A year previous to the Dear Obama project, Marcus Bleasdale had a book published about the situation in DRC called ‘Rape of a Nation’ (2009). The amazing pictures tell a grim story of dictatorship, enslavement, rape, and murder. The Democratic Republic of Congo sits atop one of the world’s most vast deposits of diamonds and [...]
Tags: Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, DRCmusic, Human Rights Watch, Kinshasa One Two, Marcus Bleasdale, Oxfam, Photography, RDC, Warp Records
You know how one thing leads to another on the internet. A Google search takes you to a site that links to something else, and bada-boom bada-bing you’ve spent hours on YouTube or Camerapedia. Well, yesterday a Todd Hido podcast led me to the name Willy Ronis, and I wondered, “why have I never heard [...]
Tags: Belleville, Life Magazine, Paris, Photography, Willy Ronis
The other day I came across a photograph on flickr depicting a barefooded man in black suit and tie, standing like he had just ripped a cow’s throat out. The person who had posted this image was not the photographer, but was kind enough to mention the name ‘Pieter Hugo’. I immediately had to find [...]
Tags: Control, hyena, Looking Aside, Mathambo, Permanent Error, Photography, Pieter Hugo, South Africa, Spoek Mathambo
In 1983 Michael Jackson escaped the lense of a Polaroid Autofocus 660 in the video for Billie Jean. Photo by Sean Smith Surrounding the Polaroid is what appears to me as a bunch of Mamiya Z-series cameras, but what’s more important: Is that a (Dirty) Diana I see there in the upper left corner?! Your [...]
Tags: 660, autofocus, Billie Jean, Diana, Lomography, Mamiya, Michael Jackson, MJJ, Photography, Polaroid, private detective
In 1981 Duran Duran used a Nikon FE to capture three femmes fatales on a fashion runway in their video for “Girls On Film”. The camera is seen with a Nikkor-s Auto 1:2.8 f=35mm–and possibly an MD-11 or MD-12 motor drive. Picture by Alfredo Hantsch The song begins with a recording of the rapid whirring [...]
Tags: Duran Duran, Kodak, music video, nikkor, Nikon, Nikon FE, Tri-x
In 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot had a Graflex Speed Graphic in his video for “Baby Got Back”. Produced by Graflex in Rochester, New York, the Speed Graphic is commonly called the most famous press camera. Although the first Speed Graphic cameras were produced in 1912, production of later versions continued until 1973; with the most significant [...]
Tags: butt, Crown Graphic, Graflex, large format, Pacemaker, Photography, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Speed Graphic
With a Minolta 7000 AF, an Olympus OM (possibly M-1 og OM-2), and a third unidentified camera Flødeklinikken let’s three girls shoot eachother for their 2011 video “Piger med pistoler” (“Girls with Guns”). Picture by Steve Harwood Picture by Spyros Bouboukas If you can identify the third camera, please let us know. We just gots [...]
Tags: 7000 AF, Flødeklinikken, Maxxum, Minolta, Olympus
In 1985 Elton John used the Nikon FM2 with a MD-12 motordrive to capture the beautiful borderguard in the video for “Nikita”. Obviously he hadn’t done a lot of zooming prior to the video shoot. Picture by David Guimarães The FM2n (1983) was available in either black or chrome finish. The camera is fully mechanical; [...]
Tags: e-6, ektachrome, Elton John, FM2, Fuji, Fujifilm, Kodak, md-12, md12, music video, Nikita, Nikon, Velvia
Philippe Halsman (born Filips Halsmans) was a famed Latvian photographer who took pictures for magazines like Vogue and Life. In 1931 he came to France with the help from Nobel Prize receiver Albert Einstein after having served 3 years in Austrian prison for killing his father on a hiking trip. When World War II broke [...]
Tags: AM New York, Ben Silverstone, Filips Halsmans, Jump, Jump Book, Leonard Nimoy, Life, Life Magazine, Patrick Swayze, Philippe Halsman, Photography, Richard Nixon, Salvador Dali, Sight and Insight, Vogue, Филипп Халсман