It’s a near universal reflex… First, the tension—every muscle in your body contracts and spasms as you try to ward off your attacker. Limbs kick, swat, and flail about. Eventually, you hunch over, thinking that might help. Then come the fits of laughter. It’s nervous laughter, loud laughter, hooting-howling-squealing laughter, and laughter...

Photographers have long excelled at making the private public—showing us what we don’t (or, in many cases, can’t) necessarily see; taking us somewhere new, somewhere strange, somewhere that is perhaps off-limits. S. Billie Mandle quietly elegant series “Reconciliation” does exactly that. The Brooklyn-based shutterbug has photographed...

Paper Trail

We just can’t get enough of these lo-fi special effects… The New York-based photographer Brendan Austin uses paint, crinkly paper, and deft craftsmanship to build miniature crags and rugged cliffs. He then photographs his creations—to alarming realistic effects. The resulting series, titled “Paper Mountains,” succeeds on so many levels....

Lights. Camera. Action!

San Francisco-based photographer Christina Seely wants to bring things back down to Earth. Her “Lux” series starts with NASA composite imagery of the entire planet at night. It’s sort of the inverse of looking up at the stars—flickers of light denote people as the most densely-populated regions of the world correlate with those bearing the...

09 Jul

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Aging Gracefully

In an ongoing series of elegant, largely landscape-driven photographs, Brooklyn-based photographer Rachel Sussman focuses her lens on what are definitively the oldest living organisms in the world (i.e. plants, forestry, coral, and fungi that have been around for upwards of 2,000 years). The project, titled “The Oldest Living Things,” has taken Sussman everywhere from Greenland to Tobago to Fish Lake, Utah (where she shot an 80,000-year-old network of trees). She works closely with biologists in each locale to locate and date her subjects and, to her credit, it’s been a mutually beneficial endeavor: before Sussman came along there was no artistic or scientific index of what she calls “global species longevity.” Sussman’s project has an environmental edge to it as well, drawing our attention to these twisted, knobby, misshapen, and monumental feats of mindboggling sustainability.