Images by Anders Petersen, renowned Swedish photographer.

“To me, it’s encounters that matter, pictures are much less important.”

Yet darkly beautiful pictures he does make.

More here. And read Aperture interview here.

(Gracias Nadia B.)

I have thought a thinking many times: about what type of place this would be if instead of figuring out the ‘averages’ and the ‘normalities’, instead of going through a watered-down process of deciding on where to draw the line between the pathological and the poetical, instead of fitting and tailoring to tyrannical  standards, we could instead build micro-climates where our quirks and ideosyncracies could live more happily and fantastically and freely– a shifting world that takes our shape.

TED just posted a talk by Temple Grandin, who spoke a few weeks ago at Long Beach and had us all in the audience on our feet clapping away madly, thoroughly moved. Diagnosed with autism (“a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior”) she herself  implodes easy dichotomies with a gracious slap: a person with autism on stage, in front of 1,000 peopled audience, communicating not only with clarity but with a strange type of undeniable force.

Yes. Yes. The world needs all kinds of minds.

And, I would say, minds need many types of worlds.

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“The eyes see and the ears imagine”

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“The case of a growing scene at the intersection of education, pedagogy and art in Mexico”.

You can read the essay–and also see my video interview with Sofía Olascoaga–right here.

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Images by  JH Engstrom.

Says American Suburb X:

Loneliness is a strange bird. If it is called upon… at first it comes like a quiet stranger and slowly befriends you. It then starts to seeps into the skin… to live inside of you as sort of an ally… to strengthen you in your pain, as a place to escape, to go to it, to survive by it, to turn “inside”… to find shelter, to find refuge. It acts as a shield, erects for you a barrier… but then, it starts to take over… it fills you up, and emptiness sets in. What was once “you” is now something “else”… a chasm, a quiet chamber where numbness echoes and your mind screams out for someone to care. The one that you were going to be has quietly left you, the one that you were going to become has slowly gone away and instead, you are left in the shadows, a shell… a walking veneer. The emptiness that makes up the internal “you” soon finds your exterior. It comes from the hidden inside to the bare outside, the eye’s give off the clues like a poker tell… the secret inside of you is able to be seen… your isolation and hardness tell your tale… and so your face becomes your betrayer. You now walk with your secret as a mask for all to see, covering up what once was you… and telling the world that you are no longer there or letting the world see that it is a partial you. In the work that is “Shelter”, JH Engstrom tells this human tale… he speaks of loneliness and isolation, he advertises this progression to a hardened self… he is a novelist of the pattern of abuse that turns to hardness. He speaks of the emotional cold, the freezing cold… cold skin-cold walls-cold cheeks, and cold hearts. He hits with past violence, with alcohol, he bleeds out a cry for intimacy… of raw human womanly existence and raw human skin. Oh yes he tells a complex tale.

Coming from the far north of Sweden and with deep ties to Anders Petersen and apprentice ties to Mario Testino, “Shelter” is JH Engstrom’s first published work. Published in 1997, and named photo book of the year in Sweden, it was made over the course of three years, at a women’s shelter. To step into this early work of his is to enter the complex world of what it is to be human, what it is to be woman and what it is to be JH Engstrom. This is subjective art, poetic and mysterious, it is not a documentary. It is real but it is fiction: this is a vision. A surreal view and with a technique that praises flaws, with an approach lifts up imperfection… this work relishes brokeness, in scratches, it’s dirt, in the film, in the scans and in the subjects.

You can explore more here

“And all that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things or one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had a precedent; but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily hurt: sustaining for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe:

So how can it be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate and not forever worship.

-James Agee, In Praise of Famous Men-

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Images by Glenn Sloggett

Via American SuburbX

More  here.

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His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. To be “taken in” everywhere is to see the inside of everything.

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(Gracias Joshua Ray)

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Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.

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Images by Walker Evans, from the 30s.

Via American SuburbX.

Family Stuff . By Chinese photographer Huang Qingjun.

People in contemporary China, surrounded by their belongings.

Says TED:

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

(You can also read a fantastic essay about him in The New Yorker.)

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

-Mark Twain

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Obitateli, or Inhabitants, by Artavazd Pelechian.

A must-see classic from the 70s, made entirely out of archival footage.

Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots is a book by designer Mark Michaelson; a collection of mugshots of petty thieves that he has amassed over the years.

Filmmaker Errol Morris wrote about the selection of pictures that you see above.

You can also read an article on this book at the Smithsonian Magazine, and see more images here.

(The New York Times called the pictures “a catalog of the human face and the things that can happen to it.”)

(One is one from the front and one is another from the side. From the back? Only the other knows.)

Says American Suburb X:

In the early 1900s, Ernest J. Bellocq carried his 8 x 10-inch view camera across Basin Street to photograph the women of New Orleans’ notorious district of legalized prostitution, Storyville. His private photographic project remained unknown until after his death, but eventually found its way to international acclaim. Yet virtually no prostitute portraits printed by Bellocq himself have surfaced. He kept his Storyville project secret from everyone except a few of his closest friends, and it remained secret until his glass negative plates were discovered languishing in a junk shop years after his death.

In 1967, Master photographer Lee Friedlander acquired and began to make prints from Bellocq’s glass negative plates, and the Museum of Modern Art hung an exhibition of them in 1970. Bellocq then took his place as the photography world’s best-known photographer of prostitutes.

