Photography as Self-Therapy

Photography as Self-Therapy

Photos document a timeline, are a snapshot of body and mind at certain times along our lives. Photos allow for time travel. Looking at an image from the past might explain moods and things and connections that were not obvious at the time. This might have a therapeutic effect. Looking for clues in how I […]

Young Girl

Young Girl

By NIGEL FOGG A Portrait by Marsha Burns Can I begin by crying? She is so frail, so strong, so shocking, so beautiful, so young, so damaged, so afraid, so courageous, so angry, so old, so wise, so determined, so veiled, so strident, so hurtful, so full of life… More than we seem able to […]

Shy Street Photographer

Shy Street Photographer

Street photography and shyness, they don’t match, do they. Street photography requires an outgoing personality, eager to not mind what passersby think, not shying away from even confronting people. People can get upset if not aggressive when they see a stranger’s camera pointed at them. Some photographers just don’t care. Others are careful enough to […]

The Art of Seeing

The Art of Seeing

John Berger, the politically committed critic, novelist, screenwriter, lyricist, dramatist, essyist, activist and, above all, photographer, John Berger is dead. He passed away on January 1 in Paris after a long illness, a few weeks after his 90th birthday. As photographers we owe many things to John Berger, above all to his equally influential and […]

Photographs on Tiles

Photographs on Tiles

Here’s a great project — kind of eternizes your photographs: Shots/on\Stone are black-and-white photographic prints which founder Tom Bates develops by hand on natural stone tiles in a darkroom in Vienna, Austria. The process involves painting a stone with photographic emulsion, exposing a negative image and developing the stone in photographic chemicals. Whilst some companies […]

Beautiful Storytelling

Beautiful Storytelling

Beautiful storytelling by former freelance photographer Amos Chapple, published by RFE/RL: On Siberia’s Ice Highway. Subtitled “A journey with the men who make their living on thin ice,” Chapple managed to join the ride of a lifetime. And because he has proven he’s able to get the story, he’s now staff at RFE/RL. The job […]

Robert Mapplethorpe Revival

Robert Mapplethorpe Revival

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) wasn’t the easiest of characters. The American photographer challenged conventions and feared no controversy. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad (Mr. Mapplethorpe’s camera) and began taking photographs of artists, composers and socialites. Be became known for his sensitive yet blunt, highly stylized black-and-white photography. His work featured celebrity portraits, […]

The Secret Behind Anton Corbjin’s Signature Look

The Secret Behind Anton Corbjin’s Signature Look

You may have missed it, but Anton Corbjin bowed out of professional photography. Might be because photography as a slow, analog form of art is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute — that’s six billion each month — , and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital […]

Aggregated Images — Mixing Photography and Deep Data

Aggregated Images — Mixing Photography and Deep Data

In a new book, data-viz guru Nicholas Felton highlights a wave of photographers mixing deep data into their art. The infographic designer is the ohor of Personal Annual Reports that weave measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps and statistics to reflect the year’s activities. Now the creator of the Reporter app and Facebook’s Timeline […]

Why Color When We Have Black and White

Why Color When We Have Black and White

The recent National Geographic Travel Contest, edition 2015, made me think. How come that the first prize of such a certainly prestigious contest goes to a black-and-white photograph, a photograph of divers swimming near a humpback whale off the western coast of Mexico. What a capture. The winner a black-and-white image; this in the days […]

The Reinvention of Seeing — Who Said the Camera Never Lies?

The Reinvention of Seeing — Who Said the Camera Never Lies?

Not much is left of the traditional camera. Give or take a few years, and mechanical shutters may be a thing of the past. Even though, what is photography without a shutter’s distinct sound. Countless variations of the “click” have persisted into the smartphone age, as the signal that an instant has been frozen in […]

Tim Mantoani’s Iconic Photobook “Behind Photographs” — Exclusive Author Giveaway for THEME Readers!

Tim Mantoani’s Iconic Photobook “Behind Photographs” — Exclusive Author Giveaway for THEME Readers!

Behind Photographs — it’s a one of a kind photobook by Tim Mantoani, a photographer from San Diego who produced editorial imagery for Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and ESPN, as well as advertising photography for Fortune 500 companies. His love of photography led to tracking down and photographing the shooters behind some of the world’s most […]

Early Philosophers on the Two Basics of the Creative Photographic Process

Early Philosophers on the Two Basics of the Creative Photographic Process

A thought fun pondering is how the old philosophers, thinkers and artists would have dealt with the onslaught of the digital revolution. How people whose only means of expression was the pen and brush would have made use of new communication technologies. Imagine Salvador Dali with a digital camera and image manipulation — right, he’d […]

“Amputee Venus” — Photography Against Discrimination

“Amputee Venus” — Photography Against Discrimination

Japanese are known for their kinky tendencies. The island often surprises the rest of the world with the weird and wonderful. And beautiful things can happen when you mix the Japanese sense of awkward imagination with Hasselblad: a remarkable catwalk fashion show, supported by the high-end camera maker, has helped amputee women in Japan to […]

