Credit: Thomas Vijayan
We encourage you to go to Nature to see the entire selection, if you think this one is amazing:
Melt warning. This shot of melt water pouring through the Austfonna ice cap on the Arctic island of Nordaustlandet, Norway, won the Nature category in the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. “I have visited this place several times before, but last year it was disheartening to witness the sea ice melting as early as June,” said photographer Thomas Vijayan.
Tawny Eagle
Fast forward to June of 2012, when I started scouting for birds in the grasslands. Clement Francis showed me the birds of Hesaraghatta. Clement is a topnotch bird photographer. I was amazed at his skills. He could identify every bird there and explained their features and behaviour. We roamed around the grasslands in our car and upon sighting a raptor on the ground, Clement would approach the bird from the car, going around it in wide circles, gradually reducing the distance from the bird. As I sat on the passenger seat with my lens rested on the car door, Clement whispered to me not to make eye contact with the bird, or make any large movements while he parked the car at the comfort-distance and with the sunlight behind us. He approached the bird with such skill that it never felt threatened as he mumbled the ideal camera settings for perfect photographs under his breath. He gave me very valuable lessons in approaching the various species of the grasslands, while advising on the ideal light conditions and inculcated patience in making handsome pictures. Continue reading
A bee collects pollen on a hot summer’s morning in Burley-in-Wharfedale, UK
Photograph: Rebecca Cole/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.
For a brief visual bit of relief, visit Joanna Ruck’s collection:
The week in wildlife – in pictures
The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including hot monkeys, baby flamingos and a hitchhiking cygnet
A European hoverfly (Helophilus pendulus) on pyracantha blossom in Dunsden, UK
Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock
I See You. Wild Portraits winner. When a huge lion looks you right in the eyes, you immediately forget that you are sitting safely in a car. Instinctively, you cower and slowly retreat deeper inside the car so as not to provoke a predator. Fortunately, he and his brothers were busy consuming a young buffalo that had been hunted several minutes earlier. # © Tomasz Szpila / Nature TTL
Alan Taylor and others offer relief through nature photography contests each year, and we thank them all for that; and to Atlantic this year for sharing these from the Nature TTL contest:
Sunset Ray. Underwater winner. A pink whipray splits a school of bannerfish, photographed against the setting sun on a late afternoon at the famous “Tuna Factory” dive site located close to Malé, the capital of the Maldives. # © Andy Schmid / Nature TTL
Winners of the Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2022
This year’s photography competition attracted more than 8,000 entries in eight different categories celebrating the natural world: Animal Behavior, Camera Traps, Landscapes, Small World, The Night Sky, Underwater, Urban Wildlife, and Wild Portraits. Contest organizers at Nature TTL were kind enough to share some of the winners and runners-up below. The captions were written by the photographers and lightly edited for style.
Pretty in Pollen. Small World runner-up. A micro-moth (Micropterix calthella) is covered in golden balls of pollen from a creeping buttercup flower found in Mutter’s Moor near Sidmouth, Devon, United Kingdom. # © Tim Crabb / Nature TTL
Photo by Seth Inman taken in Kenya’s Samburu Game Reserve
… Show me a photo. When atrocities dominate the news, and threaten to overwhelm, I lean on old photographs taken by family members that offer a meditative opportunity. Recently I have found myself leaning on those that transport me to some natural phenomenon I have not myself witnessed. Recently, three years after his last work on the African continent, Seth was on a work assignment in Kenya and took the photo above. That has been my meditative escape mechanism recently, but today the Guardian’s occasional series offers some others, thanks to Joanna Ruck:
The week in wildlife – in pictures
The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including swimming buffalo, a rescued pangolin and swirling reindeer
A monkey leaps in a pond during a hot summer day in Allahabad, India. Photograph: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty
For more pictures in the series, click either image.
Main image: A kingfisher bags a meal in Lincolnshire, UK. Photograph: Charlotte Graham/Rex/Shutterstock
The book is not new, but it is new to us. Ben Taub has brought to our attention this stunning portraiture that, like most great photography, makes you wonder how the artist got the composition just so:
Ragnar Axelsson
The Fading Ways of Indigenous Arctic Hunters
Ragnar Axelsson
Ragnar Axelsson’s portraits from Greenland reveal the effects of climate change on ice floes, sled dogs, and a traditional culture.
