Figuring out the hidden meaning of stock photos

"Lily and Peter were supposed to have a romantic night in, but Peter and a few coworkers went out for happy hour drinks. Peter got drunk, missed dinner, and passed out on the couch.

This actually happens all the time, and Lily is pretty understanding. She’s crying about the ending of Toy Story 3, which they saw four weeks ago."

Some stock photos are just weird. And you can easily spend too much time wondering what the idea behind the photo was. I've definitely wasted part of my life making up stories of the cryptical display in some stock photos. And Kevin Nguyen has done so, too: he imagines the stories behind stockphotos he found of couples fighting.

Almost the longest exposure

Making a pinhole camera can be pretty simple. But still, it can generate some astonishing images. Like the image above. It's made by Justin Quinell by means of a pin hole camera, and it documents the traces of the sun over the suspension bridge in Bristol over a six month period of time. That gives this image an exposure time of half a year! And the result is duely impressive: there's so much detail and subtlety in the image, and that without a complex and expensive camera!

This image has been called the photo with the longest exposure time in the history of photography. But that claim is simply false. The actual longest exposure times have been captured by Michael Wesely. In 2001, he documented the redevelopment of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in single images, making photographs with an exposure time of up to 34 months. Surreal.

I found this through http://itchyi.squarespace.com/.

Art is the path to the darkside?

Darth Vader's helmet is a pop-icon. Even when it's adapted way beyond it's well-known features (as the colour and the shape), it's still recognizable as it is.

The Vader Project started in 2005 with a simple idea: 100 artists were asked to work with the helmet. For this project, each artist customized a 1:1 scale authentic prop replica of the actual Darth Vader helmet featured in the Star Wars films.
After several years of exhibitions around the globe, the helmets go up for auction on the 10th of July at Freeman's auction house, giving everybody the chance to obtain a arty adaptation of a pop icon.

all you need is... sticky tape!

Packaging tape is generally only used to keep pieces together, not to make self-supporting structures. Exceptions to this rule could probably only be found in episodes of McGuyver. Until now, that is. The design collective For Use/Numen used nothing but packaging tape to create huge cocoons which you can actually enter and explore.


I stumbled upon this project onfastcompany.com

Photo-real graffiti

Most people associate graffiti to some kind of simply scratched tags, that you can find on pretty much every street corner anywhere in the world. But there's so much more to graffiti, also some things that are really taking things to a whole new level. In some instances, it's pretty much impossible to imagine such a piece being made with spraycans and flatcaps.
Take, for instance, a look at the work of the German artist Tasso, who does some amazing illusions within graffiti.



Or what about Maclaim? Another artist with a completely unique style of photorealistic graffiti. It's not just "scribbling on a wall", but I think it's safe to say that this is pure art. Made by people who definitely think outside the box.

Pixorama

A classic theme in painting is the so-called Panoramic painting, an all-compassing view of a subject. It might seem a rather traditional form, but it inspired Eboy to create something similar for a recent exhibition in Barcelona: he came up with the Pixorama.

The Pixorama is a complex view of an urban scene, all built up out of pixels. Because of the style of projection (axonometric, stylized computer images), the objects can be re-used, and remodeled. This makes a pixorama more like a living city than panoramas could ever be: the pixorama changes constantly, and is thus not a reflection on the world, but a world in itself.

Absence of Water

Sometimes, decay symbolizes not only the by-gone glory of better days. Sometimes it even tells more about the past than a picture-perfect restored "false history".

And that's exactly what the series of photographs by Gigi Cifali show. During the thirties, public baths and lidos were incredibly popular in the United Kingdom. Over the years, they lost their appeal, as people were looking for different things in a swimming pool or public bath house. Many of the once so popular baths have been demolished. But some remain, as monuments in reverse , as symbols of their heroic past. And aforementioned Gigi Cifali takes beautiful pictures of these baths, giving them a grandeur in their decay and tell a little bit about what has been - and what will be.

