans during and after the Vietnam War. This is especially true with post-traumatic stress syndrome problems, brain injuries, and immune system problems associated with the use of depleted uranium weaponry.

Certainly, the histories and ways of life we photographed in Texas 20-30 years ago continue to be relevant to contemporary political and social developments in Texas and the United States.

This exhibition, and the book, are important reminders of the power of photography (and personal activism) and how it can affect positive change, directly or indirectly. Anyone who is interested in the history of the United States, human rights, and documentary photography will find value in this work.

— Jim Casper
Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986January 24 to May 24, 2009

Photographs by

Wendy Watriss & Frederick C. Baldwin

Portraits @ Cooper

The Body as Billboard: Your Ad Here

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: February 17, 2009

TERRY GARDNER, a legal secretary in California, returned home from work recently to find two police officers waiting. They said her brother had told them he thought she might be having a breakdown because she had shaved her head.

Ms. Gardner, 50, said in a telephone interview that she had told the officers that she was fine and had shaved her head for an advertising campaign by Air New Zealand, which had hired her to display a temporary tattoo. She turned around and showed them the message, written in henna on the back of her head: “Need A Change? Head Down to New Zealand. http://www.airnewzealand.com/.”
Ms. Gardner was among 30 of what the airline calls “cranial billboards.” For shaving their noggins and displaying the ad copy for two weeks in November, they received either a round-trip ticket to New Zealand (worth about $1,200) or $777 in cash (an allusion to the Boeing 777, a model in the airline’s fleet).
Jodi Williams, director of marketing for Air New Zealand, said half the participants selected the flight, because many were either New Zealand expatriates or, like Ms. Gardner, had visited and wanted to return. The participants were, in marketing parlance, ideal brand ambassadors: when co-workers or strangers behind them in the grocery store line asked about New Zealand, they could speak enthusiastically right off the top of their heads — so to speak.
Peter Shankman, author of “Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work — and Why Your Company Needs Them,” applauds the airline for the “Tom Sawyer handing out paintbrushes” approach.

6 Painters and Photographers....

P A U L S T R A N D

"I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time."

~ Paul Strand

D A V I D L E V I N E

I liked the way this artist makes portrait. It really draws attention of the viewers. It also shows the personality as a whole which viewers will remember for years..

I tried some .....

A D O L F W O L F L I

The way he put pictures in the middle of his art draw my attention and i think its really cool. I agree it will distract viewers from the picture when we look at this picture first but as a whole it will draw attention of viewers as an artistic frame or matting.

A N D Y G R I F F I N

I found this photographer in Internet. I liked his portraits very much so i am including him over here. I liked his way of blending portraits with background very much.

W R I G H T M O R R I S

I always like dynamic shape and lines in photographs. I think it also draws attention from the viewers. Angle from which he takes photograph makes really solid objects with dynamic shape which i liked about this photographer.

P H I L I P P E H A L S M A N

This photographer uses different techniques to portrait different people. Some of his portrait is very straight forward portrait but some we can find with lots of movement in it. I liked the light settings and simplicity of his portraits.

Thirteen Ways to be a Greener Photographer

Thirteen Ways to be a Greener Photographer
Here are a few things all photographers can do to be greener.
By American Photo Staff
September/October 2007

The good news: Digital photography has taken huge amounts of chemicals out of our waste stream, including bleach and silver, not to mention millions of plastic-coated prints. The bad news: Digital sucks down a lot of electricity and requires new equipment, which consumes lots of resources and creates considerable eco-impacts, usually far away. Here are a few things all photographers can do to be greener.

1. Watch the Power Meter
With digital, you'll need to keep your power consumption under control if you don't want to warm the planet: Every kilowatt-hour you use produces about 1.4 pounds of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Choose Energy Star-certified equipment, and turn off or put to sleep your computer, display, printer, and scanner when you can. Invest in a power meter like the Kill A Watt to keep tabs on your usage -- you may be in for unpleasant surprises.

