Robert Doisneau – Paris
This immense collection of French photographer Robert Doisneau spans decades of his life. From the pre-WWII years of cafés, the opening of the Eiffel tower, Folies Bergére to the French Resistance during the war years and on into the 70s, these marvelous pictures show Paris in all its glory. The rich and famous are here, the artists, café-goers, can-can dancers and all the well-known Parisian regulars. But there are also the average people – shopping, working and enjoying their marvelous city. Gorgeous portraiture by a...
Read MoreLost Worlds of the Guiana Highlands
Stewart McPherson
I’m guessing most viewers of the Pixar flick Up were convinced that the surreal, twisted landscape on the top of the mountain where the balloon-house landed were figments of overheated animators’ brains. However, based on the pictures in Lost Worlds of the Guiana Highlands, it is clear that much of the artwork was straight still-life renditions of the eerie scenery at the top of these remote cloud-shrouded mountains. The tepuis, mountain islands shooting vertically thousands of feet into the air, have been objects of fascination and speculation for centuries. Until the 1800s, no one had ever managed to climb to the top of the straight and treacherous mountains. Despite their immense inaccessibility, numerous stories have...
Detroit Disassembled
Andrew Moore
I find something incredibly satisfying about Moore’s photos of a decaying post-apocalyptic Detroit. While the building are crumbling to nothing, nature is reasserting herself. Man has not conquered nature, nor ever will. We may be doing our damnedest to overpopulate and pollute the planet, but nature will have the last laugh.
The photos are also history in action. Often archaeologists unearth ruins and state in a purposeful (confused) tone that “trade routes must have changes and the social dynamic made people leave, yadda yadda.” It sounds so fancifal, Why would people leave a perfectly good city and move elsewhere? Why wouldn’t they take their stuff? You can’t just leave a city and walk away… can you?...
What I Eat
Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio
Photographers Menzel and D’Aluisio have outdone themselves - again – with their fantastic new book What I Eat. Their incredible work was first brought to my attention through their book Material World. The husband and wife pair bring make the most mundane exotic and riveting. By getting ordinary people to open up and share their lives, they give us a glimpse of how other people live. In earlier books, Menzel and D’Aluisio have gotten their subjects, everyday people in every corner of the world, to spread their earthly possessions out for scrutiny and photos. Here we can see the daily diets of street child in Bangladesh, a Chinese farmer and a Japanese sumo wrestler, mixed with the more mundane and...
Bent Objects
Terry Border
Using everyday objects, coupled with bent wire, Border creates a whole inner anthropomorphic life for inanimate objects – a kiwi shaves its fuzzy back, a banana lays battered and bruised in the boxing ring, a group of peanuts attend a funeral for a jar of peanut butter. Weird, hilarious and twisted.
http://bentobjects.blogspot.com/
Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Christopher Payne
This collection of photos is a true Rorschach test for the reader. The decrepit Victorian-era buildings are both beautiful and sinister. Abandoned rooms show both care and terrifying restriction – gardens, beautify parlors, movie theaters, coffee stands, barred doors and rooms of straightjackets. As one after another of these large state hospitals falls nuder the wrecking ball, Payne has made it his job to document what were once common institutions. Most were closed in the 1970s in what was arguably a poor move for the mentally ill and indigent. What is left gives a glimmer of sadness and but also a stability that many of the mentally ill no longer have. Once housed in asylums like these, virtual cities unto themselves, many of...