Blowing bubbles

For the Yokohama Triennale 2008,
Shinji Ohmaki came up with an installation that is aiming to be as ephemeral as possible. As if the installation was made out of air. And it virtually is, since it's made out of bubbles. He created 50 sweet, little, inconspicuous cases, containing bubble machines. They can be moved around, stacked, organized and whatnot. They appear to be nothing more than upturned white buckets, until the switch is flipped: bubbles start to appear from the machines, creating the space where they are placed into some kind of happy-happy-joy-joy happening. For the Triennale, Ohmaki used the famous Yokohama Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects, but there are many more places and spaces where one could imagine that this piece could create a lovely sensation...

The bigger picture

When photographers play with the interconnection of the actual reality and a constructed illusion, it's nothing new. It comes with the turf, I'd say. But especially if it's large-scaled, and if it's an actual installation in the public realm, it can become a work that verges in of the concept of street art.

And the work of the photographer/artist Renate Buser (from Basel) is exactly that. She takes an existing situation and adds a distortion of reality to it. It could be a shifted perspective, a new layer of meaning or a new way of seeing things. Because of the reality of the image, mixed with the large scale, it ends up in a rather surreal setting, where all constructed realities can be questioned as being true and false at the same time. Other than that: it just looks really amazing!


I found these projects on wrongdistance.com

The photography of Martin Parr

I really like the humorous, tongue-in-cheek approach that Martin Parr has to documentary photography. He shoots ordinary - whether it's about tourism, consumerism, contemporary living or what not - scenes in such a way that makes you want to feel uncomfortable, and fascinated at the same time. Like in the books "bored couples book" (see image above), or "think of england" (below). Or in many of his other books, for that matter.

And the cool thing is that, on his website martinparr.com, you can browse through a great part of his books. It's all so british (in style and content), and yet very universal. Satire without trying. Compelling by keeping a distance. Fascinating by being normal.

A radical conversion

The German Meixner Schlüter Wendt got a commission for a house in a wealthy residential area near Frankfurt. The thing is: on the site was already an unspectacular, 1930-style house. Most (rationally thinking) architects would've probably suggested to tear down the house. But not the architects of this project: they decided to have a little bit more fun with the house, and went for an approach that seems to be barrowed from Gordon Matta-Clark.

They took the original house and went for a process of transforming the object. But not in the traditional way, but by means of a metamorphosis. The appearingly normal setting of the house in the nature is distorted, but at the same time made more tangible. They built a shell around the old house, creating interesting intermediate spaces between the old and the new. Then they slowly started to cut open the old house. Either to let light in (or to create a stronger relation to the surrounding nature), or to allow for spatially more interesting places. Some other parts (such as the rooftop rooms) were extended to meet the boundaries of the new structure.

It's a paradoxically unnormal house. Or a paradoxically normal house. It depends on the way you look at it. The thing is that the distortion of the existing reality into a blurry, new reality creates a spectacular building that can be read like a house, like a piece of art and like a layering of history, all in one.


Read more on convertible ity.de.

Urban camouflage

When you think of camouflage, what do you think of? Quite likely, you'll be thinking of the classic army look, with different brownish spots. Or about animal camouflage: tiger stripes, cameleons and such.
But how does one camouflage himself in a more urban context? This is exactly what artist Desiree Palmen seems to pose as a question: how can people dissapear against a more "contemporary" background? Well, the answer is: by means of manipulated clothing. It can be a suit painted as a perspective of a bookshelf, or a shirt that is transformed into a heap of papers lying on a table. As a viewer, you just have to imagine: what would happen if you'd move one step away from the perfect perspective from which the camouflage is correct?

Likely, Palmen tries to express her fear for the ever-increasing camera control, monitoring, cross-medialization of the public domain and such with her work. Is it subversive? Not that much - but it's a means to get people to start thinking about what they take for granted: we are all under continual control...