2. Choose Your Power
A digital studio, including your Mac Pro computer, your Epson Stylus Pro 3800 printer, and your Nikon D80 charger, will consume hundreds or thousands of kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. Make sure that power is coming from renewable, non-carbon-polluting sources. Through your utility, switch to wind, hydro, or other sources; it may cost a little more, but rebates can help with that, and you're making a difference where it counts, at the source.

3. Recycle Everything
A digital studio will still produce paper waste -- it makes up about a third of our trash. Recycle every scrap; making a ton of paper from waste requires about two-thirds less energy than from wood pulp. Recycle ink cartridges (office stores and online retailers will give you credit for empties) and, when necessary, electronics. Electronic waste has harmful metals and chemicals; give it to a recycling plant that will salvage for useful parts and not just dump it in a landfill.

4. Shoot Locally
Transportation accounts for one-third of the average American's "carbon footprint" -- the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. If you're typical, you're responsible for about 15,000 pounds of CO2 a year. One round trip to shoot Maui's jungle could account for half of that.

5. Offset Your CO2
Can't stay home? Can't get your computer, scanner, and printer off the grid? You can help offset your footprint by buying carbon credits via companies such as CarbonFund.org and NativeEnergy. Your money will help create renewable-energy sources and meet other conservation goals.

6. Conserve Energy
The basic energy tips you're practicing in your nonphoto life will work in the studio, too. Using compact fluorescent bulbs and taking a degree or two off the thermostat in winter (and adding a degree in summer) will save energy and keep hundreds of pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

7. Unplug It All
Rechargers and other equipment left on standby create phantom loads that waste megawatts every year. Unplug rechargers and power down anything you're not using that has a little green or red light on it. You'll save money and keep CO2 out of the atmosphere.

8. Watch the Chemicals
Processing in a darkroom? Use chemicals less harmful to the environment, such as Kodak's Xtol and other ascorbate (vitamin C) developers. Manufacturers say quantities you use at home can be disposed via your sewer. Check silvergrain.org for nontoxic solutions.

9. Find Greener Options
Explore recycled papers such as Red River Paper's Green Pix, use rechargeable batteries (NiMH is better than NiCd), and, if you print a lot, buy ink in bulk rather than blowing through plastic cartridges. Extra credit: Get a solar-powered battery charger.

10. Be a Responsible Consumer
Vote for the environment with your wallet: Ask camera, paper, and film manufacturers about environmental efforts, from recycling to energy use to materials.

11. Shoot the Change You Want in the World
It's not just how you shoot, it's what you shoot. Think about how your images can represent solutions or illuminate a new angle on an environmental problem.

12. Spread the Word
Small steps add up when millions join in. Tell two friends about your new, greener way of looking at photography. They'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on...

13. Make It Last
A long-lived camera is environmentally friendly. Do your research, buy great stuff, and treat it right: It takes a great deal of materials, energy, and pollutants to make a new camera, and pretty much zero to keep your current one in tip-top shape.

The Photographing of the President, 2008

The Photographing of the President, 2008
How a little-known, 25-year-old photographer became the most-viewed shooter of the Obama-McCain election.
By Joe Gioia November 2008

