October 2011

Daniel Castro is beauty and fashion photographer, based out of New York and San Francisco, who often moonlights as a graphic designer. Of this series, he writes: ‘Having come off a run of interesting but commercial jobs, I was itching to create something more personal and unusual. ‘Curious Caps,’ a collaboration between hairstylist Preston Nesbit and myself, was my elixir. Preston is absolutely brilliant with hair- able to devise elaborate styles out of thin-air, and I wanted to make some slightly off kilter Tim Burton-esque images with an illustrative quality. So we threw some ideas around and landed upon several dramatic hairstyles that each would have an unexpected twist. I also had this image floating in my mind of a model wearing only the collars and cuffs of shirts, which seemed the perfect quirky and colorful compliment to the hair. We changed directions several times during the shoot, with Preston revising hair while I furiously deconstructed garments- but the result was even more intriguing than we could have hoped’.

Madame Peripetie aka Sylwana Zybura is a photographer and linguist based in Germany and UK working internationally on diverse art projects and for various independent magazines. She explores the boundaries between fashion, sculpture and the human body, experimenting with various fabrics and patterns; whilst infusing high fashion elements with abstract and conceptual ideas, creating an eccentric escapade of colour and texture. In her work she is focusing on character design and it’s influence on modern fashion photography. Her inspirations include surrealism, dadaism as well as postmodernism (the new wave era of the 80s) and the avant-garde theater of Robert Wilson.

She and her parents were picking through a massive pile of garbage in the Karail slum in Dhaka. The parents didn’t seem to notice me, but she did and smiled as I took the photo.

Henry Rollins, frontman for both Black Flag and Rollins Band, has been traveling the world for more than a quarter century. In recent years, he has decided to document his travels, which have taken him to countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and North Korea to name a few. His first photo book, Occupants, has just been published by Chicago Review Press.

Rollins’ writes: ‘Many years ago, I started working on a collection of photographs for eventual publication. I do a lot of traveling and as much as I write when I am in these places, a photograph speaks a different language, so I started hauling camera gear around with me everywhere I went and documented moments as best as I could. At some point, I upgraded my gear and took a lesson from a woman named Maura on basics and eventually started shooting in manual.

‘As I traveled and took more photographs I came to the conclusion that the book had to be more than merely a collection of images. If you are a real photographer, you could perhaps get away with that but not me. I am not a photographer, just someone with a lot of visas in his passport and a camera on his shoulder. The last thing I wanted was for someone to think I was being pretentious. I thought about what I could do to make the book be more time intensive on my part, so there would be more for the person who endeavored to get the book. I came to the conclusion that I would write something for each photo. In fact, I would write two things; an impression of the photograph and a caption that provided more of the practical information about where the image was captured’.

The captions below each photo are written by Rollins.

I saw this woman walking toward me in the Yogyakarta and noticed her T-shirt. At that moment, two teens on a motorbike recognized me, pulled over, and asked me what I was doing in town. I asked them if they would explain the T-shirt to the woman and how strange it was for the two of us to be passing in the street. After she was told, she just gave me a blank smile and kept walking.

I hope it burns to the ground.

You’ve photographed many people in far flung destinations such as Africa, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Mali. Did you travel specifically for this project or were these images taken in your free time during a business or personal trip?
‘I go to these places to explore and a large part of that is to get some interesting photographs. I walk all over the place and usually have a camera with me, so I photograph what and whom I encounter’.

Did you have a specific concept or idea that you wanted to get across when you began this project or did that come later through editing?
‘I wanted to bring people from the USA a little closer to other parts of the world. I think we sometimes have too great a distance from other countries and cultures. This is where ignorance sets in and nothing good comes from that’.

I was returning to the Ho Chi Minh City from the Cu Chi tunnels and saw a man on a motorbike overloaded with ducks. I had never seen anything like it. I kept my eyes peeled to hopefully see another example of this and moments later, I did. I hung out the window and got the shot. The couple on the bike thought I was funny; you can see them laughing. The expressions on the ducks’ faces seem comical to me. I don’t think they would look so excited if they knew where they were going.

I read that you travelled to Pyongyang, North Korea for a week. How were you able to do this and what was your experience once you were there?
‘It took two years to get the visa. I was told that about one hundred Americans or less go to North Korea a year. It was a propaganda tour, basically. Kim Il Sung invented mathematics, the solar system, agriculture, water, etc., and everybody’s happy. There’s really nothing to argue with, you’re in their country, so you just listen and nod. It was an interesting and depressing experience’.

Now that the book is complete, will you still continue to photograph people you come across during your travels?
‘I am a good way into work on the next photo book’.

It’s custom inside and out. For hours, men on employment visas in Riyadh labored to make this car utter perfection. A car for a princess, literally. Unfortunately for her, sharia law does not allow the Saudi princess to drive this car. She will have to drive it illegally. What a princess wants, a princess gets-except the right to drive.

Adam Voorhes started off his career shooting the things that he thought still life photographers were suppose to shoot ( jewelry, cosmetics, shoes, handbags) but after moving from New York to Austin, realized that he did not have to follow those traditional subjects and began photographing things he just found interesting. Having two english bulldogs as constant fixtures in his studio, he could not help but take their pictures from time to time. As more friends with more dogs begin to drop by the studio, this time passing act for slow days, became a passion. He got a house with a back yard, so he got chickens. And soon was hiring his assistant to come chicken wrangle in the back yard after dark. His wife’s family are farmers and ranchers, so for trips to visit the in-laws, Adam packed the car full of gear and turned his father-in-law’s barn into a studio for the weekend. This full blown compulsion to photograph things that are not “still” has been going on about year, so he finally decided to start building an animal portfolio and this is it’s beginnings.