I found this project on boingboing.net

NYC Waterfalls

I cannot be bothered too much with everything that is being said in the press release of this upcoming project of artistOlafur Eliasson in New York City. The project is called the NYC Waterfalls, and it is just that: the introduction of massive waterfalls in the I don't care too much about "the awareness for water" and all that other stuff that this project should allegedly evoke. But the thing is: it looks damn sexy. And other than that, it's a nice icon for the revitalisation of the waterfront. But above all: it looks so damn sexy, that I couldn't care less about the intentions and ideas behind it...

The water horse

Just leave it to the japanese to come up with a impressive visual advertisement. In this case, it's an outdoor advertisement for a the Japanese release of the movie: The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. Thanks to a sizeable water screen and a light projection on the water, it actually looks as if the mysterious monster of Loch Ness got stuck in a medium-sized Tokyo-based fountain. Don't forget some synchronised fountains for a nice splashing effect. Just imagine being drunk and heading home, stumbling into this thing...

Foodscapes

Probably every single kid in the whole wide world has, at one time or another, been told by their respective parents "not to play with their food". And most of us eventually stop doing that. Luckily, Carl Warner probably was one of those subversive kids who did just the opposite of what his parents told him. So after starting a career in photography, he started working on a series called "foodscapes". Basically, this means just what the name reads: landscapes made up of food products. Upon first glance, you don't quite notice it: it's just a nice, albeit slightly abstract landscape. But a closer look identifies every single object as "made of food". Gorgeous stuff...

An interactive facade in Vienna

On the facade of the Uniqa Tower in Vienna (Austria), 160.000 led lights (making 40.000 pixels) have been applied. By programming these, a virtually unlimited number of patterns is achieveable. Surely, there are tons of other ways of making facades interactive (some more sophisticated than others), but to me this light installation by Holger Mader, Alexander Stublic and Heike Wiermann takes the geometrics of the building as a starting point, and builds a whole new set of virtual geometries based on the building as such.

Questions of faith

For the 2007 edition of the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris (one night a year in which museums, galleries and such are opened), Robert Stadler designed a light installation in the church Saint-Paul Saint-Louis. When one moves through the church, the appearingly random collection of lighted bulbs transforms. From a certain perspective, they form a question mark - implying a whole range of philosophical questions about religion as such. I cannot believe that the church authorities let him do it, but it's wonderful!


This design has been featured on dezeen.com, that's how I found it...

Reverse Graffiti

In most places, graffiti is illegal. No matter what reasons for laws against it, or if you agree or not: it simply is illegal.
But cleaning isn't. So there are some artists that are creative cleaners. For instance, it might be known that cars tend to leave loads of dirt on tunnel walls. And through partially removing the dirt, a piece of reverse graffiti (or grime writing) can come into existence. The example above is done by the Braziliaan Alexandre Orion in a tunnel in Sao Paulo. So there's really no paint involved, just clean water and a sponge.

architecture photography

Most architectural images follow a strict aesthetical routine: the building is presented as a clean, autonomous object, without any people interfering. I think its safe to say that nine out of ten architectural photos follow this logic.

Therefore, it is refreshing to encounter something else, for a change. In this case, the renovation of an appartment in the centre of Amsterdam by Jeroen Mensink, of which a new roof-light is a central element, was photographed by photographer Kees Hummel. He staged the place by using people in dramatic or surreal positions. Why? I have no idea. But it surely looks fascinating...

traffic light tree

Imagine this: just when you think that you'll manage to survive London traffic, you drive towards the Heron Quays roundabout. Instead of having to tackle one set of traffic lights, you are adressed to by a mere 75 of them. Just when you start to feel a bit scared, you realize it's a piece of art.

Traffic Light Tree was designed by the Parisian artist Pierre Vivant. When one of the three trees on the site was dying because of pollution by passing cars in 1998, he designed this set of traffic lights, mimicking a tree. But it's not just that, it's also a reflection of all the continuous rhythm of financial and commercial activities.

I found this one thanks to Citynoise.