Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Polish photographer Josef Schulz's Crossing series– which explores abandoned military checkpoints across the continent.
Covering every corner of Europe, Schultz found and documented these forgotten border checkpoints that no longer belong to anywhere. They just sit, going to waste with broken or shuttered windows, rusty doors and peeling paint – merging the past with the present.
Although the border police are long gone, and the buildings are abandoned, they still remind us of the past when Europe was divided by borders.
http://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/abandoned-checkpoints-photographer-documents-europes-forgotten-borders/
http://www.josefschulz.de/html/transitIndex.html has the entire gallery of around 60 photos
Via the Blort! http://blort.meepzorp.com/
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
the isolation of a parking lot attendant sitting in his booth, inspired Tom M Johnson to start a photo journey around Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is a commuter city with marginal public transportation, so most people drive into the city from surrounding suburbs, and thus need a place to park. Around downtown there are many parking lots, some large and corporate, others small and privately owned.
Many are ground-level lots tended by a single attendant.
Tom M Johnson's new photo project "Pittsburgh Parking Lot Booths and Their Attendants" is an equal study of both. The relationship is symbiotic: the attendant needs the booth for comfort and function; the booth needs its occupant for significance.
Tom's reason on why he photographed the booths and attendants: "I wanted to show an aspect of daily life in the city so steeped in the habits that people have forgotten what makes it interesting."
Above: the most gregarious man in Pittsburgh!
John has done it all, he has been a U.S. Mailman, travel agent, professional driver, caterer, logistics broker, and a singer.
Tom M Johnson is an editorial and advertising portrait photographer who has been commissioned both in the United States and abroad to make memorable portraits of the ordinary and the famous.
He relocated to Pittsburgh from LA, when his wife's career required a move, and he found a unique way to photograph the city and tell a story at the same time of the people working there. Notice, in an almost ironic way, that there are no cars in the photos of parking lot booths and attendants. It's a conscious choice for Tom to convey the isolation of the job, and the focus on the person and booth in the photo. "What I've learned is that photography projects can get out of control, and you don't know how to define them. I edited my photos down to a story that you can put brackets around; looking at one will give you the same sense as looking at them all"
This series "Pittsburgh Parking Lot Booths and Their Attendants" is ongoing, and likely to be a book in the near future.
By the way, in his blog and Facebook page, he does feature stories about the people he photographs that are unbelievable. Like the people illegally fired from the whistleblower lawfirm. Irony!
Some of his most impressive clients have been The Oprah Magazine, Money, Forbes, and The New York Times.
His work has been featured in the New York Times Lens blog, and this months Popular Photography magazine (July/August 2016 issue) where I found it and lifted some text, and his photos have been in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Paris.
http://www.tommjohnson.com/PROJECTS/BOOTHS/1/caption
http://blog.tommjohnson.com/
https://twitter.com/tmjshooter
http://www.imgrum.net/user/tommjohnsonphoto/367552869
https://www.facebook.com/Tom-M-Johnson-Photography-116388571735733/
http://www.slate.fr/grand-format/parking-guerite-gardien-photos
And I did remember the cool movie about parking lot attendants, from back in 2011: http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2011/03/parking-lot-movie-documentary-movie.html and if you haven't seen that, I heartily recommend it.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Friday, July 1, 2016
the aftermath of the flooding in Clendenin, Camden, White Sulphur Springs, and a couple other small towns in West Virginia... the photos of David Stephenson
Steep mountains and narrow valleys were the terrain that resulted in the flash floods, fed by a series of storms that hit West Virginia in a phenomenon meteorologists call 'training' because the thunderstorms line up over the same location like the cars of a freight train.
The vicious line of storms dumped "one-in-1,000-year" amounts on the state last week. This "train track" formed June 21st 2016 along a weather boundary between cooler air to the northeast and moist, warm air to the southeast.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2016/06/27/west-virginia-floods-storm-train/86429020/
The only truck that didn't make it out of the Clendenin Fire Department before water filled the building, the working fire trucks were moved to higher ground.
https://www.facebook.com/dtstephensonphoto/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1024987660918156
A small side effect of this disaster is the revealing of politicians to be good or bad, and one example stands out as the worst: Three of the eight counties that have been declared eligible for federal relief are in the state’s Second Congressional District, which is represented by first-term Rep. Alex Mooney.