On the World’s Oldest Trees and the Noble Process of Platinum Printing

On the World’s Oldest Trees and the Noble Process of Platinum Printing

Meet Beth Moon, a photographer based in San Francisco, has traveled the world since the beginning of this millennium in search of the world’s oldest trees. Since 14 years she is traveling the globe to capture the most magnificent, ancient trees that grow in remote locations and tell stories that look as old as the […]

Wanna Feel Ancient? See Kids React to a Film Camera

Wanna Feel Ancient? See Kids React to a Film Camera

It’s actually a nice idea, letting kids interact with old stuff some of us feel nostalgic about, such as a rotary phone, the Beatles, etc. That’s what the YouTube channel Kids React is about. A latest episode: kids reacting to a film camera. Take a fancy Canon Sure Shot 85 Zoom that uses 35mm film. […]

Understanding Composition

Understanding Composition

Doesn’t matter one iota that the following video is curated by a computer graphics artist. On the contrary. Computer graphics and photography have much in common, for instance the same roots. Computer graphics tend to become even more realistic while the prevailing post-processing in digital photography implicates visual proximity to, well, computer-generated visuals. Yet, in […]

The Breaking Bad of Photography

The Breaking Bad of Photography

The “Breaking Bad” of photography: National Geographic posts the antitheses to the rules of photography. Learn the rules of photography, then break them. Imagine everyone would apply the rule of thirds all the time… Making one’s own rules is one of photography’s beauties. Imagine it would be an exact science — we’d all look and […]

Essay: The Unflattering Family Album

Essay: The Unflattering Family Album

Tonight, however, I am restless. I sit at the dining room table; rummage through the refrigerator. What am I looking for? All day long I’ve been scavenging, poking around in rooms and closets, peering at their things, studying them. I arrange my rolls of exposed film into long rows and count and recount them as […]

The Decisive Moment 2.0

The Decisive Moment 2.0

The photography world is in hyperactivity. It’s biennial Photokina time, lots of exciting announcements, just to mention the-wait-is-over Canon 7D Mark II (Amazon / B&H Photo / Adorama), world’s probably top APS-C camera. Photography sites and forums are flooded with enthusiasm, exasperation and bad blood, so let’s swim a bit against the tide of nonstop […]

The New World Atlas of Street Photography

The New World Atlas of Street Photography

Photography, like life itself, changed radically over the past few decades. The photography of city life especially — these days simply called “street photography” — has developed into an own new genre like the new urban scenery itself. Now a book titled The World Atlas of Street Photography showcases the work of 100 contemporary photographers, […]

Gregory Heisler — A Little Speech on Photography That Might Just Change Your Life

Gregory Heisler — A Little Speech on Photography That Might Just Change Your Life

Photography, a meritocracy? Wrong, says Gregory Heisler, known for his evocative portrait work often found on magazine covers. Photography is about relationships, Heisler says. Ultimately people are curious and want to meet and know you, the photographer. And photography today, he says, is vision based. People don’t want a particular style, but a vision, a […]

Photography and Literature

Photography and Literature

By IHTISHAM KABIR When photography was invented in 1840, literature warmly greeted it. Why? I think the ability of photographs to precisely describe what is in front of the camera caught the imagination of writers who felt less threatened by photography than painters did. Authors as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Ruskin […]

Menno Aden, Photo Artist Looking Down Upon People’s Living Spaces

Menno Aden, Photo Artist Looking Down Upon People’s Living Spaces

Photography is a lot about finding one’s one style. Nothing more boring than shooting the Eiffel Tower. Everyone does it. Nothing more exciting than shooting the Eiffel Tower. So many unique angles and perspectives, different lightings and framings left to be explored and discovered! That’s the beauty of photography. Each and every moment offers a […]

Photography Is Just Like Painting

Photography Is Just Like Painting

The photos we take are an expression what we’re looking for, not necessarily what we’re looking at. Every camera we use, we use as an extension of who we are. This short video makes you want to go out and try to capture the street, the nearby forest, the mood. It makes you smile — […]

The VSCO One Million Dollar Scholarship Fund to Honor the Art of Photography

The VSCO One Million Dollar Scholarship Fund to Honor the Art of Photography

VSCO, digital photography’s probably leading solution for the emulation of film, wants you to live the artist in you and get a scholarship of the $1,000,000 Artist Initiative. The initiative is a fund providing photographers the resources to pursue their creative vision. It honors art and artist by discovering, funding, advising and promoting creatives from […]

Digital Manipulation — How Much Is Too Much?

Digital Manipulation — How Much Is Too Much?

By YVAN COHEN, LIGHTROCKET “The camera never lies,” goes the adage, and for a long time we almost believed it. While photographs could never lay claim to being entirely truthful, there was a sense that an image recorded on film was as close as we could get to a freeze-frame of real life. Photography has […]

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