“The Salaryman Project” is a photo-series by Bruno Quinquet, a French photographer living in Tokyo. With his project, Quintet has tried to build an aura of mystery around the archetypal (and quite often, unfairly lampooned) figure of the male Japanese office worker (aka the salaryman).
Quinquet says,
To reference in the same vehicle office work and the specifically Japanese sense of the season, the work comes in the format of a business schedule (paper or ebook).
I think that the project has some kind of documentary value, but in a poetic and conceptual sense rather than as a social critique.
To help self-publish his photography project, he has started a crowdfunding campaign at Ulule.
After a 20 year career as a recording engineer, Quinquet started shooting photographs during a stay in Japan, sometime in 2006. He decided not to go back to his native France, but pursued and got his graduation from the Tokyo Visual Arts Photography Department. His street photography has found a place in many books, magazines and galleries.
Hit the jump to see some select photographs from the project.
Continue reading ‘The Salaryman Project’
Click on the image to view large.
An 1886 photograph of Bertha Benz, the wife of inventor Karl Benz, and one of the pioneering co-founders of Mercedes-Benz.
A woman of great fortitude and beauty, Bertha, in 1888, became the first person to ever drive an automobile over a long distance (66 mi). She completed the journey on the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which had the effect of bringing her company worldwide publicity, and some much needed sales.
[via Vintage Photography]
Photographer Sheila Bocchine travels the world with her pinhole camera, documenting different cultures and "all things beautiful." Her lensless pinhole camera, made from teakwood, uses medium format (120) film to produce gorgeously-surreal, square images.
On the subject of her photography, she says:
“The exposures are longer to compensate for the pinhole, which is why you will see subtle blur and motion in all of my images. Since the world rarely stands still, my pinhole camera captures all the beautiful motion and energy onto the negative, thus resulting with dreamscape-like qualities. I feel like each pinhole photograph is a marvelous dream… a surreal and whimsical moment in time that has swirled around my daydreams before coming out as the perfect pinhole photograph.”
Not all of her photographs are as sunny and cheerful as the ones above; some of the images of “dead” people in her portfolio were intriguingly-creepy enough to make me ask her more about them.
The story behind the photographs was, however, far more innocuous.
Bocchine replied back, saying, "the ‘scary’ photos are from Fear Farm Haunted House in Phoenix. I was at a pumpkin farm picking up some holiday goodies and I spotted a haunted house. There was no one around so I found my way inside. It was daytime, so I didn’t think it would be as spooky as it was, but with every corner I turned my heart raced!”
Continue reading ‘Sheila Bocchine’s Pinhole Photography’
New York-based photographer Erin Mulvehill’s has dedicated her ethereal ‘Underwater’ photo series “to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.” The series was on solo exhibition at the Candela Project Gallery in Munich, Germany, in 2011.
Link to Erin Mulvehill’s site (some sections are NSFW).
Check out more images after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Underwater – A Hauntingly Beautiful Photo Series’
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American photographer Melvin Sokolsky shot these stunningly-surreal fashion photographs for Harper’s Bazaar magazine in 1963. The “Bubble Series” featured models in giant plastic bubbles, suspended above various locations (including the river Siene) in Paris.
[via Vintage Photography]
More images after the jump.
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Image Credit: cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by half alive – soo zzzz
Leah Poller, a New York sculptor, has spent 15 years compiling pictures for her 101 Beds collection. And now, with her latest “Unmade Bed project,” Poller tries to satisfy her curiosity about the place where people spend a third of their lives in. She has invited people to share a picture of their unmade bed, which may be featured in the first edition of her upcoming book, “Unmade Bed Project – A Tale Between Two Sheets.”
If you are interested in participating in the project, just visit the Unmade Bed Project site, or send an email to unmadebedproject@gmail.com, with your name, bed picture, city and state.
A collection of interesting images that I have recently come across on Flickr. If you would like your photographs to be featured here, please add them to the JazJaz Flickr pool. Check out the rest of the images after the jump. 
Self Portrait, by Mitra Mirshahidi-.
Click on the image to view large.
A daguerreotype of a fashionable young lady, with a hairstyle strikingly similar to that of Princess Leia’s “cinnamon buns” that we have all come to love (and lust after). The photograph is a miniature (2” x 2.5”), taken circa 1850.
[via Robs Webstek]
“The Miracle of Fluo Colours” is a satirical art project by Dimitris Polychroniadis, an architect and scenographer based in Athens, Greece.
