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Photography

Old Master-Style Still Lifes of the Ridiculous Food Musicians Request on Tour

By Alison Nastasi on

We’ve looked at the strange and hilarious demands that musicians made in their tour riders before, and artist Henry Hargreaves brought those contractual requests to life in a new photo series. In the style of Old Master paintings, Hargreaves photographed the nibbles pop stars like to stuff their faces with. “I was inspired to create this series after reviewing a few riders from some of the biggest acts in the world, all of which were ridiculous,” the artist wrote for Vice. “What I found most interesting about them is that they offered a glimpse into their larger-than-life personalities.” It’s true. Sinatra lived on booze, New Kids on the Block eat like 12-year-old boys, Axl Rose’s cuisine also makes you want to punch him in the face, and Prince sips tea. Meanwhile, Billy Idol has danced with himself for so long, he’s resorted to chocolate chip cookies and a tub of butter to soothe his weary feet (and soul). Take a closer look in our gallery. … Read More

Art

Fascinating Photos of the Models Who Inspired Famous Artworks

By Alison Nastasi on

We’re fascinated, and slightly unnerved, by Flóra Borsi’s photo manipulations, which bring abstract figures from paintings to life. They apply a surreal and cartoonish twist to the traditional notion of the model as subject, and mischievously toy with our separation of real and aesthetic dimensions. Of course, the two are intimately related, and the real-life models of the fine art world have their own fascinating stories to tell. Fortunately, the advent of photography offered artists the opportunity to capture their sitters for reference. See famous artworks and the models that inspired them, side by side, in our… Read More

Photography

Disconcerting Digitally Manipulated Photos That Echo Famous Paintings

By Tom Hawking on

It’s interesting, albeit not perhaps surprising, how the use of heavy-handed Photoshopping techniques as an artistic tool is generally confined to ostensibly digital images, art that draws attention to its own artifice. These pictures by Hungarian artist Flóra Borsi, which we came cross via Dangerous Minds, are decidedly different: they twist and contort the faces and bodies of models into shapes that match those of famous paintings. Borsi’s work is all the more disconcerting because it’s so naturalistic — you find yourself doing a double take at the people on display, especially as they’re posed right next to the paintings from which they’ve been taken. … Read More

Photography

A Tale of Two Cities: Compelling Photos Merge London and New York

By Chloe Pantazi on

As a Londoner living in New York, I’m often drawing parallels between the two cities. Central Park is (a prettier) Hyde Park; Williamsburg is trendier than Shoreditch; the Upper East Side’s as swanky as Chelsea, Washington Square Park swarming with NYU kids might as well be Russell Square crawling with UCL students, and so forth. With her photography series New York+London (spotted via Architizer), another English woman, Daniella Zalcman, has turned her homesick musings following her move to New York into art. … Read More

Photography

Side-By-Side Photos Illustrate Inequality in America

By Julia Pugachevsky on

In his series, Created Equal, Detroit-born photographer Mark Laita explores social inequality by placing photos of US citizens who appear to be the opposites of each other (punks teens and Amish, for instance) side by side. The series took eight years to complete and is meant to show the “successes and failures that America has experienced in its short life.” Click through for a gallery of photos from Created Equal, discovered via Bored Panda, and visit Laita’s website for more info on the project and the book that came out of it. … Read More

Photography

The Dude Is an Award-winning Photographer: Jeff Bridges’ Best Behind-the-Scenes Shots

By Julia Pugachevsky on

Jeff Bridges is not just The Dude, he’s THE dude: since 1982, he’s been snapping artistic photos of the sets he’s been on, some of himself, some of his directors and castmates. Last week, he was honored at the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Awards dinner as a special presenter. Here are some of the evocative black-and-white photos he took over the years. … Read More

Los Angeles

Amazing Photographs by Children Living With Cancer

By Tanja M. Laden on

The third annual Pablove Shutterbugs Gallery Show at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles recently celebrated truly beautiful photography by children living with cancer across the LA area. Numerous supporters contributing to making it happen, including the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. But to help raise money for future projects that encourage photography programs for pediatric cancer patients, the Pablove Shutterbugs Gallery Show hosted a special fundraising event May 4 full of work by big-name photographers like Herb Ritts, Piper Ferguson, Jeff Antebi, and many others. … Read More

Art

Amazing Shadow Art Made With Mangled Wires

By Julia Pugachevsky on

Shadow art is booming in popularity but will probably never get old, because it’s so hard to comprehend how someone maps out a detailed silhouette and then recreates it with what looks like a random assortment of objects. It never loses its mystery, and Larry Kagan’s stencil-like shadow art is no exception. … Read More

Photography

Clever Surrealist Photographs That Evoke Man Ray’s Witty Spirit

By Tom Hawking on

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of surrealism is that it was funny. For all that the eyeball-slicing of Un Chien Andalou and the nightmarish dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí’s paintings are singularly disconcerting, the movement also had an endearingly quirky sense of humor — one that’s echoed in these playfully surrealist black-and-white pictures at Faith is Torment. They evoke the spirit of Man Ray, juxtaposing the mundane and the bizarre in ways that are both striking and amusing: a spoon casts the shadow of a fork, a ladder leads into a mirror, plates sit stacked in the grating that covers a street drain. They’re the work of Spanish photographer Jose Maria Rodriguez Madoz, who goes by the name Chema Madoz. Click through for a selection of his wittiest and most imaginative images.
… Read More

Photography

Powerfully Evocative Portraits of Four Sisters Photographed Over 30 Years

By Alison Nastasi on

“You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affections: there is nothing like it in this world,” Charlotte Brontë once wrote. We’ve examined the special connection between sisters in literature and art before. However, few have illustrated the emotional bond sisters share more poetically than photographer Nicholas Nixon. … Read More