While he is on an all-expenses paid junket, every other elected official in the federal and state government there is on hand to help, not to mention the thousands of people who are not running for any office.
But what makes Mooney’s absence so notable is that he moved to the state right before the 2014 elections, having run for congress once from New Hampshire and having filed to run from Maryland. Given that he neither voted nor volunteered in the state before running for office in West Virginia, is it surprising that he is unavailable now to pitch in? So, watch out who you vote for http://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/06/30/are-west-virginias-floods-the-result-of-climate-change-and-a-congressman-gone-awol/#4d3150a86d03
Monday, June 27, 2016
probably the only time a SR 71 was on the freeway
According to HABU.org, the SR-71 seen in the photo – serial number 17958 – was retired in early 1990 and flown to Robins Air Force Base to be decommissioned and placed in the base’s Museum of Aviation. To get it from the hangar to the museum, however, it had to be towed, apparently down U.S. 129, the only four-lane highway we see in the area.
http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2016/06/22/warner-robins-georgia-1990/
Monday, June 20, 2016
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Friday, June 3, 2016
The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside by Ryann Ford
On a solo road trip from California to central Texas along historic Route 66, in 2007, photographer Ryann Ford was struck by the multitude of humble, solitary mid-century rest stops built during the nation’s golden age of car travel. After doing some research, Ford was alarmed to learn that these rest areas were currently being closed and demolished all over the country due to budget cuts.
"It’s difficult for states to justify the tens of thousands of dollars a month required to mow the lawns and empty the trash cans, so unfortunately a lot of these old stops are being closed and demolished. I’ve even seen stops that seem very well preserved and well kept vanish overnight. It’s as if their historical and architectural significance is irrelevant, I wonder if it was even considered? Since I started this project in 2008, I’ve seen dozens and dozens of these stops vanish, and they are still vanishing today."
The Route 66 trip left Ford wanting more, so she set out on a quest to document as many of these locales as possible, all across the country, driving over 10,000 miles and photographing over 400 rest stops, all on film. Not all 400 are in the book, around 100 were selected.
What was the story behind these quirky and playful pieces of Americana, such as the mock adobe dwellings in New Mexico and faux oil rigs in Texas, which she passed by?
Many feel that these old rest stops are no longer necessary, and many were being closed and scheduled for demolition. Determined to capture as many as she could while they were still in existence, Ford did whatever she needed to gain access.
Collected together for The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside, Ford’s photographs take us on a memorable ride across the United States, visiting more than 75 different locales along the way. Included in the book are rest stops in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Mississippi, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri.
She funded her book via the Kickstarter website and was "blown away" when it easily clocked up pledges of more than $35,000 in a matter of weeks.
The book’s design is well executed and the 10″ x 12″ trim size of the book gives ample space for the photos. Each rest stop shown in the book has a corresponding geo-tag location and a dot on an adjacent map of where it is located along her journey.
The Last Stop does far more than capture the remarkable, effective design of our nation's road stops. It preserves a moment in time that is quickly fading, a unique period in the American travel experience when the journey was just as important as the destination. It's clear these modest structures did far more than provide picnic tables, they shaped our collective experience of golden-age car travel across the vast United States.
http://www.ryannford.com/
http://ryannford.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ryann.ford.5
the book is already selling at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Stop-Vanishing-American-Roadside/dp/1576877914
Prints are available on her Etsy page https://www.etsy.com/shop/RyannFord
About the Author / Photographer
After graduating from Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, she landed the most unbelievable job on earth with Resorts and Great Hotels magazine, photographing hotels all over the world and eating free room service.
After a few years of living like a gypsy, she moved to Austin with her Chihuahua, Mr. Big. After arriving in Austin, she fell in love with the city and bought a bumper sticker that said “I’m not from Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.”
Now a photographer for clients like Better Homes and Gardens, The New York Times and Texas Monthly.
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