December 2011 Archives

All old-school photographers know that black-and-white film typically registers a negative image of the subject of a photograph, which can then be printed as a positive image on paper for final viewing. What looks dark on a negative becomes light on a print. But what happens when an artist decides to play with this paradigm by aiming to make the final image a negative image that looks like a positive image?

Slovakian photographer Tono Stano has been artfully exploring this idea since the 1990s, and the results are wonderful, delightful, surreal, and hard to deconstruct. Lens Culture is pleased to present a dozen of our favorite images from Stano's series titled White Shadow.

The video at the bottom of this blog entry offers an inspiring behind-the-scenes look at the artist at work in his studio. Cheers!

How do the faces of soldiers change — before, during, and then after war? Can we detect profound or subtle psychological shifts just by looking at their portraits?

This is precisely the challenge that Claire Felicie presents with her series of triptych portraits of marines of the 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps. The series, Here are the Young Men (Marked), shows close-cropped portraits of the Dutch marines before, during and after they were deployed to Uruzgan, Afghanistan in 2009-2010.

Without doubt, every viewer will project a bit of himself or herself into the readings of these photographs. No matter what conclusions you draw, the images are haunting and compelling. See the full series here in Lens Culture. For best results, click the slideshow option to view high-resolution images.

This is the second in a series of delightfully quirky photobooks of images made by Frederic Lezmi with his iPhone. It's not really a book; it's more like a box of beautifully printed lithographs on heavy paper — so you can take them out one by one to appreciate them (even frame them), shuffle the order, or arrange them as a grid on your wall... They are self-published in a signed limited edition of 100.

I like the fact that they are also ephemeral bits of street art, symbols of anarchy tempered with the beauty of collage, captured on the go with a camera phone, and filtered through a computer application that attempts to replicate the look of Polaroids. They also serve as sociological specimens from the streets of the youngest democracy in Europe.

See and read more here in Lens Culture.

Twenty years ago, the boundaries of three new sovereign states were mapped along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union with immense oil and gas reserves and the enormous challenge of defining themselves as independent nation-states.

The rapid oil-fueled transformation of these societies and the newfound quest for national identity has left many of the citizens isolated, unable to locate themselves in the midst of these changes.

Hope, ambition, greed and uncertainty have been defining factors for various groups of people as these new littoral states attempt to integrate themselves into the world political economy. Read more, and see more, in this photo-essay, Promising Waters, by Mila Teshaieva.

Despite Japanese government refusal of admittance to the 20 kilometer "No Go" Zone surrounding the devastation of the nuclear power plant of Fukushima Daiichi, Photojournalist Pierpaolo Mittica went inside the zone several times last July to document the situation. This seemed like a natural follow-up to his award-winning work and book covering the aftermath of the disaster at Chernobyl.

Lens Culture is honored to present 30 powerful images from this new investigation, along with text by the photographer. See and read the whole story here in Lens Culture.