Word on the Street: Found Urban Type Timed for Social Commentary

For the past 30 years, photographer Richard Nagler has been capturing urbanity’s ephemeral moments of existential irony by pairing found typography from the urban landscape with perfectly timed random passersby. His original inspiration for the series came one summer in the late 1970, when he was wandering the streets of Oakland and noticed the word TIME bolted in large letters on the side of an old building. As he looked up, a very old woman gazed out at him from a window near the type sign, and in that micro-moment he founded embedded a powerful visual metaphor for aging and the passage of time.

Word on the Street is a fantastic collection of Nagler’s richest such images from the past three decades, which iconic poet Allen Ginsberg eloquently and accurately described as “visual poetics.” Sometimes shocking, often surprising and invariably compelling, these portraits invite you, with a wink, to complete the barely bespoken narratives and look for those hidden yet staggeringly obvious human truths that interlace with the fabric of mundanity.

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Thoughtful, amusing and deeply human, Word on the Street is an absolute treasure trove of meticulously timed serendipity, captured with a keen eye for poetic irony.

via NPR

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PICKED: Color Story Parallels, Past vs. Present

Street style photography has evolved from being a hobby for the style conscious to source for inspirational personal style. We recently featured a documentary on Scott Schuman, better known as The Satorialist, who is partially responsible for today’s surge of street style photography.

Originally inspired by Shuman’s work, Color Comparisons is a series of image pairs that draw comparisons between the art world and street style photography, presenting fashion photography alongside vintage ads or classic art with the same color stories. The results are pretty incredible.

Explore the Color Comparisons archive for more color story doppelgängers across the space-time continuum.

Shenee Howard is a writer, designer and creative tactician based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is also an avid story and pop curator. The 90s are her favorite. She founded design/strategy firm You’ll Look Great and is in the process of launching the storytelling blog eight thirty seven. She also spends way too much time sharing links on Twitter.

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Stunning Images of Pollen, the Hidden Sexuality of Flowers

We’re all about the cross-pollination of ideas and disciplines, and nowhere does it get more literal or more stunningly embodied than in Pollen: The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers — an extraordinary project by visual artist Rob Kesseler, who collaborated with two leading botanical biologists to document the otherworldly beauty of the building block of plant life. Using bleeding-edge electron photomicroscopy to scan these tiny microgametophytes of seed plants, Kesseler awakens a special kind of awe for the incredible diversity and miracle of plant pollination.

Pollen is like a 21st-century version of Ernst Haeckel’s remarkable illustrations from the early 1900s, a gorgeously gripping reflection of the amazing world we live in and a subtle but palpable living reminder to cherish, honor and preserve the planet’s precious biodiversity.

Images from Pollen: The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers, by Rob Kesseler and Madeline, published by Papadakis Publisher

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The Great Mystery of Photography: How to Photograph a Black Dog

For the past decade, editor Eric Kessels has been sifting through the world’s amateur analog photography, culling fascinating collections of found photos around eccentric and esoteric themes. in almost every picture #9: black dog documents one family’s attempt to solve one of the grand mysteries of photography: How to photograph a black dog. The couple, befallen by their beloved pet’s complete blackness and the technical insufficiencies of their very vintage camera, try over and over again to capture endearing portraits of the pooch, only to find his likeness hovering between brooding silhouette and nondescript black blob.

The collection unfolds across seasons and years, in almost comedic fashion, as the family carries on the seemingly hopeless quest, revealing at once a tender personal story and a timecapsulre of a photography era long gone.

Before the digital age, before cameras that could solve any problem from red-eye to world hunger, there was the 20th century, a time when photographers actually had to take photos themselves. Among other things, this included finding sufficient light for your subject.” ~ Christian Bunyan

And, finally, in a dramatically overexposed shot, we see the dog’s elusive face.

in almost every picture #9: black dog is the latest in a fantastic series of found photography books by Kessels, exploring everything from Japan’s infamous flat-headed Oolong rabbit, one of the earliest internet memes, to missing persons portraits.

via Lensculture

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