Here is an image from Heartland, one of Texan Bryan Schutmaat’s photography sets. You know when someone just has the eye? Well, if you don’t then this is a good chance to polish up on someone who most definitely does. Displayed through one of those sites that you just can’t seem to keep yourself from clicking through.
Gaea Woods caught our eye the other day with the portraits she took of her friend Samantha, seemingly covered all over in Vaseline. A bit of research led us to finding out that Gaea is actually a photographer with a whole host of talents under her belt, particularly when it comes to shooting things really close-up. Gaea was born in rural northern California and now resides in LA, where she’s making her career as a photographer.
Photographer Wai Lin Tse’s portfolio balances dewy, sun-kissed babes with photographs of plants and chubby-cheeked kids. It’s quite the melting pot and can be seen in editorials for Lula, The Plant and Apartamento magazine. Lin’s photographs are impeccably-lit and somehow both poised and quite tongue-in-cheek. She seems equally comfortable shooting landscapes as she is people, perhaps partially down to the fact that she is based in both Stockholm and Barcelona and surely taking lots of exciting cross-continent road trips.
Removed from their cabinets, museum pieces take on a strange quality. Once the glass is gone, some of their mystique goes too; and they feel almost like everyday things to be used and touched, rather than alien relics to be admired. It’s this disorientating new quality that’s captured so beautifully in Thom Atkinson’s series Museums, showing pieces from the Wellcome Trust and National History Museum collections.
There’s something very peaceful, but slightly voyeuristic about Adrian Skenderovic’s series Down the River. The photographs show the bateaux-mouches tourist boats that gently cruise down the River Seine in Paris, but here the spectacle isn’t the Louvre or Notre Dame, but the tourists themselves. It really awakens our nosey nature seeing the little bald heads and bathing ladies from above, and creating our own narratives about what might be happening on these seemingly serene vessels, with the colours and perspective helping us float along with the subjects. Last time we posted about Adrian’s work it was to showcase his brilliant series of images of lonely basketball hoops, and it seems he has a knack for taking objects that feel familiar and totally shifting our take on them.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 25 years, and missed last night’s Oscars ceremony (congratulations Patricia!) Richard Linklater is an Austin-based filmmaker who until recently would have been best-known for coming of age classic Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy or School of Rock. That is, until the release of Boyhood.
Yener Torun is a 32 year-old architect who has turned Istanbul into the geographical equivalent of Aladdin’s cave of wonders. Tucked away among the beautiful Ottoman and Byzantine architecture and the blue Bosphorus are a wealth of impossibly bright buildings dominated by geometric patterns, rainbow hues and funny architectural idiosyncrasies. And through his Instagram account, Yener has been slowly but steadily documenting it all.
Charlotte Rutherford’s photography is fun, bright and tinged with humour and 1980s sass. Shooting editorial for the likes of Vice and Tank magazine and look-books for Lazy Oaf and Baby G, the self-taught photographer maintains an aesthetic that is both well-informed and original. She cites David LaChapelle and Pierre et Gilles as major influences on her work, saying that they prove the encouraging dictum “OK cool, you can do like ANYTHING.” I couldn’t agree more.
You can almost smell the creativity, hash and late late nights behind the images in Hipgnosis Portraits. Or perhaps that’s just the super-shiny, huge full-colour pages. Either way, the enormous tome from Thames & Hudson transports you into a world of surreal scenes formed of surreal characters, taking us into the archives of the Hipgnosis design agency that helped form the mythologies surrounding some of the biggest names in music in the 20th Century.
Few things look quite as fun as floating about in a big blue pool, surrounded by those foam wiggly things right now. The moustachioed gent above, reclining in the water, was shot as part of photographic duo Labadie / Van Tour’s Pool series for a Vers Beton magazine feature about Rotterdam’s public swimming pools.
Blair Getz Mezibov is the photographer responsible for taking men, mere mortal men, and transforming them into what are essenetially demi-gods. Case in point, here’s some of his refined editorial work for glossy magazines like GQ Style, Rollacoaster magazine and Out magazine, elevating models to immaculately poised and dapper gents caught mid-swing in a game of tennis, or perhaps leaning nonchalantly over the back of a director’s chair, looking like they’ve been carved from marble.
Life can be pretty boring when you’re a teenager. Rather than turning to the gory allure of video games and SnapChat, 18-year-old Izumi Miyazaki decided to take matters into her own hands and make a series of selfies that make yours look absolutely rubbish. By utilising household items and foodstuffs as props, and sometimes going as far as building her own sets (see head in the clouds photos below) Izumi transports herself into far off lands, so far off that they’re on a different world entirely. Her fixed, deadpan stare throughout makes the project not just endearing but also worth much more than if she was just larking about. It’s art, man. FYI she also sells badges and other small merch items – get ’em while you can.
Close Your Eyes, the newest publication from Northern Ireland-born and London-based photographer Gareth McConnell, is one of those books which seems to boil history down and to present it for inspection. Gareth describes it as a “frenzied reworking” of his accumulated archive; it brings together over ten years worth of photographs of rave culture, of civil gatherings and of riots, all of which is placed side-by-side with found imagery from the internet, shots from historical moments and personal and political perspectives.
This post comes by way of submission from young Russian photographer Anastasia Korosteleva. You may have seen her Girls series over on Dazed in which she burnt out the faces of the subjects of her dream-like photographs. This series entitled Classmates takes Anastasia to sunny East London in South Africa where she turns her lens to school kids. Once you get past how fantastic their uniforms are, and that feeling of nostalgic schoolyard bliss has passed, notice just how fantastic Anastasia is at contrasting the primary colour uniforms against the stark, school-y backgrounds. Also worth noting is how clever she is to not make the project cutesy in the slightest, but just a study of a group of innocent, cheeky mini adults.