During springtime in the far, far north—when the sun breaches the horizon, after months of total darkness—indigenous Greenlandic hunters head out to frozen inlets and get lost in ice and time. By day, the hunters might move miles in one direction, while the ice under their feet floats gently in another. Continue reading
Wild Asian elephants lie on the ground and rest in Jinning district of Kunming, Yunnan province, China June 7, 2021. A herd of 15 wild elephants has trekked hundreds of kilometres after leaving their forest habitat in Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, according to local media. Picture taken June 7, 2021 with a drone. China Daily via REUTERS
It has been awhile, too long, since we nodded to Alan Taylor’s photo selections, so here is to closing out the week with images:
An optical illusion at the Eiffel Tower, scenes from the French Open, a surfing competition in El Salvador, a presidential election in Peru, Olympic qualifying skateboarding trials in Italy, a giant sinkhole in Mexico, a sunrise annular eclipse seen in New York City, a platypus health check in Australia, and much more
A Lupine field in full bloom is pictured near Sollested on Lolland island in Denmark on June 8, 2021. – Denmark OUT (Photo by Mads Claus Rasmussen / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP) / Denmark OUT (Photo by MADS CLAUS RASMUSSEN/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)
SOURCE IMAGERY © MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES – WESTMINSTER, COLORADO
Thanks to Yale e360 for a bit of visual perspective on human interventions–efforts to improve landscapes and energy-harnessing:
Overview: Transforming Land and Sea for a More Sustainable World
Aerial photos often document the destruction of the natural world. But these striking satellite images show how countries are beginning to respond to the global environmental crisis by restoring ecosystems, expanding renewable energy, and building climate resiliency infrastructure.
SOURCE IMAGERY © MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES – WESTMINSTER, COLORADO
As the global population nears 8 billion, the human footprint can be seen in almost every corner of the Earth. Logging roads cut deep into the Amazon rainforest. Plastics swirl in remote parts of the ocean. The world’s largest gold mine is carved out of the mountains of Indonesia.
Satellite and aerial images have captured much of this destruction, often in startling and unsettling images. But a new collection of photos offers a different view: Images of places where efforts are underway to slow or even reverse the damage we have done to the planet — Continue reading
Since we started this platform in 2011 I have been on the lookout for graphical representations that help me, and therefore might help others, understand complex issues related to the environment. Photography has been the easiest reach for me, perhaps because I am a son of, a brother of, and a father of people who have mastered that form. Comics were not part of my life, so that form has eluded me. And I realize that the work of Susie Cagle escaped my attention–as I have shared visual artists’ depictions of natural phenomena, with science and especially ecological issues emphasized–until now. And this is a good way for her work to come to my attention, because in our family we have been debating this tree’s value for decades:
Fire-starting weed or ecological scapegoat? The battle over California’s eucalyptus trees
The fight over a celebrated exotic plant highlights questions over California’s future amid the climate crisis
The Moment, overall winner and joint winner of the 2019 wildlife photographer of the year for the category ‘behaviour: mammals’. Yongqing Bao’s image shows a hungry marmot, not long out of hibernation, being confronted by a fox in China’s Qilian mountains. Photograph: Bao Yongqing/2019 wildlife photographer of the year
Today, not much to say, other than wow, thanks to the Guardian’s sharing of these photos, compiled by Eric Hilaire. Continue reading
Impala, zebras, topi, and waterbuck share this savanna scene in Akagera National Park
The next park we visited on the Rwanda Study Tour after Nyungwe was Akagera National Park. Although the park was created in 1934, it’s only been run by a partnership between the Rwandan government and an NGO called African Parks—which helps manage about fifteen parks on the continent—since 2010. At this point, a change in operation style and protection started to help wildlife bounce back as well as increase visitation to the park. Back in 2010, the park hosted around fifteen thousand visitors per year and only made about $200,000 (while losing money), but last year the park received thirty-six thousand visitors and made $2,000,000 (getting out of the red for the first time).
A zebra gives itself a dustbath while a impala, two topi, and a warthog watch on
Thanks to Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose books I have read about but never read, this book above came to my attention with the photo below featured under the review’s title on the New Yorker website.
To Be a Bird
The photographs in Stephen Gill’s “The Pillar” encounter birds on their own terms.