Click photo to see more 2008 Presidential Campaign images.
One sign of our digital times is how quickly something can become a phenomenon. For example, Brett Marty bought his first digital SLR for a college class two years ago and used it to document his epic overland journey in an old Buick from San Francisco to the shores of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego. Last September the 25-year-old filmmaker began photographing presidential campaign events in battleground states for the white-hot political blog Fivethirtyeight.com. Today he's probably the most-viewed photographer of the 2008 election.
Don't believe it? Consider that on election day alone the Progressive poll-analysis site got almost 3 million hits. The Flickr photo server hosting Marty's photographs was nearly overwhelmed by traffic from Fivethirtyeight that night and embargoed his pictures indefinitely. (They are available now at BrettMarty.com.)
What's not in doubt is that Marty is the first photographer to take an open-ended self-assignment with a news blog and end up six weeks later with credentials for the national press corps. In doing so, he and Sean Quinn, Fivethirtyeight's lone reporter, logged over 14,000 miles through 15 states, covering what political junkies call the ground game: the cadres of local volunteers and organizers in both parties, working to get out the vote.
Their partnership began in late summer. Marty finished a documentary feature project and, swept up by election-year politics, was looking for something to do. He emailed Quinn, already on the road in Carson City, Nevada, to ask if he needed a photographer. The two had never met.
Quinn says several photographers contacted him, but "Brett's e-mail stood out. I saw his pictures from Argentina on his website and realized he's someone who knows how to travel the way I do. We hit it off on the phone right away, and he could leave the next day." He drove the 200 miles to San Francisco to pick Marty up and start a journey that did not end until they covered president-elect Obama's first press conference nearly two months later.
Equipped with two Apple Powerbooks, cell phones, a broadband wireless modem, and the same Nikon D80 body and standard 18-135mm lens Marty took to Argentina, the pair spent every waking hour on the job, one driving while the other wrote, edited photos, or planned the next day's itinerary.
Marty says they researched past election results and new voter registration figures to find communities where the Obama and McCain campaigns were concentrating their efforts. "We could kind of figure out the battleground counties and we'd go see what was going on in them." Both campaigns listed their field offices on line. "Usually the smaller the area and the less frequently they had to deal with the media, the more accepting and open they were to us."
Fivethirtyeight's traffic grew exponentially through October as Marty and Quinn filed their sometimes twice-daily reports. "At the beginning of the trip, half the campaign organizers wouldn't know what Fivethirtyeight was, but after a week or two everybody knew who we were, which made it fun," says Marty. The pair also gained press access to rallies by both candidates and their running mates. "That was something we got better at as we went along," Quinn says. "We learned who to talk to."
Days could be brutally long, starting sometimes before dawn and ending after midnight, with hundreds of miles in between. Marty fondly recalls a day in Ohio when he photographed an Obama rally in Dayton, Ohio and an appearance by Sarah Palin hours later in Wilmington, Delaware. "I could easily take 800 pictures at one event," Marty says, making his daily editing process "a big headache."
In looking for pictures, Marty quickly discovered campaign offices were mostly alike. "But there were always unique things, like homemade posters, so I would start taking pictures of whatever I hadn't seen before." Though working for a liberal political site, they strove for evenhanded coverage. If Obama volunteers predominate in his work, Marty says, it's because the winner had by far the bigger ground game.
Marty says he relished the chance to produce photo work beyond "the one money shot that would be the iconic news photo of the day. I was able to put up 30 or 40 pictures of a rally, to give a feel for what was going on." Indeed, Marty's ground-level photographs are evidence that our politics is not the freak show big media likes to present, but rather the work of sincere and dedicated citizens who volunteer for the challenging and energizing task of electing our leaders.
Marty and Quinn financed the trip themselves, often staying with Fivethirtyeight readers who followed their progress and offered guest rooms. "We were both pretty sure it would pay off in the end," Marty says. And it has. Fivethirtyeight's success allowed founder Nate Silver to reimburse his reporters' expenses. Quinn is planning a book and, at this writing, Marty has four exhibitions in the works.
Looking ahead, Marty says he might go to Washington. "I think the model is there for a blog press photographer now for the first time. I'd like to go back to filmmaking, but it would be hard to pass up the momentum Fivethirtyeight generated."

The place I belong to.....

Garden of Dreams

One of the oldest market in Kathmandu

Pokhara, 200 k.m. from capital city

view of Pokhara and Fewa Lake

Mount Fishtale (6993 m. high)

evening @ Fewa Lake

Heart of Capital City, Kathmandu Durbar Square

One of the temple in Kathmandu during festival

Statue of God 'Sweta Bhairab' , 3m high gilded fearful head made in 1794

View of Kathmandu Durbar Square

Boudha Nath Stupa: White and looming 36 meters in height, Boudhanath has become world Heritage Site.

Diyo - Like a candle which is used to worship by Nepalese people.

Sunset @ Nantucket, 2008

Sunset @ Nantucket Island, MA

Sun and Sankatyhead Light House

Sunset @ atlantic

Sunset from Nantucket

Sunset from Nantucket

Sankaty Head Light House