This is for my editor friends, the “impossible to do” videoclip Fear and Delight, a great idea and a great technique in shooting and editing for an incredible result, the behind the scene and interview with the director Naren Wilks follows the clip.
“For some people, if you’re religious, you’re ugly,” says Federica Valabrega, an Italian photographer who for the past four years has been documenting Jewish women across the world. Her fascination with these “Daughters of the King,” as she calls them, comes from her own religious background. “My mother isn’t Jewish, but my dad is and so is his mother and all of his family. When I was born in Rome, the chief rabbi back in 1983 accepted to convert [to Judaism] kids from mixed [religious] marriages, so my sisters and I did it.” Read the full story here or visit Federica Valabrega website.
At Home With Themselves by Sage Sohier is an intimate portraits of committed gay couples in the 1980s. Sohier produced images that stood in opposition to contemporaneous media portrayals of the “gay lifestyle”, images that expose some of the roots of today’s marriage equality movement.
“All these shots were taken pretty much following the usual tourist trail in Manhattan… the locations along that trail are iconic for a reason. I wanted to present them differently however, like the Chrysler and Empire state buildings in different compositions than they are usually seen in. I also wanted black and white, to really simplify and make it about light, contrast and strength of composition (to varying degrees of success if I must be honest) in the street scenes below and in the architecture above.” Alex Teuscher
Harold Feinstein was born in Coney Island in 1931. With the street as his backdrop and the public as his muse, Feinstein began shooting photos at just fifteen and has amassed an epochal body of work over the following seven decades that tells the story of this curious part of the world. Feinstein’s photographs, which span six decades, capture the magic of Coney Island. “It is America’s playground for the working class–classic Americana exuding the spirit of generosity and common humanity that is the best of the American spirit,” he said.
Rising from the remnants of what was once a vast inland sea, California’s Central Valley is an agricultural empire unparalleled in the history of the world. Covering an area larger than ten US states, it is home to America’s richest farms and generates close to $20 billion dollars’ worth of fresh food each year, nearly half of the US supply.
Though this wealth comes from the earth, there is little natural about how it is produced: the Central Valley is a place not so much rural as it is empty-urban — a thoroughly industrialized farm landscape whose once undulating plains have been tractored into table-top flatness, whose streams have been dammed and whose lakes have been drained. Some farms have become so automated that the tractors are piloted by satellite, and some plots are so vast and monotonous that thousands of pollinating bees die each year because they can’t find their way back to their hives. So much water has been pumped from the aquifers that in places the ground has dropped by fifty feet. Most tellingly, the fields are planted, tended and harvested by migrants brought in by the busload: few make more than $10,000 per year, eight out of ten are undocumented, and hardly any know the names of the farmers in whose fields they work.
From the roots of this unnatural wealth has sprung a dysfunctional society, communities whose chronically high unemployment and generational poverty have fostered social ills more commonly associated with big cities. In tiny towns surrounded by farm fields, drug and alcohol addiction is rampant, teenage pregnancies are among the highest in the nation, crime and gangs are commonplace.Much is revealed by how a society raises its food — the one thing people both pay for and pray over — and the Central Valley tells us much about modern life. A modern rural distopia, it is a landscape at once rich but impoverished, industrialized but rural, inhabited but unsettled: a kingdom, but one made of dust, nourishing millions as it consumes itself. Matt Black.
“My mission in photography is to ‘force’ you to look at the reality of life; the reality of poverty, injustice and corruption that affects many in the 3rd world countries. The worst abuser of the poor little children is the one who knows about their situation but not coming forward to help. My favorite subjects are always the street, the working environment and low light photography. My all time favourite photographer is Werner Bishof. I really admire his work about people.” Thomas Tham. Please have a look at the other extraordinary pictures that this photographer shares on his Flickr page.
“I love taking pictures and traveling around my city. Child portrait and child activity are my favorite. I love their expression innocence and trying to capture with my cam. Although I am a beginner in photography got my first camera in 2012.” Santu Mondal
I am not my work. I am a photographer, writer, a loving husband and father. I read a quote at someones profile that just stuck in my head, because it describes so well how I feel concerning bw. It goes something like this and if I got it wrong I appologize: “When you photograph people in color you can see the color of their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you can see their souls! ” AND this one: “I suggest though, that if we strive for perfect, digitally processed images and prints, the further away we might get from our own fallibility and accident prone humanity.”- Michael Kenna.
Anyway, Be happy with what you got, it can ALWAYS get worse.
Life is a journey, not a destination… Peter Levi
Thomas Leuthard is a street photographer from Switzerland who travels around the World to witness and document life on the streets. He has written several ebooks about Street Photography which can be downloaded for free on his website. “The biggest challenge, after years of shooting in the streets, is definitely to see new and interesting things. No matter where you walk, people are people and those people do things average people normally do. Thomas Leuthard keeps walking down the street in order to get new views, new frames and facing the challenge of street photography over and over again. Have a look at some of his shots from the past months and years. Take a journey around the world looking through his passionate, creative eyes at the ordinary life happening on the street. “
Life in Pictures 