Dimitris feels that the humorous message behind his pop sculptures in his photographs is highly relevant to the present situation in his country, although it directly refers to the absurd, almost hysterical levels to which religion has been pitted against politics in the US.
Dimitris says,
Religion often serves as an emotional ‘lender of last resort’ in times of crisis. The idea for this series of maquette sculptures, comes from Christian church signs and billboards in the US. By stripping these religious quotes away from their physical and emotive context, the ‘message’ becomes more absolute, almost surreal. To emphasize this further, the text size has been exaggerated in scale (compared to the figurines) and colour. The project is somewhat ‘street’ influenced by large scale advertising and slogan graffiti. The title of the series generates a contrast: The notion of God-sent miracles as an integral part of religious faith, against the marvels of man-made, modern age, industrial technology and it’s products such as fluorescent materials and colours.
The photographs were shot by Dimitris in collaboration with Michalis Dalanikas.
Check out more images after the jump.
Asha: Jewel of the Nile
In his new series, Glam Bugs, photographer Xavier Nuez finds breathtakingly-ethereal beauty in some of the most humble and unlikeliest of subjects – dead and decomposing insects.
To create his images, Nuez begins with a concept, and fleshes out the characters he wants to create. He then builds tiny sets that can be as small as a few square inches, to provide a perfect backdrop for his “star” bugs. The bugs themselves are those found already dead and dusty in basements, windowsills etc, which are then positioned into desired poses on the sets. He says that lighting setups are often quite complex, as they are required to create tiny shafts of light which won’t wash out the intricate details in the photographs. The final images are then shot on large format film, usually on his 50-year old Hasselblad cameras.
Count Blankfein: Collected Souls
Nuez says,
When I look at bugs magnified through my photographic lens, they become larger than life icons – sometimes appearing as a heroic figure in an epic drama, or a superstar adored by millions, or a tragic victim in a cruel world, or a powerful evil villain.
I am absorbed by the contrast between the reality and the fiction of their stories. They are the anonymous, downtrodden masses whose fate is mostly disregarded: the bottom one-percent. With my camera I dignify these largely rejected creatures, or rather, what they represent; I want to glamorize them, and give them an ambiguous but exciting allure.
I try to see their faces and look into their eyes. Perhaps their expressions contain echoes of untold epic tales. Or, perhaps, in the end, each of them is simply a dead bug, as the cycle of life completes another turn.
Nuez is already well known for his sublime photographs of urban decay and night scenes. Of Spanish origin, he was born in Montreal, and now lives in Chicago. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and groups shows in galleries and museums in North America.
A selection of photographs from Glam Bugs will be featured from February 21 to March 28, 2012, at the Elmhurst Guild Gallery of the Elmhurst Art Museum, Illinois.
Hit the jump to see more photographs.
Continue reading ‘Xavier Nuez’s “Glam Bugs” – A Series of Photographs’
Laetitia Soulier, a French-born photographer, currently living and working in New York, has been adjudged to be the grand prize winner of Artists Wanted’s ‘Exposure 2011’ photography competition. A closer examination of Soulier’s visually complex, yet playfully quaint worlds–painstakingly created by hand, and then lovingly photographed–are enough to convince anyone that she is quite deserving of the title.
Laetitia Soulier’s photographs, articulated in series, each invite the viewer to journey through different worlds ruled by different paradigms. The Palindromes series follows a binary system, using diptych images where twins wander in symmetrical landscapes. In the Fractal Architectures series, the geometry of the wallpaper and the structure of the decor follow a fractal logic, weaving together microcosm and macrocosm. Soulier’s characters, approximately eight years old, have reached the critical place between the fantastical mind and the rational mind.
Soulier is a trained artist, having got her Masters degree from l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts (l’ENSBA) in Paris, while simultaneously earning a degree in philosophy at the University of Paris Nanterre. She then studied photography and studio lighting at Les Gobelins, Ecole de l’Image, in Paris.
Her works have been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Beaux Arts de Paris, and the Musashino University in Tokyo. Soulier is now preparing for a solo show at the Aperture Foundation in New York.
Link to Laetitia Soulier’s site.
Click here to see more photographs, as well as a making-of video of one of her works, after the jump.
Reminds me of a certain fictional cyborg from a dystopian, machine-ravaged future!
From CES 2012, the gorgeous, stripped down magnesium alloy frame of the Nikon D4, the latest flagship D-SLR model of the Japanese camera major.
[via Nikon Rumors and Petapixel]
On the hunt for a meal…or a mate?
Nikon D50. Nikon 50mm, 1/400 at f/1.8.
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