MetaFilter posts tagged with photographs

War Photographer

netbros — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:44:44 -0800

David Guttenfelder is the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press. Recently, he has been focusing his lens in Afghanistan. Photographer Collection: David Guttenfelder in Afghanistan and On Assignment: Afghanistan.

Images of the Somme

verstegan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:00:36 -0800

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Lieutenant John Purvis risked court-martial by taking some snapshots of the battlefield. Now his photograph album has been put online. It gives an extraordinary insight into what it was like to be an ordinary soldier in the middle of the battle, marching up to the front, resting in the forward lines, taking cover as a bomb explodes, advancing into battle, watching a shell burst, digging into freshly made trenches, or moving forward over captured ground.

Lost Border

jedro — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:47:45 -0800

It's been posted before, but on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the stunning photography of Brian Rose is certainly worth revisiting. It's amazing that something like this existed. There's also a book

Military Censorship of Photographs in World War I

NotMyselfRightNow — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:04:30 -0800

Military Censorship of Photographs in World War I: "During the course of World War I, tens of thousands of photographs were withheld from publication by the U.S. military. These included images that might have revealed troop movements or military capabilities, pictures that were liable to be used in enemy propaganda, or those that could adversely affect military or public morale. The development of military controls on publication of photographs during WWI was described in a 1926 U.S. Army report (15.75MB PDF) that is illustrated with dozens of images that had been withheld, with a description of the reasons their publication was not permitted."

Black and White WTF

grumblebee — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:08:44 -0800

A blog of strange (found) B&W photography

Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967

acro — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:17:33 -0800

“I started firing my machinegun. Then I passed out. Walter came crawling up the stairs and hid all my guns under his bed. When he left in the morning he took all my negatives for safekeeping.” Between 1961, when the 25-year-old Hopper married the actress Brooke Hayward, until 1967, when he made Easy Rider, he took thousands of black-and-white photographs. He seemed to have his Nikon with him all the time, on sets, in galleries, at recording sessions. Now a selection of those wonderful, evocative photographs, many of them never seen before, is to be published in a limited-edition book, Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967.

Superman standing in the Neuschwanstein Castle

Pater Aletheias — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:51:41 -0800

Superheroes in Old War Photographs. [via]

I found some found photos

dersins — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:45:06 -0800

Stateside, Wild Youth, Motor Life, Roberta's World, Memento, and Sidewalks. Six collections of found vernacular photographs from reservatory.net. More found photos at Phoundfotographs, Accidental Mysteries, and Other People's Pictures. In the same vein as the better known (and previously posted) Shorpy and Square America.

The Commons' Photostream

netbros — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:31:23 -0800

The Commons' Photostream from the National Library of New Zealand is a collection of late 19th and early 20th century photography. Includes a selection of stereographs from the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington-based photographer William Hall Raine, and panoramas of New Zealand from Robert Percy Moore. There is lots, lots more, and the NLNZ is continuing to update regularly. While visiting the National Library (previously) don't miss Papers Past, containing more than one million pages of digitized New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from the years 1839 to 1932.

Please Prepare For Landing

msalt — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:33:36 -0800

1,512 high-resolution images of Mars from the viewpoint of an airplane passenger. Previous photos: 1 2 3

Orchids

netbros — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:24:46 -0800

How do you spread your genes around when you're stuck in one place? By tricking animals, including us, into falling in love. Orchids — Love and Lies Orchids are dizzying in their diversity. Over the past 80 million years, some 25,000 wild species have taken root on six continents, in nearly every kind of habitat. Representing a full fourth of the world's flowering plants, there are four times as many orchid species as mammals, and twice as many as birds. Perhaps the most clever deceit of all is offered by those orchids that hold out the promise of sex. And not exactly normal sex. Really weird sex, in fact. I went in search of one of the most ingenious and diabolical of orchids: the Ophrys. (Some botanists call it the "prostitute orchid.") I'd been eager to lay eyes on this orchid and meet its hapless pollinator ever since reading about its reproductive strategy, which involves what my field guide referred to as "sexual deception" and "pseudocopulation." The pollination strategy of the Ophrys is, like that of so many orchids, ingenious, intricate, wily, and seemingly improbable—so much so that proponents of intelligent design sometimes point to orchids as proof that the hand of a higher intelligence must be at work in nature. (And a rather sadistic intelligence at that.) Yet the peculiarities of orchid sex actually offer one of the great case studies of natural selection, as Charles Darwin himself understood. Darwin was fascinated by orchid pollination strategies, and though he was puzzled by the purpose of Ophrys's uncanny resemblance to bees (pseudocopulation wasn't observed until 1916), he taught us much of what we know about these plants in The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, the volume he published immediately after The Origin of Species. Outcrossing, or mixing one's genes with distant mates, increases vigor and variation in one's offspring, maximizing fitness. The sexual frustration of a deluded bee turns out to be an essential part of the orchid's reproductive strategy. Determined not to make the same mistake again, the bee travels some distance and, if things work out for the orchid, ends up pseudocopulating (and leaving his package of pollen) with an orchid a ways off. That distant orchid is likely to look and smell ever so slightly different from the first, and some botanists believe these subtle variations from plant to plant are part of the orchid's strategy to prevent bees from learning not to fall for a flower. "Imperfect floral mimicry" [pdf] is the botanical term for this adaptation. There's a video on YouTube, a riveting snippet of interspecies porn, in which you can watch a wasp be utterly bamboozled, and then humiliated, by an Australian tongue orchid. The tongue orchid (Cryptostylis) lures its pollinator by deploying a scent closely resembling the pheromone of the female wasp. "Prurient apparitions," is how Victorian critic John Ruskin described these flowers. Prurient? Is it possible that humans can look at an orchid and, like the deluded orchid bees or male dupe wasps, see an apparition of female anatomy? (Georgia O'Keeffe certainly did.) Could it be that plant sex and animal sex have gotten their wires crossed in human brains just as they have among the bugs? That accident of evolution has proved another happy one for the orchid, for look how much we humans now do for these flowers: the prices paid, the risks to life and limb endured, the pains taken …

