Photo Essays on the Web, March 2014
As we breeze past the quarter-pole in 2014, the following photo essays from the web highlight Instagram, doodling, black-and-white format, 19th-century Paris, and finding life in the town called Death.
From chaos one finds order, and I often moments of stillness in the noise …
Is Instagram Helping to Democratize Photography?
Love it or hate it: Instagram has been a part of a huge wave worldwide making photography far more accessible to an ever increasing number of people. The World Photography Organisation takes a “insta-look”.
Bored Commuting: Doodling on the Train
What happens if you’re a commuter on a train and you’re bored? Draw caricatures of your fellow passengers, and photograph the very funny results. Here’s the hilarity from October Jones, who’s also the creator of the very funny “Text From Dog” tumblr website.
Alex Webb’s view of the world
Magnum photographer Alex Webb has a wonderful way of viewing a world in black and white. When asked how he views the relationship between ‘documentary or journalistic content and purely aesthetic concerns in your work’, he says they’re both ‘simultaneous and inseparable, both in vision and the world, of form and content.’ He always asks questions through his photographs, his experiments with form are sometimes by themselves the literal process of asking those very questions.
Mastering What You Have
There are good reasons why I made tens of thousands of clicks on my old camera. One of those reasons was how I’d get used to the camera until it became second nature. That when it was time to make a shot, I wouldn’t have to think about what to do, or what button was where. Shoot, shoot, and shoot some more, so that getting the shot was 1st nature, and making the shot became 2nd nature. It’s what photographer David duChemin writes in his latest article, about mastering one’s own camera gear, whatever gear you might have.
Glories of 19th Century Paris
In the second half of the 19th-century, the French capital city of Paris experienced massive urban transformation, and Marville was charged to document these changes. His photographs are now seen as a “standard” to urban documentary photography and as historical documents to what Paris was like before redevelopment. I’d seen some of his work over the past few years in exhibitions in Hamburg and Essen, and the fascination is just as fresh as the first time I laid eyes on these beautiful photographs.
Welcome to Death! (in Finland)
“Welcome to Death!” That’s the sign you’ll see outside the town of Kuolema in Finland. Swedish photographer Eva Persson was captivated by this, and spent time in town to photograph ‘life in Death’. I also laugh at the “simple” contrast she draws between Swedes and Finns about life and death in general. To Finns: you’re born, you suffer a long time, and then you die. To Swedes: you’re born, all is “Jätte bra!” (very good), then you disappear … to somewhere warm, preferably the Mediterranean.
This post appears on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com
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