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/.

A slightly different view

Honestly, I don't know that much about Mexico City. I know it's large, it's crowded and it has issues with smog and pollution. That's about it. Looking at pictures gives some kind of impression, but mostly a very incomplete (and potentially enscanated) one.

That's what I like about the photographs by the helicopter pilot Oscar Ruiz. Granted, not every picture has a strong composition, but the images can give you a different feel for the city.
They just give you just that little bit of extra perspective of the life in Mexico City. Like the image above. It does look a bit like a rendering, but it's an actual picture of a part of the low income housing complex in Ixtapaluca, which has a whopping total of more than 10,000 houses.
Or the image below, showing Cerro Chiquihuite, where a wall was built halfway up the hill in order to stop people from continuing to build uphill.
Or, all the way at the bottom, the market at Barrio Tepito. The area is allegedly very criminal and (therefore) dangerous, but the market should be awesome.

All in all, sometimes having a little bit of an overview can give you a better sight of the city than eye-level images.

Real landscapes

There's a dichtomy between "nature" and "landscape". The two words overlap in meaning, but not completely. Somewhere in time "nature" transcended into "landscape" - indicating the man-made aspects or maybe even a natural scenography.

The photographs of Thomas Wrede imply the question what landscape means to people today. The photos are rather surreal, making the viewer wonder what's real, what's fake and what's enscanated.
Well, instead of a lot of words or interpretation, I'd rather let the images speak for themselves...

people or no people, that's the question...

Recently, I saw some images of the completed "La Llotja" project by Mecanoo. I'm not going into details about what I think about this project, because it triggered a whole different subject: I recalled seeing renderings that looked pretty similar to the final result not that long ago. But something was different. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, until I checked the renderings again. Then, the difference became quite clear...


Look at this image (the render), and look at the image above (the photograph), and think about the role people play in the images. It's not just about this example by Mecanoo, but it happens in virtually every project lately: the renderings are filled to the brim with smiling, happy people, whilst the final photographs are completely devoid of any people. It makes me think what the reasoning behind this logic would be.

Is it because the target audience is different? A rendering is aimed at a laymens' audience, whom architects try to sell an "atmosphere". But for the final photos, the target audience are the architectural magazines, for whom people are mere annoying clutter. Or is there something else at play? I'd be curious to know the reasoning behind this selective (re)presentation of people in architectural imagery...

Stereo photography

Have you ever seen one of those 3D photographs? Well, anybody who's ever looked through a view-master, definitely has. It adds a certain something to a picture to have a bit of a three dimensional effect to it. I've always thought that it was a long, boring process to achieve those images, including a lot of specific machinery and a lot of hard work...

Well, it's actually a lot easier. All you need is:
- Two disposable cameras
- Duct tape
- Scissors (optional)

How it works? photojojo explains you how to do it, in a quick tutorial.

The afterlife of buildings

The curators of the Polish pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale of Architecture, by Grzegorz Piątek and Jarosław Trybuś, took the theme of this years´ biennale ("Out there - architecture beyond buildings") rather literal.
For the exhibition called "Warsaw's Polonia Hotel. The Afterlife of Buildings", they let Nicolas Grospierre take pictures of six prestigious buildings that have been constructed in recent years by renouned architects.
The curators wanted to debate the durability of those buildings. The project is portraying how the usage of those buildings could change drastically -whether because of social or environmental issues.

Kobas Laska made photocollages, portraying this possible future of these six buildings. The result is not just highly speculative and funny, but also raises questions about the life-spans as such.

I found this exhibition on We Make Money Not Art. I've placed my favorite one here, you can find the rest on that website.

The image above is the largest church in Poland, called the Sanctity of our lady of sorrow, designed by Barbara Bielecka and built between 1994 an 2004. The question that is inherent in this picture is "what if Poles stopped going to masses?" The afterlife of this building is a whole new kind of gathering space: what if the church would be used as an aquatic park?

Image Construction

Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin made a really intriguing series of photocollages under the title "image/construction". The starting point appears to be an existing building, which is cut up, sampled, mirrored, warped, distorted, cloned and appropriated to make a new structure, possible and impossible at the same time. It plays on the dichitomy of the image and reality. It questions the value of representation in many aspects. And it implicitly asks the question what a building is.

Other than this quasi-intellectual interpretations, these images just look great. So here's another one:

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.

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.

Image is everything

Have you ever had the experience of buying something in the supermarket that just looked absolutely delicious, but turned out to be nothing short of appalling? Well, there's definitely a discrepancy between the image that we buy, and the actual product.

That lead the people behind pundo300.com to conceive their project "ads vs. reality", in which they compare 100 products with the image on the package. Some look more alike than others. It's not to rate a product or anything, just to get people thinking about the way the means and ends of the advertisement-industry is used...

I stumbled upon this via www.hard-c.com.

The Illuminati

I think everybody with a SLR camera has, at one time or another, tried to play with the shutter speed of the camera a bit. And maybe, if lucky, one would've ended up with pictures of nice light traces from the lights of passing cars.

Well, Lichtfaktor has taken this form of photography to a whole new level. With the aid of different kinds of lighting tools (flashlights, LED-lights, fireworks and so on) they found a way to make a new kind of graffiti with light, which looks really great. If you look closely, you might see a glimpse of a moving person in the image, but mostly the pictures look like a graffiti-style painting with light. It's great to see abstract curvy shapes, or a phone booth wrapped in light. But I am especially intrigued by the robots. At one time, the big ben looks like a attacking (but clumsy) creature from outer space. Or a garbage bin that, by some relatively simple illuminated gestures, turns into a poor man's R2D2. Of course, there are plenty more great images on the site of Lichtfaktor, and there's probably more to come. It's great to see what a good eye for a projected lightscape and some well-coordinated lights can do.

Sleeveface

Sleevefacing is, according to the website sleeveface.com: "one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion." Well, that basically says it all: pictures of people with record sleeves in front of their faces and such. Oddly enough, it is quite fascinating to see the interplay of two photographed realities - even though it tends to come close to the kitsch holiday snapshots of people holding the Eiffel tower on their hands and such...


Other than the aforementioned website, flickr.com is a great source for sleevefaced images, too...

Between you and me

Patryk Rebisz knew to exploit his digital photocamera to its fullest for his short movie Between you and me. He used the burst-function - the function to shoot a rapid succession of images to take roughly two thousand images. He compiled this into a short film of 4.30 minutes length. An unusual approach to photography - and to film. It's no wonder that this film has won several awards.

Do like 150.000 people did before you, and watch the movie online.

Their circular life

On their circular life Lorenzo Fonda and Davide Terenzi document the day in the life of a piece of urban infrastructure. Well, actually, they document a day in the life of five places. By means of 24 still photos, combined with sound clips, they present 24 hours of urban life in one time-lapsed video.

The two guys that started the project in 2001 say the following about 'their circular life': "Humans are all equal. They have the same needs. They feel, act and behave accordingly to an unknown law. Urban places know this well. By living the life of urban infrastructure, you become an external observer of what happens everyday in every place on earth."
And it's just that. Imaginative observations of life. Not life on the streets, but the life of the streets...

By the way, the project is open source, so feel free
to participate with a film that you made yourself.

The landscape of lower league football

The photographer Hans van der Meer has made some beautiful pictures over the years. But the one that grabs me most is his series "European Fields: the landscape of lower league football", where he does just what the title says: photographing landscapes and lower leugue football in a brilliant unison.

The pictures on his website are nice, the photobook, published by Steidl Verlag, is better. Sheer beauty.