In honor of this evening’s lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, we’ve pulled together a few favorite photographs of the various incarnations of coniferous trees, the emblem of the holiday season.
In the mix: out in the desert, Mike Sinclair and Stephen Antonopoulos capture the glory of the beginning and the bitter end of the tree’s journey from farm lot to disposal. In Tim Barber’s photograph a truck and tree make a great getaway, gliding off stealthily in the fog. A tiny tree is lost in a bright, white sterile room, as photographed by Joseph O. Holmes. And Daniel Cheek, Emily Shur, Trent Parke, and Brent Clark make light of suburban holiday situations.
Photographer James Griffioen left a comfy life as a securities lawyer in San Francisco to take pictures and raise his family in what many consider the most dangerous city in America thanks to a staggering rate of 1,220 violent crimes committed per 100,000 people. He now calls Detroit home sweet home.
Griffioen has since spent his days walking the streets of his disintegrating hometown photographing the houses that others have long left behind. In the absence of their owners, architectural structures are slowly taken over by green matter. He calls the series of photographs Feral Houses; feral meaning “reversion to a wild state” and belonging to the dead. There is nothing sinister about these images though. Instead they remind us of the indomitable power of nature — living proof of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us.
Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily. | 2008 by Mark Menjivar
Michael Pollan’s call for personal “Food Rules” drew 2,500 responses from New York Times readers in just a few days. Yesterday, he posted his favorite twenty. Naturally, the quotable selection reflects Pollan’s clever-healthy-foodie readership and ranges from: “Avoid snack foods with the ‘oh’ sound in their names: Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Hostess Ho Hos, etc” to “Don’t eat anything you aren’t willing to kill yourself.” Read More »
Fred Tomaselli may be best known for amassing and using copious amounts of pills and herbs in his paintings. But the Brooklyn-based artist is a collector at heart — acquiring, archiving, and assembling not only pharmaceuticals, but also images of flowers, feathers, anatomical illustrations, and other ephemera. In his classically beautiful and psychedelic paintings, he painstakingly rearranges his objects; from afar, individual items are barely distinguishable, but up close, the details are mesmerizing. Read More »
Tamara Thomsen makes the bones of old homes beautiful. In her large-scale watercolor paintings, spare and elegant architecture is rendered ageless and glamorous in jeweled washes of lime, lemon, magenta and turquoise. Her most recent series, Chambers memorializes Benedict Arnold’s former home, Philadelphia’s neoclassical landmark, Mount Pleasant Mansion. Read More »
Orb 5 (Long Island, New York) by Carlo Van de Roer
Photographer Carlo Van de Roer is willing to believe — or at least pretend that he might believe — in the unbelievable. His two most recent projects, Orbs and Portrait Machine Project, focus on supernatural phenomena: floating orbs and auras. Read More »
