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Feature Shoot’s Top 10 Most Popular Photography Posts of 2014 (NSFW)

By Ellyn Kail on December 23, 2014

1. Powerful Portraits of Individuals Before and Directly After Their Death © Walter Schels

2. Heroin Chic: Portraits of Russian Sex Workers in Designer Clothing (NSFW) © Loral Amir and Gigi Ben Artzi

This year, Feature Shoot’s top ten most popular posts have run the gamut from heartbreaking to hysterical, with artworks that span topics like mortality, beauty ideals, and sexuality. If anything, this has been the year of identity, a theme that manifests itself most literally in Lauren Renner’s series of nudes labeled with common epithets and descriptors and more obliquely with Dita Pepe’s self-portraits, for which she inserted herself into strangers’ families.

We caught up with some of our top ten photographers to see how their viral projects have affected their careers and trajectories. In the last year, Patrick van Dam’s behind-the-scenes photos at Playboy magazine have been featured on over one hundred websites, and Olivier Fermariello has been contacted by artist agencies hoping to represent his work. Since being featured on the site, Lauren Renner’s work has been shown in five gallery exhibitions, including a solo show at JANGEORGe in East Hampton, New York, and she continues to expand into the field of performance art in collaboration with the Marina Abramovich Institute.

As we approach 2015, we want to take a moment to celebrate all the artists who have been featured on the site, and to take look back and some of our favorite series, many of which continue to expand. Says van Dam of the viral experience, “[It was] very overwhelming indeed, in a very good way.”

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