The selfie isn’t a 21st-century invention. Buzz Aldrin has reminded us on Twitter that he took the first space selfie in 1966. Here’s a selection of other early examples of the form – from the 1830s to the 1980s
The world’s earliest selfies – in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian
In Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenfield’s latest, the documentarian and photographer behind 2012’s award-winning Queen of Versailles lets her ambition run wild.
In many ways, Wealth is a natural extension of Versailles, a cautionary tale about one family’s efforts to build the largest home in America. This newest documentary widens the scope, taking on a world made sick with overconsumption—but that’s an oversimplification given how much Greenfield takes on in this 106-minute manifesto and career retrospective. The film is, at once, a look back on 25 years’ worth of Greenfield’s work, a deep dive into the lives of her subjects, captured over decades, and a meditation on consumerism, Kardashian culture, and the rise and fall of the American empire.
American Wealth Gone Wild: A Blistering Takedown of Greedy Kardashian Culture
The opening photo in Half, Julia Kozerski’s series of naked self-portraits, is actually the bookend to a sequence of earlier photos. In those, she appeared unhappily in her wedding dress in a changing room cubicle, more than 300lb (21 stone) and mortified. Here, she appears in the dress again, standing sideways on to the camera, to show how much of the dress is unoccupied. Over the course of a year, Kozerski lost half her body weight, and you might expect the resulting photos to conform to the glib narrative of before and after. Instead, the 28-year-old took pains to show “what real is, what raw is” – in this case stretchmarks, skin folds, contours like sand dunes. Raw is Kozerski naked, and frequently crying.
Nudity is an overused gesture in photography, particularly when it purports to “celebrate” the “ordinary”. You can’t turn on the TV (Lena Dunham), go to a gallery (Spencer Tunick) or, if you’re in San Francisco, enter a civic building these days without tripping over someone getting their kit off in the name of corporeal democracy. That Kozerski still manages to be shocking and interesting is testament to her ideas and her courage. The question most people ask on seeing the photos – after “Why don’t you get surgery to remove the extra skin?” – is “How did you get the weight off?” which she thinks misses the point. Losing the weight was tough, she says: “I had no idea who I was, and while I went through all that I was lost.” But what came after was tougher. Contrary to media everywhere, being thin isn’t enough of an identity to go on. “This is it!” she thought, when she finally got her weight down, and then: “Now what do I do?”
Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian
The binding of Lauren Greenfield’s new book of photography, “Generation Wealth,” has the color and sheen of a bar of yellow gold. The book has the heft of bullion, too: at seven pounds, it is too heavy to hold in a single hand, and too weighty to read unless rested on a lap or table. The size is demanded by the scope of the work. It consists of five hundred glossy pages of Greenfield’s photographs from the last quarter century, along with accompanying text. The images range from portraits of high-school students and gangbangers in Los Angeles, in the early nineteen-nineties, to photos of plastic-surgery aficionados undergoing their painful rites in the mid-two-thousands to pictures of high rollers at Las Vegas casinos “making it rain,” tossing stacks of dollar bills like confetti to the glee of those around them. But the book’s design also seems intended to be ironic commentary on the culture, or subcultures, it seeks to portray: materialistic, vulgar, excessive, and wasteful. The book would fit perfectly into the pseudo-rococo decorating scheme of the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower.
What Rampant Materialism Looks Like, and What It Costs | The New Yorker
In his latest book, The Last Testament, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen chronicles seven men who all publicly claim to be the biblical Messiah returned. Some have thousands of followers; others only a handful of disciples. All are united in the faith that they themselves are the Chosen One and have come to save the world. In his own words, the Magnum photographer explains what the project means to him.
In her series “Spitting Image,” which is on display at Crush Curatorial through May 13th, Eva O’Leary photographs teen-age girls examining their own reflections. The mirror they use is a two-way; O’Leary positioned her camera behind it, so that we see the girls caught in the act of looking. The photos are alarmingly intimate, unguarded, and open. Think of them as the anti-selfie, that punishingly idealized form. Here, each sitter’s individuality constitutes her beauty. There are pimples and oily skin, plucked eyebrows and lip fuzz, lipstick and mascara as well as bare faces. Some of O’Leary’s subjects seem intrigued, even excited, by what they see. Others seem distressed, disgusted, perplexed. Childhood has been shed; these are new faces, but they won’t be theirs for long. The photos are shot against a deep-blue backdrop, like that of a yearbook photo, as if to remind the sitters that adolescence, too, is something they’ll graduate from. Get a good look while it lasts.
What Teen-Age Girls See When They Look in the Mirror | The New Yorker
Several years ago, while staring at a photograph of torture on the front page of the newspaper, I began seriously asking myself a question that many people had asked before: What should one do when faced with images of violence? I spent thirteen years researching the question, which became more urgent as those years passed and social media began connecting people around the globe. Every week, perhaps every day, something terrible happens somewhere in the world, and, whether it is far away or right at home, we are inundated with images of the horror. Do these images harm their subjects? Is it an ethical violation to make a photograph of suffering beautiful? Do I have a right to look at other people’s pain?
I read theorists who claim that violent images are pornographic, theorists who point out the narcissism of worrying about the effects of images on viewers, theorists who fear that looking at images of suffering extends that suffering. Then I read Ariella Azoulay’s “The Civil Contract of Photography,” which was first published, in Hebrew, in 2007, and translated into English by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli the following year. Suddenly, every question that seemed important to me felt beside the point. Azoulay, a curator, filmmaker, and professor at Brown, is not interested in viewers’ emotional responses to images of suffering. It’s not empathy she’s after; she wants action. Images can transform the world, she argues, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because we don’t know how to look at them. The problem isn’t images; it’s us.
How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering | The New Yorker
Jo-Anne McArthur, a Canadian photographer and animal rights activist, does not deny that her new book could be called “one-sided.” That is sort of the point.
The images in “Captive” were taken at zoos across five continents, but they don’t include depictions of handlers bottle-feeding baby hippos, giving pandas ultrasounds or even cleaning cages. They’re taken from the perspective of the public, and, McArthur said, aim to show the animals as “individuals,” as opposed to representatives of their species. The photos are unusual and at times arresting, featuring solitary animals juxtaposed against gawking crowds, suburbia and the barriers that keep them enclosed.
The book comes off as quite anti-zoo, but McArthur says she hopes it will count as a contribution to an escalating public conversation about animals in captivity — one that has been highlighted by uproar over Sea World orcas and the killing of Harambe the gorilla, but that is also churning quietly among zoo managers.
What follows is a selection of photos from McArthur’s book, paired with her captions, and a Q and A about the book. All images were taken in 2016, when McArthur was on assignment in Europe for the Born Free Foundation, a wildlife advocacy organization.
These haunting animal photos aim to make you reconsider a visit to the zoo – The Washington Post
It comes down to facial symmetry, and in this regard my face is skewed. My chin is crooked, my eyes don’t line up, and there’s a weird bay in my hairline on my left forehead. News flash: your face probably isn’t absolutely symmetrical either. Only a few people come close, and even some models and actors have crooked faces.
A photographer has travelled the world photographing people with unwieldy objects balanced on their heads. French photographer Floriane De Lassée travelled across some of the world’s most rural landscapes, from East Africa to South America, in search of people for her ongoing photo series, How Much Can You Carry.