Men and Machines

Dan Williams - Men and Machines, from the Black Biker Series, 1983

Smithsonian American Art Museum

via Ordinary finds

Golden Eagle Nomads

The Golden Eagle Hunters of Mongolia

Photographer John Delaney travels to the remote reaches of Asia to document a dying Kazakh skill

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light

Photographer Richard Nicholson presents Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light, a survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms.

Dead media?... or will there be an emergence of cottage industries catering to an adherence - and return - to the use of film? As we meet, someone has already acquired Polaroid's old equipment factory and seeks your support. (via)

via Super Colossal

The World of Trench Warfare in Color

A scene over Hartmannsweilerkopf, in the Vosge mountain range.

SPIEGEL ONLINE:

Although color photography has existed since at least 1879, it didn't become popular until many decades later. The overwhelming majority of photos taken during World War I were black and white, lending the conflict a stark aesthetic which dominates our visual memory of the war.

Hans Hildenbrand, one of nineteen photographers employed by the Kaiser to document the war, was the only German to take photos of the war in color.

via Retro Thing

The Places We Live

This year, for the first time in history, more people will live in cities than in rural areas. One-third of these urban dwellers - more than 1 billion people - live in slums. It is predicted that this number will double in the next 25 years.

Magnum Photos presents the work of Jonas Bendiksen in this interactive slideshow of The Places We Live, where you can visit selected households from around the world. The panoramic photos are amazing.

via Nag on the Lake

Harry Benson

George C. Scott, Tucson, 1972

Harry Benson

thanks to Ordinary finds

The Outpost War

Peter van Agtmael:

Dawn breaks over a village in Eastern Afghanistan occupied by U.S. soldiers searching for a man suspected of launching rockets at a nearby American base. The previous night, as the soldiers approached, the village dogs began barking, and by the time soldiers arrived the suspect was long gone.

via Magnum Blog

Body art behind bars

Audio slideshow: Body art behind bars:

The BBC's Mohammed Allie talks to photographer Araminta de Clermont and the subjects of her recent exhibition - former South African prisoners, whose tattoo-covered bodies reveal the story of life inside and its gang culture.

Living Africa

Fighting elephants, Savute, Botswana

Steve Bloom - Living Africa

Living, breathing and bleeding.

via New Scientist

weather

People walk in the center of Helsinki on November 2008 during the first snowstorm of the season.

photo: Martti Kainulainen

Winter descends on the Northern Hemisphere

Imke Lass Photography

John Nash

Imke Lass is a friend here in Savannah and a freelance photographer with a wonderful talent and a compassionate eye. I just love her work and envy her for her globetrotting assignments. If you've opened a magazine in the last five or ten years or so, there's a good chance you'll have seen one of her photos. The very fact alone that she had the opportunity to photograph John Nash sufficiently blows my mind.

Take the time and check out her website. The stories she tells are touching and amazing - and I'm not blowing smoke because she's a friend, this is top drawer stuff.

China: Portrait of a People

Tom Carter traveled around China for two years and photographed thousands of people in all 33 provinces and autonomous regions. I look forward to checking out his book, China: Portrait of a People. You can watch a preview on YouTube.

via Danwei

Chris Rainier

Chris Rainier (stunning)

People of Chernobyl

(video link)

Serge Van Cauwenbergh:

In 2006, 20 years after the nuclear disaster, I visited the Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl. I also visited elderly inhabitants of Chernobyl. This is my photographic testimony of those visits.

via Chernobyl and Eastern Europe

Aaron Huey

AARON HUEY IS A PHOTOGRAPHER

...and his photographs are incredible.

via madamjujujive

Children watching the story of "Saint George and the Dragon," at the puppet theater in the Tuileries, Paris, 1963

"It took a long time to get the angle I liked, but the best picture is the one I took at the climax of the action. It carries all the excitement of the children screaming, "The dragon is slain!" Very often this sort of thing is only a momentary vision, my brain does not register, only my eyes and finger react. Click." - Alfred Eisenstaedt

Alfred Eisenstaedt: Photojournalist of the Century

hat tip: βereníκe (v.ii)

Cliffs of the Dead

24 hours in pictures:

Sagada, Philippines: Coffins of Kankanaey tribal people are crafted from century-old pine trees. Death rituals are performed over them before they are taken to their final resting places, suspended along the limestone cliffs Photograph: Dave Leprozo/EPA

stray bullets

Getting A Story Made at National Geographic After talking with several National Geographic photographers about shooting for the magazine I became intrigued with the process of getting a story made. The collaboration between the photo editors and photographers and then the photographers involvement in all the steps along the way is unique and important to how they make stories. More magazines should spend this kind of time with their contributors. The few times I’ve had photographer come into the office and present their images to us have been incredibly rewarding and certainly I think made the story that much better. I asked David Griffin, National Geographic’s Director of Photography about the process of getting stories made and the rumored years it takes for a story to go from idea to printed page... (via)

Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface? How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre A cache of letters hidden in the basement brings to life a house, a family and the tragedy that would change everything (via)

Love story: The librarian, the postal worker and their art Art takes up all the air in Herb and Dorothy Vogel's cramped one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. Minimalist and conceptual works cover every inch of wall and dangle from the ceiling. Because there is no other place for it, a Richard Tuttle painting clings to the inside of a louvered door that leads to the tiny kitchen. Other pieces crowd shelves and table tops. And the Vogels, who are giving the Miami Art Museum and 49 other institutions around the country gifts of 50 artworks each and are subjects of a documentary that will screen in December during Art Basel Miami Beach, say there is plenty more under the bed and jammed into the closets of this modest, rent-stabilized space they have called home since 1963.

Library Ghosts: Northeastern U.S. Last year about this time (just in time for Halloween), I posted on this blog a list of libraries that are said to be haunted. Now the library ghosts are back, by popular demand...

also:
Stanislav Petrov, the man who could have started a nuclear war, but didn’t (via)
Know Your Intelligence Agencies: National Reconnaissance Office
Biology in Science Fiction: Erasing Memory
The History of Some of Today's Most Common Phrases (via)
Recent additions to the Chambers Slang Dictionary
Punctuation Game
1000 artworks to see before you die (via)
Podcasts from the University of Oxford (via)
Haruki Murakami interview (via)
Wayne Coyne interview
Aerial Phenomena Research: Selected Papers - Jacques F. Vallee (via)
Casting the Runes by M.R. James
Oboe Bong

Futility Closet: Over the Moon Jules Verne earned his title as the father of science fiction. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon contains eerie similarities to the Apollo program that unfolded a century later. (read more)

viddy:
The Anti-Fascist trailer
Parallel Universes, Parallel Lives 1/6 (Eels frontman Mark Everett in search of his father's brain. Dr Hugh Everett III proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.) (via)
Hog Hunting (A plague of feral hogs has descended on the American South. They've been spotted here in Savannah.) (via)
The Real Secret Of The Matrix: The Haunting Sound Of The Waterphone (You'll know it as soon as you hear it.)
Daily (kinda sorta) Weather with David Lynch (via)
Angkor Wat, Cambodia (1930s newsreel)

refugee

avenue of transmission:

This is an unpublished image from my Karen refugee photo story I did a while back. I photographed a series of encounters on expired film....

Karen Human Rights Group

One-man-army

wolf böwig - burma. sterben im ko thulei:

"One-man-army" belongs to the (Karen) special forces which were trained in guerilla warfare... he is fighting alone behind the front lines to gather information and to kill as many Burmese soldiers as possible.

via 3quarksdaily