These images are from ‘Created Equal’, the amazing photography project of photographer Mark Laita which focuses on contrasts between people, their lives and their cultures through a series of engaging black and white portraits.
Here are some more photographs from this remarkable series…
Photographer Brandon Stanton is the brainchild behind the wildly popular blog Humans of New York, otherwise known as HONY.
Stanton spends his days photographing on the streets of New York City, and what truly sets his images apart from those found on other photography blogs is his personal interaction with his subjects.
Now more then a year into his blogging project, Stanton has collected compelling quotes and stories from an estimated 10,000 New Yorkers who he has stopped to photograph along the way. In the meantime, HONY’s follower base has grown to about one million fans.
Be sure to visit Stanton’s Humans of New York blog and, if you haven’t already done so, check out the video clip above for an insightful commentary into his creative inspiration!
Related post: Finding comfort in portraits of Bostonians
“He was training to be a surgeon when we got married. One night he came home from two days straight on the job, and I’d cooked him dinner. Right before he fell asleep in his plate of food, he asked me what movie I’d like to watch. I thought it was so sweet.”
Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries.
Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time since 1984. However, when certain stories he wanted to cover – such as Romanian orphanages and famine in Somalia – garnered no interest from magazines, he self-financed trips there.
He is known for getting up close to his subjects, or as he says, “in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit,” and he passes that sense of closeness on to the viewer.
In putting himself in the middle of conflict, his intention is to record the truth, to document the struggles of humanity, and with this, to wake people up and stir them to action.
As Nachtwey says:
[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.
Like to learn more about Nachtwey’s work? Check out the following links…
Born in a small coal-mine village in 1967 in Yamaguchi prefecture, western Japan, Junku Nishimura lived there until he was 18.
After studying Latin American affairs at college in Kyoto, Junku worked as a club DJ, a construction worker and later got a job with a cement manufacturing company, working in tunnel construction sites across the country as a concrete expert.
With a Leica in his hand, he started photographing the places where he worked. After 18 years, Junku quit his job, travelling the world to make photographs. Today he is a freelance photographer based in Nagoya and Yamaguchi.
Of his intimate environmental portraits and street photography, Junku says:
Take three minutes to check out this inspirational, well-shot video featuring some great advice from smartphone photographer Dilshad Corleone about shooting, composing and telling a story with an image.
Of his practice, Dilshad says…
image by Vivian Maier (Florida, 9 January 1957)
© 2013 Maloof Collection, Ltd.
In 2007 John Maloof, a 26-year-old real estate agent involved in historic preservation of Chicago’s Northwest Side, strolled into an auction house and placed a $380 bid on a box of 30,000 prints and negatives from an unknown photographer.
Realising the street photographs of 1950s/60s era Chicago and New York were of unusually high quality, he purchased another lot of the photographer’s work, totalling some 100,000 photographic negatives, thousands of prints, 700 rolls of undeveloped colour film, home movies, audio tape interviews, and original cameras.
susie loves photography 