Thanks to the Guardian for ongoing coverage of the band of environmentalists who are doing their best to keep the planet’s oceans healthy:
Greenpeace activists target destructive fishing in Indian Ocean – in pictures
With some Indian Ocean tuna stocks on the brink of collapse, the expedition exposes harmful methods by the world’s largest tuna company, Thai Union, owner of John West
A young man from Bali, Indonesia, shows off his rainbow-colored rooster before a cockfight. Courtesy of Ruben Salgado Escudero and the World Photography Organization
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for reminding us that it is that time of the year, again, when Sony culls through hundreds of thousands of entries to narrow the field down to a handful of exceptional photos:
6 Sensational Photos From A Global Contest With 230,000 Entries
One photo of a pensive Congolese woman in her distinctive makeup could be mistaken for a Renaissance painting. Another, of a coal plant sending smoke plumes over a town in China, looks like a still from a 1950s propaganda film. And another, of a little girl yawning during an Indonesian festival, will just make you smile. Continue reading
Although a previous post that embraced the sculptural qualities of food had a far more lighthearted intent, the juxtaposition of Carleton Watkins’ classic photographs and Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman’s irreverent dioramas has to be viewed with a certain level of irony. The iconic photos of America’s great national parks brought a sense of the country’s vastness home.
The pioneering nineteenth-century landscape photographer Carleton Watkins visited Yosemite during a time of rapid industrialization in the American West, but you’d never know it from the majestic tranquility of the rivers, mountains, forests, and rock faces he depicted. In her book “River of Shadows,” Rebecca Solnit, chronicling the life of another influential photographer of the time, Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies of high-speed movement helped to pioneer motion-picture technology, wrote that Watkins’s landscapes “looked like the true world everyone sought but no one else could locate among the mining booms, railroad building, land grabs, mobs, and murders” of the period. And yet Watkins’s images—which provided many people back East their first views of Yosemite’s idyllic splendor—were, in some sense, an advertisement for the possibilities of the West, and the vast untapped resources that American corporations of the eighteen-sixties and seventies were rushing to exploit. Continue reading
A mix of tropical and hybrid fruits recently available in the United States. Credits: Photograph by Anthony Cotsifas. Styled by Michael Reynolds. Retouching: Anonymous Retouch. Prop assistant: Caleb Andriella. Photo assistants: Karl Leitz and Jess Kirkham. Fruit courtesy of Melissa’s Produce and Frieda’s Specialty Produce.
From the New York Times, the most unusual short news feature we have seen in some time just came to our attention. An April Fool’s item, perhaps? Click to the end of the story to see these “fruits” identified:
In a world of very few absolutes, here is one: Nature has no more perfect offering than fruit, nothing that seems better engineered to delight and entice humankind’s every sense. But of course, the real purpose of fruit is not to make humans happy, but to make more fruit: While it is the result of a relentless biological process that we happen to enjoy, the creation of fruit itself — from its larval stage as a flower to its dropping from the tree or bush onto the ground and growing into a new tree or bush — would go on whether we were there to appreciate it or not. Continue reading
S. electri. COURTESY GEORGE POINAR / OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
Amber is awesome. In so many ways, it is the definition of a natural wonder. One of those definitions might be its role as unintentional conservator of ancient natural history. This collection of images, from an amber-trapped flower to an prehistoric stingless bee, make the case for this definition:
The flowers of Strychnos electri are slim and small and trumpet-shaped. Their petals flare out at the tip to form a star, out of which a single spindly pollen tube protrudes. They look as if they might have fallen from the stalk yesterday, but they are ancient. At least fifteen million years ago, and possibly as many as forty-five million, they landed in the sticky sap of a tree that is now extinct, in a kind of forest that no longer exists on Earth. The sap hardened into amber, the tree died, and eventually geology took over. The fossilized flowers were submerged in water, buried under layers of gravel and limestone, and finally thrust upward into the foggy hills of the modern-day Dominican Republic. There, in 1986, an American entomologist named George Poinar, Jr., unearthed them. Continue reading
Mattanchery, Kochi, India
28 years ago, a Chicago-based couple found a shoebox of photographs of the Indian countryside and they traveled halfway across the world to find their origin. PHOTO: Scroll
Here’s the plot: In 1988, a couple visited an estate sale of a deceased friend and stumbled upon a shoebox of old photographs tucked under a couch. It contained more than a hundred envelopes filled with negatives and contact sheets for photographs depicting India in 1945. The identity of the photographer: unknown.
But only until they set out to discover the man behind the lens. The answer (and the photographs) hang at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts till January 31.
Darjeeling, India, 1983.
In short, you cannot. India is too diverse to explain, or even describe, in any meaningful way. So understanding it is a journey, at least lifelong if not eternal. But you should try. And we are dedicated to all kinds of attempts, including via journey; this book, published recently by Phaidon, may help with visual clues prior to such a journey, whether it will be your first or 80th:
The brilliant American Magnum photographer Steve McCurry has travelled so widely, he could have produced a great monograph on almost any continent. Yet, in his latest Phaidon publication, he has chosen to focus on the country that he first visited as a 28-year-old photojournalist in 1978, and has since returned to over eighty times.
Organikos 