“On my thirtieth birthday, my wife left me,” Rafael Mantesso said. She took her cookware, furniture, photos, her decorations. She left me alone in an empty all-white apartment. The only thing she didn’t take was my bull terrier, whom she’d named after her favorite shoe designer: Jimmy Choo,” Rafael said.
Category Archives: Inspiration
A new angle on oceanic imagery
Australian photographer Ray Collins first picked up a camera in 2007 and used it to photograph his friends surfing around his coastal home after long shifts working in a nearby coalmine.
His attention quickly shifted from his friends to patterns and forms he noticed in the waves. Collins, who is colourblind, was also drawn to the interplay of light and water, perhaps more attuned to contrast than the nuance of color.
He poetically refers to this switch from coalminer to fine art photographer as a balance between his “black life and blue life”.
Here’s some more of Ray’s striking oceanic imagery for your viewing pleasure:
Stefanie Schneider’s work with expired Polaroid film
Stefanie Schneider lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Stefanie’s scintillating situations take place in the American West. Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, her photographic sequences provide the ambience for loosely woven story lines and a cast of phantasmic characters. She works with the largely uncontrollable chemical mutations of expired Polaroid film stock.
Amazing (non-digital) dreamscapes by JeeYoung Lee
Resurrection
It’s amazing to witness an artist who embraces one of their greatest limitations, turning it instead into one of their greatest advantages.
For Korean artist JeeYoung Lee the question was how to utilise her small studio space in Seoul measuring just 3.6m x 4.1m x 2.4m (11.8′ x 13.5′ x 7.8′). Instead of finding a new location or reverting to digital trickery, Lee challenged herself to build some of the most elaborate sets imaginable for the sake of making a single photograph.
Models wear high speed milk as traditional 1940s pinups
London based photographer, Jaroslav Wieczorkiewicz, has created a 12 month calendar inspired by retro calendars featuring 1940s pinup girls. Except the girls aren’t wearing clothes—they’re wearing milk! Very fast milk.
Frozen with high speed strobes, each image is layered from hundreds of photographs capturing splashes on real models using real milk. Inspired by iconic images from artists like Gil Elvgren, Wieczorkiewicz shoots up to 200 frames to complete an image. The frames are then layered in Photoshop and combined seamlessly to complete the dress.
The power of a single photograph: Auggie’s photo album
I so love this memorably wonderful scene from Smoke (1995) featuring Harvey Keitel and William Hurt… I hope you do too…
You know how it is…
Tomorrow tomorrow and tomorrow,
Time creeps on its petty pace.
In Auggie’s New York smoke shop, days pass, seemingly unchanging – until he teaches us to notice the little details of life…
Contemplative silhouettes
Artist Kasia Derwinska creates scenes with contemplative silhouettes of people trying to find their own paths in life. Each anonymous character is either standing at a distance or walking off into a vast and empty landscape.
There are recurring visuals throughout her portfolio that include umbrellas, clouds, and a theme of pensiveness as her characters are stuck at a standstill. Like an artistic metaphor for life through a surreal lens, each frame presents characters with endless options to create their own reality.
Choosing not to refer to herself as a professional photographer, Derwinska says:
I use photography as a tool, like a brush for painting or an instrument to play music. My creations are an attempt to connect the visible with the invisible – feelings, emotions, fears, hopes and doubts about the world we live in. It is my personal journey through this unreal reality.
Check out more imaginative images below…
susie loves photography 