Alexey Titarenko’s series, “City of Shadows” is breathe taking. According to the artist: “The idea of The City of Shadows emerged quite unexpectedly and quite naturally during the collapse [of the Soviet Union] in the fall of 1991..” but I think that anyone looking at the photographs today can divine a modern, urban meaning from them. Each photograph speaks to anonymity in the city; a tide of people. Here is exemplified a mastery of technique married to nuanced meaning in one of the best possible configurations of “showing-not-telling” that can be achieved within art.

I can’t rightly recall where I saw/heard about these photographs originally, but they have been on the peripheral of my knowledge for quite some time. My own attempted imitation (in color) can be found on my flickr.

nedroidcomics:

E•N•E•M•I•E•S

This is the work (or play) of Jonathan Hobin, a single shot from his series “In The Playroom” wherein events from recent and older news are re(de)constructed using children playrooms as the setting. Prisoner torture Abu Ghraib, 911, Kin Jong-il, Jonestown Kool-aid suicides, etc. Above and beyond the questions these photographs conjure up, I’d like to know if the children models themselves were made aware of what they were portraying and how they felt about it. I can understand ignorance about the older topics, but how could the children in the 911 photograph not understand what they were making? At any rate, the images themselves are masterfully lit and edited. This is a very strong example of artistic images that speak for themselves. (via)

Gregory Crewdson is a photographer by trade, but a short fiction creator at heart. His works, constructed and then photographed, solely for the purpose of the photograph, are achievements of miniature story-telling as well as accomplishments in the realm of aligning people, things and places with ideas.

The reason, I think his work speaks, is because of the obvious level of intention he manages to imbue unto the far side of his lens. All artists face an uphill battle in turning their ideas into reality and negotiating the compromises that tend to stand in the way of doing that. Listen to him speak about his art: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5157819

Note the photograph of the burning house. It begs the question, if this photo is constructed solely for the sake of itself, what is lost and what is gained from it. How would the same photograph look if it were a documentation of an arson rather than this staged photograph? And what avenue does one take to arrive at a professional enough level to be able to ask a town to light a house on fire for a picture? And what of the hundreds of pairs of eyes and hands that make his photographs realized. Food for thought.  via (NSFW)

This is the work of Israeli artist Meir Eshel (AKA: Absalon) who died at the age of 28. His work has the feeling of a child’s block set (remember those? No one plays with them anymore.) mixed in with a futuristic, utopian future. All his works here exist within an air of feigned minimalism. In my heart of hearts, I’m commissioning him to create me a sensory deprivation chamber.

From the wfw article: ‘He termed these structures Cellules—“bastions of resistance to a society that stops me from becoming what I must become.”’

This short film, it looks awesome. I see a lot of Akira in this, the hyper realistic animation style extended using 3D graphics and (correct me if I’m wrong) real landscape footage as the background? Short of a kick-ass animation, this would make a kick-ass game.

The Noun Project is an intreguing initiative to establish a lexicon of free and public iconography. If you’ve had your head in design for any amount of time, you’ve seen books upon books of this kind of thing. So it’s refreshing to see an open, public version.

If I’m reading the description correctly, this prototype ethernet circuit board, developed by Robert Metcalf in 1973, was predated by a redimentary for of waht could be considered the predicessor of wifi. Still a peice of computer/internet history. Looks kinda perty too.

Look at this, look at this! Amazing, sub 2000$ budget and shot on a DSLR! Pays homage to Americana Exotica in all the right ways.

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong.

I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind.

Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought, nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.

Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice …” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.

Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

(Excerpted from “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time” by Douglas Adams)