Tag: photography

Diverse bedrooms

Image from the book, Where Children Sleep by James Mollison.
Where Children Sleep by James Mollison.

To supplement our work on the fundamental needs of humans, we can add James Mollison’s poignant pictures in his book, Where Children Sleep. It ties in well with the Diverse China pictures.

You can find more of his images in LIFE.

Even without the text descriptions, the pictures are wonderfully composed and evocative. I think I’m going to have to add this one to our library.

An interesting project would be to have my students take their own pictures of their rooms. Just in the book, some of the contrasts are quite startling.

From Where Children Sleep by James Mollison (via Visual News).

Real estate crisis

Partially developed residential project in Florida. Image from Google Maps via The Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

Two poignant intersections of the foreclosure crisis and art came to my attention recently. One is the series of aerial photos of Floridian real estate developments that never came to fruition. The other, an article on photographers who document the insides of foreclosed homes.

Both are moving in very different ways. The former in showing unfulfilled potential (although there is a good argument that many areas should never have been developed in the first place), and the latter in illustrating the debris of dreams that were broken.

NPR’s On the Media has a fascinating interview with Paul Reyes, a reporter who’s covered the foreclosure photographers. Reyes points out that while there can be a certain aesthetic that makes for striking photography, the real poignancy, particularly in these examples, comes from knowing the tragic back-story behind the images.

The On The Media article:

Texture photography

I’ve always had a predilection for texture photography, despite the fact that I’ve only just now come to realize that there is actually a term for it. The changes in perspective you get from looking at things at different scales continues to fascinate. Texture photography focuses on the small but looking at big things from far away can have a similar effect.

Martian dunes. Image from NASA.

Insects up close

Photo by Luc Viatour from the Réserve naturelle Marie-Mouchon.

A change of perspective can give the most amazing insights. I find macro photographs, particularly of insects, to offer a stunningly refreshing view of these nuisances. Luc Viatour, whose image is posted above, has some wonderful, copyright permissive, pictures.

Alternatively, Miroslaw Swietek has some amazing images of insects covered in droplets of dew (taken at around 3:00 am).

John Kimbler also has some spectacular photos as well as a nice article on how to do macro photography. The Wikipedia page on macro photography is also quite useful in that it goes into how to adapt your camera to take these photographs.

Photography, with it extensive use of refraction and reflection is a great avenue to talk about waves and their properties. Macro photography can be quite effective at striking the imagination and getting into taxonomy and entomology.