Find full article here.

(Interesting read.)

As you probably heard already, Larry Sultan–influential American photographer–died some days ago.

As I was looking through some of his images, I remembered a great picture (‘Dad on Bed’) and a great lil text on the BBC website:

Some artists have confronted the role photography itself has played in creating and complicating our sense of domestic life. Larry Sultan photographed his father and family over a ten year period spanning the 70s and 80s as part of an elaborate project that included his parents own photos, home movies and statements. This was the Reagan era which preached the values of family life, a version Sultan didn’t recognise.

“Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, ‘Isn’t this a great family?’ So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology.” (Larry Sultan)

As Larry set about creating his version of the Sultan family experience, his father Irvin struggled with the role his son now gave him, as the following exchange reveals:

Irvin: “I’d get set, I’d get comfortable and he says to me ‘Don’t smile’, which would absolutely irritate me because when he says ‘Don’t smile’ in my own mind I have no idea what he is projecting. What is he trying to tell me to do?” “I remember that picture so distinctly sitting on the bed, shirt and tie dressed up and I looked like a full on lost soul and I look at the picture and I say ‘That’s not me!’”

Larry: “In fact you went even further you said, ‘That’s not me sitting on the bed that’s you sitting on the bed. That’s a self portrait’. And I thought that was right. And you said this too, you said ‘Any time you show that picture you tell people that that’s not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to go, depressed. That’s you sitting on the bed and I am happy to help you with the project but let’s get things straight here!’”

“The daily practice of a photographer is to be distanced, to have a little bit of room between what you’re doing and how you see, what you look at. For me the biggest surprise was that the distance I thought I needed as a photographer slipped. It wasn’t about ‘these’ people it was about ‘us’.”

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You can also read an article about him on the New York Times, right here.

Ahh. I confess: I have been going through an intoxicating TED overdose. First I got excited reading about the recently announced TED 2010 Fellows, whom I am tremendously eager to meet in a couple of months. Then, on Thursday, I got sent my first official TED Senior Fellow plane ticket. Sí sí sí:  February at Long Beach. Should be mind-blowing, once again…

And so, while a certain post-TED countdown and another pre-TED countdown occupy my head, I have been diving into the new videos: do take a look at the one above if you have not yet.

Says their website:

“Pranav Mistry is the MIT grad student behind Sixth Sense, a tool that connects the physical world with the world of data. He and his advisor at the MIT Media Lab, Pattie Maes, unveiled Sixth Sense at TED2009, and the Sixth Sense demo premiered yesterday on TED.com — and in both places, it has fired people’s imaginations.”

(You can also read a TED Q&A with Pranav.)

(And our dear Black, from the MIT Media Lab, if you are telekinetically present: would you care to comment about the Sixth Sense, as you did before? Unos meses más tarde, cómo se ve la cosa…)

Esta serie de Guido Castagnoli, fotógrafo italiano, enseña esa otra cara que se pierde en una esquina del estereotipo de Japón. Lejos de la tecnología y las grandes urbes: la suburbia japonesa.

(Fotos tomadas en varios pueblos. Puedes ver más aquí.)

A few drawings by Lorenzo Fonda, visual artist and filmmaker, also part of the ex FABRICA family; he used them to illustrate a talk he gave a month ago at the Cutoutfest in Queretaro.

(Gracias Lorenzo por mandar)

Female Photographer Seeks Portrait Subjects, by Siri Kaur. More here.

“These are photographs of strangers, people I don’t know, whose lives I discover through the act of photography. The strangers select themselves by responding to notices I post around town and online, announcing, “Female Photographer Seeks Portrait Subjects. All Ages, Shapes, Sizes Welcome.” Giving me permission to enter their lives long enough to create a portrait nurtures a deep-seated curiosity I have nurtured my whole life. My role as photographer gives me access to these anonymous existences. My images are concrete fictions: they are my fantasies about the lives of people who willingly invite me into their homes. My strangers are willing participants in this fantasy. “

-Siri Kaur-

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(“The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of matter. The difficultly is that every firm step I win out of chaos is a firm step towards…more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself across the gap, and huddled on the little outcrop, safe for now, observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of water. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief  beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.”

-Jeanette Winterson-)

Images by Lauren Greenfield.

Says James Estrin, from The New York Times:

“They journeyed to the desert emirate of Dubai by the tens of thousands. Laborers from small towns on the Indian subcontinent and white-collar executives from the capitals of Europe. They came seeking fortune, and they built a modern city unlike any the world had ever seen: a city with the world’s largest tower, an indoor ski slope and a honeymoon suite with a live whale shark in the window.

A city where anything was possible. Sand too hot? Then build a beach with underground refrigeration.

As the orgy of building ground to a halt earlier this year, the photographer Lauren Greenfield set out to tell the story of Dubai and the foreign workers who make up most of its population.

“I call the story an improbable fairy tale,” Ms. Greenfield said. “Anything that could be fantasized could be built. It really was the land of opportunity. It’s more Las Vegas than Las Vegas.”

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Read full story and see complete photo gallery here.

Found via bldg blog.

Images by Joel Sternfeld

Images by Catherine Larre

By Yoko Ono

(Via)