One in 8 Million

ocherdraco — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:06:52 -0800

One in 8 Million "New York is a city of characters. On the subway and in its streets, from the intensity of Midtown to the intimacy of neighborhood blocks, is a 305-square-mile parade of people with something to say. This is a collection of a few of their passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions. A new story will be added weekly." A photo and audio series from the New York Times. A few of the stories:

Morenatti, a conflict photographer

nickyskye — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:40:17 -0800

Some recent photographs by the renowned photojournalist Emilio Morenatti, Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2009, who recently lost his foot in a bomb blast in Afghanistan. He was present at the 2007 assassination in Pakistan of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and barely escaped injury in that explosion. More of his recent work, a few duplicates, mentioned previously. He is recovering.

"A mental and visual release for New Yorkers, who may find it exhausting to live in the most identifiable city in the world."

ocherdraco — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:49:06 -0800

The Last Parcels of Nowhere Remaining in Manhattan. Photographs.

For the scope of the project, "nowhere" is defined as a place that has been neglected, and from this neglect has achieved the status of an organic non-place; a perfect combination of the built and natural. From these places, one cannot say, "I am in a park" or "I am in the city" because neither appears to be true.

Times of our lives indeed

dersins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:38:26 -0800

Hiking, biking, boating, fishing, shooting and more: "The Times of Our Lives." Wonderful scans of vintage photos of the 1950's and 1960's (uh, and 80's) from flickr user aroid. [via]

OF COURSE!!!

netbros — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 11:15:00 -0800

All at once, they practically screamed, “We’ve got ten minutes with the President on Monday…do you wanna do the shoot?!!”. Don’t let anyone tell ya photographing the President ain’t all it’s cracked up to be! Here is Brad Trent's portfolio.

The Motor(less) City

netbros — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:59:33 -0800

Detroit is one of the most visually interesting cities in the world, however it is also one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented. Detroit Book of Love is a group of photographs illustrating what contemporary Detroit artists have been doing in regards to developing an understanding and appreciation for this complex and diverse city; from street portraits of the survivors, to the landscapes of wild new growth, to the industrial leftovers. As a group they show Detroit as it is, not what it should be or what it once was. Detroit’s got problems. That’s not new. The question is how to tap into the potential, if any, that remains. How can Detroit, and Michigan, bring out the best in our creative, highly trained and skilled workers, stem the population loss, convince our students to get an education, and make a change from a largely industrial economy, into something else? Detroit’s had a “renaissance” at least twice in the past. One in the late 70’s, hence the Renaissance Center, and again in the late 90’s, when condos and lofts began to pop up all over the city. When will Detroit’s real renaissance occur? How can we make it happen faster? The Motor(less) City: Post-Industrial Detroit

Discover, Explore and Document

netbros — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:27:13 -0800

NYC Grid is a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering The City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral. An optimistic snapshot of New York as it is now. Vs. The Lamentations: Lost City is a running Jeremiad on the vestiges of Old New York as they are steamrolled under or threatened by the currently ruthless real estate market and the City Fathers' disregard for Gotham's historical and cultural fabric. Jeremiah's Vanishing New York — a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct. Still hunkered down in the East Village, waiting for the wrecking ball of gentrification to find me. Until then, I'll write this ongoing obituary for my dying city.

The Lunar Orbiter's Kodak moment

prinado — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:16:01 -0800

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned its first images of the Apollo moon landing sites. The spacecraft’s onboard camera photographed Lunar Module descent stages at five of the six Apollo sites—11, 14, 15, 16, and 17. The Apollo 12 site will be photographed in coming weeks. The Apollo 14 image is particularly interesting: ideal lighting conditions resolve additional details, including the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package and the tracks left by the astronauts’ footprints and/or the Modularized Equipment Transporter, a 2-wheeled, rickshaw type cart for carrying around tools, cameras and sample cases on the lunar surface. These first images were captured before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit—future images of the Apollo sites will have two to three times greater resolution.

Photo-essays from around the world

Rumple — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:47:45 -0800

Gaia Photos is "Your global team of local photojournalists," with contributions ranging from Nepal to Canada, and Mongolia to Texas. via The Press Photographer's Year 2009.

Shopped, or Not?

netbros — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:58:51 -0800

Real or Fake? From the Life Magazine photographic archives.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age

acb — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:14:58 -0800

The New York Times commissioned Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins to travel around the United States and take photographs of abandoned construction projects left in the wake of the housing and securities market collapse.

Bringing Nails to Life

netbros — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:53:21 -0800

Scenes sculpted with nails by Czech photographer Vlad Artazov. (via)

Social Documentarian

netbros — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:56:49 -0800

Daryl Peveto is a freelance photographer and videographer with a passion for social documentary storytelling. Over the last few years he has worked on issues ranging from American nomads to bullfighting in Tijuana to Antarctica: The White Continent to the black market economies of Peru. His photoblog is a sketchbook for story ideas and visual explorations.

Leaving the Ghosts in Peace

netbros — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:11:33 -0800

When thousands of people depart, leaving an entire city dead that’s a real tragedy. There are mainly two reasons why people leave the place where they used to live for years or even generations: danger, and economic factors. Abandoned Places In The World. ( previously 1,2)