Tag: Photography

Kiev is Burning.

“Anti-government protests in Ukraine reached their most violent point on Tuesday as at least 25 people were killed and hundreds injured amid violent clashes between police and citizens. The protests have evolved into a full-blown crisis on the ground. What happens now is critical to the geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West.”

As the situation in Ukraine degenerates — here’s a decent primer — Paul Szoldra and Michael Kelly offer up stunning photos from the heart of the protests. “From riot police using ancient military tactics to defend against attacks to streets engulfed in flames, the photos coming for the heart of the standoff are incredible.”

At the Bayou of Madness.

“For many fans of weird fiction, the surprising appearance of this madness-inducing play into what ostensibly appeared to be just another police procedural was a bolt of lightning. Suddenly, the tone of the show changed completely, signaling the descent into a particular brand of horror rarely (if ever) seen on television.”

In io9, Michael Hughes explores True Detective‘s many references to The King in Yellow, an 1895 collection of short stories by Robert Chambers, and a “fictional play…that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed.”

As Molly Lambert of Grantland pointed out of HBO’s dark and addictive mini-series, “True Detective’s closest relative is Twin Peaks, which mined similarly nocturnal depths. Both shows espouse mythologies that feel extremely personal to the creators but also eerily universal, tapping into the same brain waves as paradoxical sleep.”

For his part, show creator Nic Pizzolatto recently talked about his debt to another Weird Fiction author, Thomas Ligotti. “I first heard of Ligotti maybe six years ago, when Laird Barron’s first collection alerted me to this whole world of new weird fiction that I hadn’t known existed. I started looking around for the best contemporary stuff to read, and in any discussion of that kind, the name ‘Ligotti’ comes up first…[H]is nightmare lyricism was enthralling and visionary.

On top of everything else, True Detective also has one of the more captivating credit sequences in recent years, as per below. (It apparently owes a heavy debt to the work of artist/photographer Dan Mountford.)

This is Your Film on Drugs.

“What do those substances, when they’re not altering minds, actually look like? To find out…Schoenfeld turned to a logical source: photographs. She converted her photo studio into a lab, then set to work exposing drugs (legal and illegal) to film negatives. She took the images that emerged from the reactions and magnified them—to gorgeous, and sometimes fairly creepy, results.” The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber points the way to All You Can Feel, an often-beautiful gallery of drugs on film on drugs.

Rooms in a New York Shoebox.

“Tuschman began by building the dioramas. Apart from an occasional prop taken from a dollhouse or toy train set, Tuschman builds everything to a scale about big enough for his cat, Smithers, to fit inside. He then photographed his models (he used two women and cast himself for the male character) on gray, using Photoshop to create the final image.”

Also by way of The Late Adopter: With Edward Hopper as his (original) inspiration, photographer Richard Tuschman conjures up evocative Hopper-style photos using dioramas and Photoshop. “I have always loved the way Hopper’s paintings, with an economy of means, are able to address the mysteries and complexities of the human condition,’ Tuschman wrote in his statement about the work.”

Tulip Time.

“Abstract rainbows of color fill the landscape in these beautiful photos by French photographer Normann Szkop who hopped in a Cesna with pilot Claython Pender to soar above the tulip fields in Anna Paulowna, a town in North Holland.” It’s a Mondrian kind of ground – Let him show you what he can do with it: In the eye candy department, tulip fields from the sky. “See the entire 100+ photograph set over on Flickr.”

The Secret Life of Hubble.

“Hubble has made over a million observations since launch, but only a small proportion are attractive images — and an even smaller number are ever actually seen by anyone outside the small groups of scientists that publish them. But the vast amount of data in the archive means that there are still many hundreds of beautiful images scattered among the valuable, but visually unattractive, scientific data that have never been enjoyed by the public.“

Until now. NASA uses crowdsourcing to unveil “Hubble’s hidden treasures”. The impressive pic above is “NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud,” submitted by one Josh Lake.

Crimson Twilight.


“Darkness crept back into the deserts of the red expanse. Rumors grew of a shadow in the East, whispers of a nameless fear.” Those two crazy Brits just landed, and already they’re paying dividends: Curiosity sends back this haunting vision of a Martian sunset. Update: Oops, sorry, this isn’t from Curiosity. It’s from the Mars Rovers, circa January 2009.

Back on Top of the World.


Soon after 9/11, I posted here that I hoped they’d break ground on the new buildings at Ground Zero before I left New York City and/or finished the PhD. Well, they got one out of two at least. Via the WTC Progress twitter feed and Buzzfeed, breathtaking views from atop the new World Trade Center. Great light in this one — It looks like a matte painting out of King Kong.