A pillar knocked into the ground next to a stream in a flat, open landscape, trees and houses visible in the distance, beneath a vast sky. That is the backdrop to all the photographs in Stephen Gill’s book “The Pillar.” We see the same landscape in spring and summer, in autumn and winter, we see it in sunshine and rain, in snow and wind. Yet there is not the slightest bit of monotony about these pictures, for in almost every one there is a bird, and each of these birds opens up a unique moment in time. We see something that has never happened before and will never happen again. The first time I looked at the photographs, I was shaken. I’d never seen birds in this way before, as if on their own terms, as independent creatures with independent lives.
The review got me to seek out the book to see what it looks like; the picture at the very top and the ones below are what I found:
I see from these pages what the reviewer describes, and to the right is what appears to be the cover of the book:
What was shocking about it was that I already felt familiar with birds, as I imagine most people do, since we can hardly go anywhere without being surrounded by them in one way or another.Here, where I’m sitting, in London, if I turn my head and look out of the glass doors, two, perhaps three seconds will go by before a bird passes over the trees and rooftops. Continue reading
Subway cars set sail on a barge in “Weeks 297, 2008.” STEPHEN MALLON
Thanks to Winnie Lee and Atlas Obscura:
Photographing the New York City Subway Cars That Retired as Artificial Reefs
How Stephen Mallon captured this unusual voyage to the bottom of the ocean.
The rooftops of subway cars. “Abbey Road, 2008.” STEPHEN MALLON
The photographer Stephen Mallon specializes in documenting man’s industrial-scale creations. During his career, he’s focused his lens on the recycling industry, the largest floating structure ever built, and the transportation and installation of a new bridge in New York City. So it wasn’t surprising when, in 2008, he was drawn to an unusual program spearheaded by the MTA New York City Transit system: a multi-phased artificial reefing project that saw the shells of 2,580 decommissioned subway train cars repurposed and dropped into coastal waters off New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, between 2001 and 2010.
The abstract beauty of stripped-down vehicles in “Transfer, 2009.” STEPHEN MALLON
Mallon arranged to follow the outdated subway cars as they were prepared and cleaned, loaded onto barges, and finally plopped into the sea. As he traveled with a crew in a tugboat to get his shots, the photographer developed his sea legs.
Subway cars hoisted in the air in “Mind The Gap, 2008.” STEPHEN MALLON
“I was never underwater, so just needed to keep myself steady on the back of the boat. It’s kind of like surfing or skiing—just keep your balance, keep the horizon line straight, bend your knees, and don’t fall overboard,” Mallon says. Continue reading
The Ogelthorpe University Museum of Art is one of the gems of the Atlanta area, for good reason. Not only does the museum have its own well curated collections, it receives visiting collections that are timely and powerful.
Tara Rice‘s Grandmother Project photographic series highlights the historically matriarchal influence within African cultures, coinciding with the project based in Senegal “promoting health, well-being and rights of women and children in developing countries through grandmother-inclusive and intergenerational programs that build on communities’ cultural values and resources.”
The photo series dovetails perfectly with the female centric collection of sculptures and masks in the sister exhibit, Stories Without an End.
Stories Without an End: Power, Beauty and Wisdom of Women in African Art of the Mehta Collection
January 18 – April 21, 2018
The exhibition Stories Without an End: Power, Beauty and Wisdom of Women in African Art of the Mehta Collection includes a selection of 50 classically carved wooden sculptures and masks drawn from the collection of Dileep and Martha Mehta.
The exhibition represents art from more than 25 ethnic groups spanning 12 countries. These objects are gathered into thematic groups including women in governance, maternity, idealized beauty, and female ancestors.
OUMA members Dileep and Martha Mehta are collectors of African and Asian arts. Their African art collection, including objects in this exhibit, has greatly benefited from diligent sourcing by and wise counsel of African Art dealers Tamba Kaba and Sanoussi Kalle.
This exhibition was developed by Elizabeth H. Peterson, OUMA director, and organized by Amanda Hellman, PhD, curator of African art, Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
Stories Without an End was inspired in part by the work of the Grandmother Project (GMP) an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and a Senegalese NGO with representatives throughout the USA and abroad. GMP, with headquarters in Senegal, works with elders in West African villages to fight the maltreatment of young girls. This includes bettering maternal and child nutrition, reproductive health, and marriage standards. The exhibition title is inspired by the GMP initiative “stories without an ending,” which is a tool used to facilitate communication via the elders. For more about the Grandmother Project please visit www.grandmotherproject.org.
