Akule: Magnificent Black-and-White Underwater Photographs

What underwater tornadoes have to do with marine sustainability and Captain Cook’s death.

For the past 30 years, photographer Wayne Levin has been capturing the magnificence of the underwater world in spellbinding black-and-white images with equal parts mystery and awe. One day, as he was swimming to photograph the spinner dolphins of Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay, infamous as the location of Captain Cook’s death, Levin came across what appeared to be a giant coral reef. But, as he approached it, the “reef” began to move and morph, turning out to be an enormous school of bigeyed scad fish. Levin snapped some photos and scurried to find the dolphins, but the experience stuck with him. Over time, he developed a fascination with the strange beauty and synchronicity of these fish schools and spent the next 10 years capturing them on hundreds of rolls of film.

His new book, Akule, offers a selection of his finest photographs, named after the Hawaiian word for bigeyed scads. Haunting and poetic, Levin’s work is particularly fascinating — if not melancholic — when examined in parallel with the Census of Marine Life and our efforts to reverse the damage we’ve inflicted on this whimsical microcosm.

Surrounded by Akule

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Puffer fish with Akule

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Two Amber Jacks Under Akule

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

School of Akule by Mooring

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Most underwater photographers are divers first, then they get into photography to capture the beautiful scenes they see underwater. I was a photographer first. My first serious underwater photography was when I finished graduate school at Pratt in 1983. I returned to Hawaii to teach photography at University of Hawaii, and decided to photograph surfers from underwater. My first attempts were in color, but the results were very murky blue on blue. Then I switched to black and white, and everything came alive.” ~ Wayne Levin

Line of Akule

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Akule Tornado

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Rainbow Runners with Akule

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Great Barracuda Surrounded by Akule

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

Akule Pinwheel

Image courtesy of Wayne Levin

I feel a sense of freedom, and I can feel myself relax, and my bodily functions slow down as I leave the anxieties of the human world behind. But the ocean has its own dangers. … So there is a freedom in being underwater, but also a responsibility to always be aware of your surroundings, and yourself.” ~ Wayne Levin

Akule is the follow-up to Wayne’s 1997 debut book, Through a Liquid Mirror, a play on the title of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass to convey the magic and wonderment Wayne finds once he passes through the surface, just like Alice passes through the mirror into Wonderland. For more, NPR has an excellent interview with Levin.

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Urban Atrophy: Haunting Photos of Architectural Ghosts

What Classic Coke has to do with abandoned dolls and the afterlife of buildings.

The Japanese find beauty in decay, accepting the natural cycle of growth and collapse. This philosophy might be foreign to our Western clinging to the corporeal, but since 2005, Dan Haga and Dan Ayers have been looking for beauty and poeticism in abandoned schools, psychiatric hospitals, missile silos, amusement parks, cathedrals, jails, churches, and other remnants of modern civilization.

This year, they immortalized their finds in Urban Atrophy — a spellbinding collection of 560 striking, haunting images, alongside text that contextualizes these architectural ghosts and exposes the afterlife of ordinary buildings.

Pennhurst Hospital

Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School

Pennhurst Hospital

The Queen Theater

United Cross

Fort Washington

Hebrew Orphan Asylum

The Queen Theater

Mayfair Theatre

via Web Urbanist; images from Urban Atrophy

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Andrew Bush’s Drive-By Portraits: A Meditation on Character

What a vintage Beetle has to do with speeding grannies and the challenges of family travel.

Many years ago — okay, maybe three — I came across Andrew Bush’s fantastic photos of everyday people cruising the freeways of Los Angeles, thanks to Very Short List, one of my 5 favorite newsletters for a better, more interesting life. This week, Public School reminded me of the Vector Portraits series, immortalized in the excellent coffeetable book Drive — a selection of Bush’s best photographs, exploring the often uncomfortable intersection of the public and the private through his peculiar drive-by portraits.

Man heading south at 73 mph on Interstate 5 near Buttonwillow Drive outside of Bakersfield, California, at 5:36 p.m. on a Tuesday in March 1992

Woman pausing at a Beverly Hills intersection at 2:22 p.m. on September 12, 1990

Man drifting northwest at approximately 68 mph on U.S. Route 101 somewhere near Camarillo, California, one evening in 1989

Each image of car and driver captures the personality of the person behind the wheel with surprising simplicity, candid yet unabashedly creative, resulting in what Cathleen Medwick eloquently calls “a meditation on character, class, [and] the human condition, precarious at any speed.”

Man drifting near the shoulder at 61 mph on Interstate 405 around the Getty Drive exit at 4:01 p.m. on a Tuesday in September 1992

Someone's son traveling northbound at 60 mph on U.S. Route 101 near Santa Barbara at 1:55 p.m. in August 1993

Family traveling northwest at 63 mph on Interstate 244 near Yale Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at approximately 4:15 p.m. on the last day of 1991

Bush takes his portraits by driving alongside his subjects, often at 60mph, with a camera attached to his passenger window. The captions on each photograph, frequently imbued with subtle humor, include notes on the speed and direction he was going. An essay by cultural critic Patt Morrison contextualizes the series and an interview with Bush offers a peek inside the mind and creative process of one of today’s most remarkable photographic artists.

Women racing southwest at 41 mph along 26th Street near the Riviera Country Club, Pacific Palisades, California, at 1:14 p.m. on a Tuesday in February 1997

Woman waiting to proceed south at Sunset and Highland boulevards, Los Angeles, at approximately 11:59 a.m. one day in February 1997

High school students facing north at 0 mph on Sepulveda Boulevard in Westwood, California, at 3:01 p.m. on a Saturday in February 1997

With images spanning nearly 15 years, Drive is as much a time-capsule of techno-anthropology, with its evolving car models and hairstyles, as it is a rich and peculiar collective portrait of car culture and the myriad vehicles of human character that fuel it.

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Spomenik: Eerie Retrofuturistic Monuments of the Eastern Bloc

The ghosts of communism, or what alien architecture has to do with societal memory and Serbia’s mountains.

Having grown up in the former Eastern Bloc, I vividly remember the bizarre and beautiful monuments commissioned by the communist leaders of the 1960s and 70s, which remained as retrofuturistic remnants after the fall of communism, like the undying ghosts of an era most sought to forget but would always remember. These are the subject of Spomenik — a peculiar book by contemporary Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers, who took a laborious trek across former Yugoslavia and The Balkans to photograph the strikingly beautiful yet odd structures tucked away in the region’s mountains. The results are haunting and eerily powerful, evoking a felt sense of a fold in the space-time fabric of sociopolitical reality.

Kempenaers did not set out as a documentary photographer, but first and foremost as an artist seeking to create a new image. An image so powerful that it engulfs the viewer. He allows the viewer to enjoy the melancholy beauty of the Spomeniks, but in so doing, forces us to take a position on a social issue.” ~ Willem Jan Neutelings

Podgaric

Kruševo

Kozara

Petrova Gora

Kosmaj

Kadinjaca

Niš

Tjentište

Korenica

Jasenovac

Ilirska Bistrica

Tjentište

What’s most fascinating about the structures in Spomenik is that, up until the 1980s, they attracted millions of visitors, yet today they stand unknown by the younger generations and neglected by the older, their symbolism a fading flashbulb memory in the collective mind of their host cultures.

via MetaFilter | Images via Crack Two

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