Sander Meisner is a self-taught photographer living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This work is from his EA2011 series which will be shown at the Budapest ART.FAIR among other places. Of his work he writes: ‘I like to photograph the sleeping infrastructure of the urban environment. I shoot in the middle of the night, often going out at ten or eleven and photographing until sunrise. I tend to go to the outer regions of a city, to the more industrial and commercial areas to shoot. These areas are similar in any city. That’s part of the reason why they interest me so much, everybody recognizes them for what they are, yet nobody likes them’.
Meisner is represented by Brandt gallery in Amsterdam.

Together, photographer Arne Svenson and Ron Warren, director of the Mary Boone Gallery, photographed 140 dog toys that have seen ‘better days’ for their new photo book, Chewed. Augusten Burroughs, Isaac Mizrahi, William Wegman, Todd Oldham, and Maria Kalman are just a few of their pet-owning friends that contributed mangled dog toys and stories for the book.

Of the book, Svenson and Warren write: ‘We decided to take a close look at these comically distorted creatures. We began by coaxing these casualties of tough love from pet-owning friends. Soon we were swamped with boxes containing plush animals, rubber squeakies, and unidentifiable bits and pieces. We photographed these slobbery victims in a formal yet humorous style as seen through the eyes of the adoring pet’.

Photo by Toto Photo

Photo by Hugh Kretschmer

Photo by Keith Davis Young

Photo by Lauren Ward

Annalaura Masciavè is a 21-year-old photographer from Rome. These images are from an ongoing series entitled, ‘The Naked Project’.

1st Place: Portrait of a Chrysopa sp. (green lacewing) larva (20x) [Photo by Dr. Igor Siwanowicz]

Nikon recently announced the winners of the 2011 Small World Photomicrography Competition, which recognizes excellence in photomicrography, honoring images that successfully showcase the delicate balance between difficult scientific technique and exquisite artistic quality. This year’s top honors went to Dr. Igor Siwanowicz’s for his ‘Portrait of a Chrysopa’.

When a small bug landed on Dr. Igor Siwanowicz’s hand and began “fiercely digging its mandibles” into his skin, he didn’t swat it away. Instead, he removed a tiny test tube from his pocket – which he carries for occasions such as these – and captured it as a potential subject for his photomicrography passion. Dr. Siwanowicz writes, ‘My art causes a dissonance for its viewer – a conflict between the culturally imprinted perception of an insect as something repulsive and ugly with a newly-acquired admiration of the beauty of its form,” said Dr. Siwanowicz, who completed his doctoral studies in protein crystallography but now works in invertebrate photography for research. ‘My hope is that in some way, my photomicrographs prompt people to realize the presence of cultural programming, question it, and eventually throw it off as an illusion’.

Top images from the 2011 Nikon Small World Competition will be exhibited in a full-color calendar and through a national museum tour. You can also vote for your favorites through the end of October.

2nd Place: Blade of Grass (200X) [Photo by Dr. Donna Stolz]

3rd Place: Melosira moniliformis, living specimen (320X) [Photo by Frank Fox]

4th Place: Intrinsic fluorescence in Lepidozia reptans (liverwort) (20X) [Photo by Dr. Robin Young]

5th Place: Microchip surface, 3D reconstruction (500X) [Photo by Alfred Pasieka]

6th Place: Cracked gallium arsenide solar cell films (50X) [Photo by Dennis Callahan]

7th Place: Retinal flatmount of mouse nerve fiber layer (40X) [Photo by Gabriel Luna]

8th Place: Graphite-bearing granulite from Kerala (India) (2.5X) [Photo by Dr. Bernardo Cesare]

9th Place: Temora longicornis (marine copepod), ventral view (10X) [Photo by Dr. Jan Michels]

10th Place: Daphnia magna (freshwater water flea) (100X) [Photo by Joan Röhl]

11th Place: Ant head, frontal view (10X) [Photo by Dr. Jan Michels]

12th Place: HeLa (cancer) cells (300X) [Photo by Thomas Deerinck]

13th Place: Curare vine in cross-section, Chondrodendron tomentosum (45X) [Photo by Dr. Stephen S. Nagy]

14th Place: Sand (4X) [Photo by Yanping Wang]

15th Place: Porites lobata (lobe coral), live specimen displaying tissue pigmentation response with red fluorescence (12X) [Photo by James H. Nicholson]

16th Place: Cultured cells growing on a bio-polymer scaffold (63X) [Photo by Dr. Christopher Guérin]

17th Place: Litomosoides sigmodontis (filaria worms) inside lymphatic vessels of the mouse ear (150X) [Photo by Dr. Witold Kilarski]

18th Place: Venation network of young Populus tremuloides (quaking aspen) leaf (4X) [Photo by Benjamin Blonder and David Elliott]

19th Place: Mammalian cell collage stained for various proteins and organelles, assembled into a wreath (200-2000X) [Photo by Dr. Donna Stolz]

20th Place: Agatized dinosaur bone cells, unpolished, ca. 150 million years old (42X) [Photo by Douglas Moore]