The Grandmother Project: Photographs by Tara Rice
January 18 – April 21, 2019
The Grandmother Project (GMP) develops community approaches that promote positive and sustained improvements in the lives of girls, children, women, and families by building on existing cultural and community values, roles and assets in southern Senegal. Continue reading
Forest mother-of-pearl
‘It was a painstaking process, holding my breath and sitting perfectly still every time I pressed the shutter release. It seemed to take forever’
Time for a break from the regular news. Here are some visual reminders of why we care for nature, and why we protect it. Thanks to the Guardian for bringing this photographer’s unique technique to our attention in the photo feature titled The butterfly effect: wings in extreme close-up – in pictures:
In his new series Metamorphosis, photographer Jake Mosher composes artworks using hundreds of exposures of highly magnified butterflies’ and moths’ wings
All photographs by Jake Mosher
Detail of a Malay lacewing butterfly. Photograph: Jake Mosher
Thanks to that feature, I wandered into this commercial project, valorizing the beauty of butterflies, that I can recommend as worth a look:
METAMORPHOSIS
*** Featured in the Royal Photographic Society’s Journal, and also in The Guardian. Please take a look at their photo gallery display here.***
Limited edition, 1 of 1 pieces. When one sells, it will not be reprinted in any size, ever. This is your chance to own collectible, one-of-a-kind pieces of art the likes of which the world has never seen before.
These images are the composition of hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of 4:1 macro photographs of butterfly and moth wings. There is no artificial color, imported designs, or any “drawn” artifacts. This is art and photography intertwined, and these images are only available here. This work has been recognized as entirely unique to me. Continue reading
Grand-Prize Winner: Thousands of Volkswagen and Audi cars sit idle in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert. Models manufactured from 2009 to 2015 were designed to cheat emissions tests mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Following the scandal, Volkswagen recalled millions of cars. By capturing scenes like this one, I hope we will all become more conscious of and more caring toward our beautiful planet. # © Jassen Todorov / National Geographic Photo Contest
I never tire of reminders of how greed is never good. It is unbecoming. But visual reminders of this are especially welcome. When the story broke about this audacious scam that showed how profit can motivate evil, it gave me pause, if momentarily, because our entrepreneurial conservation business model is premised on the possibility that profit can motivate good outcomes. Thanks to Alan Taylor for reminding us it is awards season for photography that impacts our understanding of the world, and especially for the link to this photo that tells one outcome of the VW scandal with such impact:
Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Contest
National Geographic magazine has announced the winning entries in its annual photo competition. The grand-prize winner this year is Jassen Todorov, who will take home a $5,000 prize for his aerial image of thousands of recalled Volkswagen and Audi cars in the Mojave Desert. The contest organizers have shared with us the top winners and honorable mentions below, selected from a pool of nearly 10,000 entries. Captions are written by the individual photographers and lightly edited for content.
At first, this runner up photo looks too composed to my eye, but the more I look at it the urge to weep gets stronger. Kind of like when I gaze long enough at this photo, the urge to stay still and observe grips me. Or when I look at this photo, I can explain the best of life in India. Same for any of Milo’s series. Photographic impact.
3rd Place, Wildlife: As the late-night hours ticked by and my eyelids grew heavy, two southern white rhinoceroses appeared silently from the shadows to drink from a watering hole in South Africa’s Zimanga Game Reserve. On alert, they stood back-to-back, observing their surroundings before lowering their heads. I felt privileged to share this moment with these endangered animals. While I was well prepared technically, with my camera set correctly on a tripod, I underestimated the emotional impact the magnificent beasts would have on me. I had photographed them months earlier, and now both rhinos sported a new look: They had been dehorned to deter poachers. I had heard about this development but had not yet seen them. I was full of emotion—and horror—that poaching had such a devastating effect. It must have been a hard decision to dehorn their rhinos, and I am grateful for the reserve’s efforts. # © Alison Langevad / National Geographic Photo Contest
Read the whole story here.
Jill Greenberg, Glare, Glare, 2005, Ultrachrome ink on hot press paper, 106.7 x 127 cm / 42 x 50 in, Private collection.
It has been a long year since our last links to Phaidon. Following yesterday’s essay this seems an appropriate moment to renew our attention to beautiful books, this one about animals (click the image of the book to go to the source).
