In desperate search for a unique font? Visual arts student Anastasia Mastrakouli created this sensual font using the human body. Visit her Behance profile for the complete set.
Anastasia Mastrakouli’s Behance profile: www.behance.net/AnastasiaMastrakouli
The series Nachtfluge by landscape photographer Kevin Cooley, reminded me of the opening song to a cartoon I watched a lot in my younger years. I’m talking about Transformers. In the opening song of that show they sung “..Robots in disguise..”. At the time I thought, being a Dutch kid who knew only a couple of English words, they were singing: “…Robots in the skies“. It made sense to me, they did flew around a lot. Luckily my English did get a little better.
Perhaps the robots weren’t all in the skies. But in this series Nachtfluge we do see the pathways in the skies. Not created by gigantic robots who for some reason need to blend in on earth by transforming into a car or fighter jet. But the trails of aircrafts. Showing us the highways they travel on. The long exposure photographs were all taken at major airports across the United States of America. Some of the photographs in this series reminds me a little bit of the wonderful House Hunting series by Todd Hido. The colors are amazing and the angles and landscapes Kevin Cooley picks give a good sense of the neighboring places of these Highways.
Kevin Cooley’s website: www.kevincooley.net
Fashion has always been a way to tell the world who you are, or who you’d like to be. People even dress up their pets. Perhaps to make them look better or to turn their beloved ones into a fashion accessory. I’m not sure but this way of dressing up was one of the inspirations that made photographer Yago Partal create the Zoo Portraits series. This funny series shows us animals in clothes. A simple yet intriguing idea. And somehow the clothes really suits the animal. It immediately gives it a personality. Like how we tell the world what we are supposed to be. For me a striking example is the rhino in the leather jacket. I see him stepping on his Harley, right after the photo was taken, and drive back to his favorite biker bar. Just a funny series that reflects our own fashion sense in a subtle way.
Yago Partal’s website: www.yagopartal.com
The complete series can be found here: www.zooportraits.com. (also to order prints)
If you want to see the grandeur of the amazing starry sky nowadays you would have to travel to some of the more remote places on earth. That used to be different. I have heard stories that people would go out and visit friends in evening where there was a full moon. So you could see where you where going at night. Today, in the age of technology the nights are illuminated from both moon, starts and men. We’ve created a night sky that is clouded with light, covering up the stats. True light pollution.
Julien Mauve and assistant Pauline Ballet created a series called After Lights Out. The series shows scenes of dark places illuminated by only one light. A beacon of hope in the surrounding darkness. It shows quite the opposite of the light pollution we have in the western world. It shapes light into a rarity in an otherwise so very well-lit world.
What if darkness in our world once again overtook the night and as an affect, transforming even the most insignificant light into an exception – a mystical phenomenon ?
Julien Mauve’s website: www.julienmauve.com
Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the capital and the life of its inhabitants following the Cultural Revolution. It covers a period of 20 years, from 1985, namely when silver film started being used massively in China, to 2005, when digital photography started taking over. These 20 years are those of China’s economic opening, when people started prospering, travelling, consuming, having fun.
This photo series by Jim Vecchi is breaking the rules of composition; placing the subject dead center. But in many cases in art, breaking laws provokes and creates an interesting piece of attention grabbing art. This series is called The Center of the Universe. He created this series as a memory of the hours he spent looking at everything. As a child he simply spent hours inspecting ordinary objects, such as poles, columns, wires. The focus was entirely on the subject. The surrounding landscapes would blur and melt away in color and motion. So all and all he tried to recapture that magic feeling he had inspecting things as a child. A wonderful and colorful series. That really captures the imagination and make you look at something you’d ordinarily don’t pay much attention to. And on top of that it makes you look at the unsharp worlds created behind the subject. Abstractions of real life.
Jim Vecchi’s website: www.jimvecchi.com
We all had or still have them. The toys we’ve spent hours with. Creating different worlds while playing with that toy. Gabriele Galimerti visited many children in different countries to photograph them with their favorite toys. The series is called Toy Stories.
The story behind the photograph above:
Maudy was born in a hut in a small village close to Kalulushi, in Zambia. She grew up playing in the street with the other children in the village, who all attend the same school, where students ages 3 to 10 years old are in the same class. The village has no shops, restaurants or hotels, and just a few children are lucky enough to have toys. Maudy and her friends found a box full of sunglasses on the street, which quickly became their favorite toys.
A series showing that imagination is a big and important part of growing up. It also shows the world the child is growing up in. A glimpse in their personalities, economic statuses, interests and countries. Visit her website to see and learn more about this wonderful series.
Gabriele Galimberti’s website: www.gabrielegalimberti.com
The art of Fashion needs to be covered. And photography is perhaps the perfect way to capture and share those new styles and trends in fashion. And with social media and fashion blogs on the internet it’s easy to reach a large crowd fast. The editors and photographers of these blogs swarm around the fashionable people attracted by Fashion Weeks held around the world. Chasing them, photographing them and in a way consuming their fashion styles to be shared among their hundreds or thousands, perhaps millions followers.
The short documentary created by Garage Magazine is called Take My Picture that explores this explosion in Street Fashion Photography.
When we set out to make this short, our intention simply was to observe the phenomenon of fashion bloggers and street style stars. As we started to review the footage, two salient trends became apparent: fashion editors frustrated by the ensuing commotion outside of shows, and the rise of “peacocking” street style stars as a result of the proliferation of blogs. This film examines these themes from both perspectives. – GARAGE MAGAZINE
“He can wear an ascot without appearing pretentious. He proclaims himself to be a closet optimist. He believes Modernism took a wrong turn at a wrong time. He thinks Freud saved his life. He graduated Yale. He lives in a wooded enclave in Snedens Landing, just close enough to Manhattan to meet an editor for lunch at a moments notice, but far enough away to mollify his distain for city living. He loves books. Paper. And printed matter. He wrestles with Big Ideas and references Wittgenstein and Plato as if he saw them just yesterday. He’s tweedy. Proud. Not loud. He’s a perfectionist. Workaholic.”
This is a short bio of photographer Rodney Smith. You can read the rest on his website. But more importantly you can see his wonderful work there as well. His photography is like that of another world or dimension. Strange but beautiful settings. Men wearing suits and hats, women wearing dresses. Each photographs with its own story, or so it seems. Visit his website and create yours.
Rodney Smith’s website: www.rodneysmith.com and his blog: rodneysmith.com/blog/
