Where Children Sleep

 An introspective look at the lives and culture of children from around the world as told through a series of portraits of each child and a photograph of their bedroom. The James Mollison, who is Kenyan born but grew up in England, says: ‘I found myself thinking about my bedroom, how significant it was during my childhood, and how it reflected what I had and who I was’.

source: Lost at State Minor
artist website: James Mollison

 'It occurred to me that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances. From the start, I didn't want it just to be about 'needy children' in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations.'

 'It occurred to me that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances. From the start, I didn't want it just to be about 'needy children' in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations.'

 The artist published the photographs in a book "Where Children Sleep'. It is written and presented for an audience of 9-13 year olds ' intended to interest and engage children in the details of the lives of other children around the world, and the social issues affecting them, while also being a serious photographic essay for an adult audience.

Stephen Shore: American Beauty

Forced Perspective

Forced Perspective Photography is a technique that employs optical illusion also called a visual illusion Pics to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It is used primarily in photography, filmmaking and architecture. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation between them and the vantage point of the spectator or camera.

See some more at Forced Perspective Photography

Light Painting

Light Painting by Stuart Freeman

Illusions in Photography

This neat image by Michael Hughes uses the simple photography technique of holding one image in the frame of the shot you are taking. You can create optical illusions very easily.


See more by Michael Hughes

Now and Then

Now and Then photography project - insert an old photo into a new one to tell a story of past moments and how times have changed. Inspired by the flickr group Looking Into the Past, this project run by ABC Open explores the evolving history of Australian places and people and how a single image framed in a new one can ignite our imaginations and open a door to the past. Pictures that work best generally are details of places, buildings and often people - in short, they tell a story, and holding them in the new image tells a new story.

Signs of Life - JR

2011 TED Winner French street artist JR pastes enormous close up portraits of African women on any available wall space in their villages. He also printed them onto vinyl sheets then used to protect many leaking huts from rain, making murals seen from the sky. The portraits show the resilience and spirit of the women. 'I photograph anonymous women who are our daily heroes,' say JR, 'to make their story travel.'

brainpickings  daily motion
TRAILER " WOMEN ARE HEROES" from SOCIAL ANIMALS on Vimeo.

Sydney Biennale 2010

Image: Araya Rasdjarmrear 'Van Gogh's The Midday Sleep 1889/1990 and the Thai Villagers' 2007 (from 'The Two Planets Series' photographs and video 110 x 100cm, 18 mins)

Source: interview with feminist artist Araya Rasdjarmrear.

More Biennale 2010.

Smiling Face Film

In 1967 Yoko Ono proposed an idea to collect a smile from every person on the planet. In those pre-internet times she suggested we all take a smiling snapshot of ourselves and deliver it to the local post office where each town can keep their images on file. Smiles were to be displayed on a tv network so we could see smiles from all over the world at the click of a button. Ever the peace activist Yoko Ono says the collection of smiles may remind president Johnson of the individuals killed in the Vietnam War.
Now its the new millenium, we can contribute to Yoko Ono's project by adding our smiles via facebook, flickr etc and here.

Exposure

The Justice & Police Museum at Circular Quay in Sydney launched a new photography space earlier this year called the Archive Gallery. The gallery shows the work of forensic photographers from the 1940's and 1950's from its extensive forensic photography negative archive.
The photos document the harsh reality of crime in poetic black and white square format images taken with a steady hand. The stillness that is conveyed contrasts with the hurried phone camera shots we see on the news and internet today.

Photo: Aerial view of police attending a fatal fall in Sydney in 1954 photographed by Police Photographer Ross

source: Historic Houses Trust

Flying Hippo

Bicyclops

Several Purple Pedal project bikes are currently cycling around the streets of cities in America, Eurpoe and Asia. They each have a solar powered camera attached to the handle bars that automatically takes a photo every minute and uploads it to Flickr (the photo-sharing website) via a built in mobile phone.

Each bike's journey is also mapped using GPS technology. This dude spelled out a timely message to the universe.

I met the two fellows that are rolling around Sydney, Cyclops and Rollatron, at Bikes Rock & Roll in Newtown last week.

Triptych Portraiture

Year 11 students create a visual narrative portrait within set constraints of a triptych composition using digital imaging software.
See the exhibition here.

Trees

The trees had no leaves. It was May. I thought of something I'd read about the impossible beauty of the landscape before the industrial revolution. Particularly the beauty of woodland, because an Oak tree takes 300 years to grow, 300 years to live and 300 years to die. Unless you have a chain saw. Or a bomb.

source: Jeanette Winterson's new novel "The Stone Gods" p200

photo: Ansell Adams

Face 2 Face

The Parisian artist JR works with portrait photos which he puts up on walls, bridge pillars or gates. Through the special aesthetics of his photos and the sometimes gigantic formats in which he brings the faces to the city, he directly challenges advertisement posters and gigantic banners in a visual way because the people in his photos are actively looking out at us as opposed to being objectified.

Certificate No.000358/

Dutch photographer Robert Knoth has been visiting Chernobyl and other sites of nuclear devastation in the former Soviet Union since the early Nineties. The people in his photographs - many of them children and teenagers - are just like those in the rest of the world except that through no fault of their own they must grapple with the apocalyptic consequences of technological folly.

15-year-old Annya Pesenko (or Chernobyl certificate no. 000358/) has been ill since a brain tumor was diagnosed when she was only four years old and now is bed-ridden. Knoth's straightforward photographs of people like Annya allow viewers to enter their lives and gain an understanding their stories without making a spectacle of their misfortune.

Currently exhibiting at the Australian Centre for Photography
IMAGE © Robert Knoth Gomel, Belarus. Annya Pesenko, Chernobyl certificate no. 000358/ 2005

Explorers

Jennifer Zwick Artist's Statement:
My constructed-narrative photographs are nonlinear short stories. They focus on bizarrely adventurous young girls populating beautiful but uneasy worlds. To create these images, I draw from childhood fantasies and memories, then construct life-sized environments. By pushing these scenarios to an extreme conclusion, the girls become metaphors for our hyper-real childhood selves, where remembered emotions become stronger through time.

Making of blog for 'The Explorers' photograph.

Ella Dreyfus

Ella Dreyfus' black and white photographs are an exploration of the human body when its condition appears to threaten the social order. At certain times of life and in certain conditions, the tenuous nature of the relationship between the body and its borders and boundaries are disturbed. A person's response to their changing physical condition may challenge their self-perception, identity and sense of mortality.

Transman, Ella Dreyfus 2001

Light Sculpture

The sun has been so warm lately many of my classes have moved outside. Here I am with a student who is holding a delicate orb woven from grasses as part of her organic art project. Inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, students made site-specific sculptures in and in relation to nature.

To see some of their work visit http://www.organicart11.blogspot.com/