Don’t look too closely at this Diana Monkey – you might unnerve yourself. Captured by photographer Jill Greenberg and appearing in our book Animal: Exploring the Zoological World, with its defiant yet nervous hazel-eyed gaze, today’s Astonishing Animal stirs an uncanny sense of self in the viewer.
Greenberg’s hyperrealist style – the monkey’s white and grey fur is lit so that each single strand appears in high definition – captures incredibly emotive images of animals showing emotions and involved in gestures previously thought to be the reserve solely of humans. This portrait is one of seventy-five Greenberg has published covering thirty different primates, including species such as apes, chimpanzees, macaques, mandrils and marmosets.
In the Tophane quarter, 1986. Credit Ara Guler/Magnum Photos
The third of three previous posts invoking Orhan Pamuk mentions an experience in a museum a couple years ago in Istanbul. I did not write much about it in that post because I did not know what to say, or if there was anything to say about how the museum affected me. But reading Orhan Pamuk’s words in the essay below about his friend, and the photographs that man took, evoked strong memory of the effect that museum had on me. It evoked a strong sense of the value of memory, in all its limits and even imperfections.
Just prior to that museum experience I had written a dozen posts about the work we had been doing in India since 2010, which was connected to work we began in Costa Rica many years earlier. I think what that museum visit put into focus for me was how, in our work crafting experiences with sense and sensibility, we were creating our own museums of innocence. Our mission is to create authentic, distinctive and valuable life experiences, to build profitable businesses around these, and then to direct the associated economic benefits to the conservation and prosperity of unique natural and cultural heritage and to the improvement of the quality of life of the local host communities. That work is about crafting memories, just as books, museums and photographs do in their own way. Seeing these pictures and reading these words reminds me of that:
‘I Like Your Photographs Because They Are Beautiful’
Orhan Pamuk remembers his friend Ara Guler, the great photographer, who lovingly captured Istanbul and its people.
A coffee bar in a Beyoglu arcade, 1958. Credit Ara Guler/Magnum Photos
Ara Guler, who died on Oct. 17, was the greatest photographer of modern Istanbul. He was born in 1928 in an Armenian family in Istanbul. Ara began taking photographs of the city in 1950, images that captured the lives of individuals alongside the city’s monumental Ottoman architecture, its majestic mosques and magnificent fountains. I was born two years later, in 1952, and lived in the same neighborhoods he lived in. Ara Guler’s Istanbul is my Istanbul. Continue reading
(Clockwise, from upper left) Seven-square-mile views of Manhattan; Chaganbulage Administrative Village in Inner Mongolia; Venice, Italy; and farms in Plymouth, Washington # © Google
Every now and then, it is good to just let the mind wander. And some of those times, visual prompts are the fastest way to get from here to there.
A seven-square-mile snapshot of the 2,700,000-square-mile Amazon rainforest in Brazil #© Google
Thanks to the Atlantic’s Senior Editor of the photo section, Alan Taylor, for this:
Seven Square Miles
Spending time looking at the varying and beautiful images of our planet from above in Google Earth, zooming in and out at dizzying rates, I thought it would be interesting to compare all of these vistas at a fixed scale—to see what New York City, Venice, or the Grand Canyon would look like from the same virtual height. So, the following images are snapshots from Google Earth, all rectangles of the same size and scale, approximately three and a half miles (5.6 kilometers) wide by two miles (3.2 kilometers) tall—showing seven square miles (18.1 square kilometers, or 4,480 acres) of the surface of our planet in each view.
Photographs courtesy Rorhof / Stadtarchiv Kronberg
Thank you Andrea DenHoed. We did not know how much we should appreciate them:
The Turn-of-the-Century Pigeons That Photographed Earth from Above
In 1907, just a few years after the Wright brothers lifted off in Kitty Hawk, and while human flight was still being measured in metres and minutes, Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent application for a new invention: the pigeon camera. The device was precisely what it sounds like—a small camera fitted with straps and equipped with a timer so that pigeons could carry it and take photos in flight. Neubronner first used the device on his own flock of homing pigeons, which he sometimes employed to deliver prescriptions. In the following years, he showed his camera at international expositions, where he also sold postcards taken by the birds. Additionally, he developed a portable, horse-drawn dovecote, with a darkroom attached to it, which could be moved into proximity of whatever object or area the photographer hoped to capture from on high. Continue reading
Organikos 