Letters From Here

Without the use of a camera Portland-based artist Jim Kazanjian sifts through a library of some 25,000 images from which he carefully selects the perfect elements to digitally assemble mysterious buildings born from the mind of an architect gone mad. While the architectural and organic pieces seem wildly random and out of place, Kazanjian brings just enough cohesion to each structure to suggest a fictional purpose or story that begs to be told. You can see much more of his work over on Facebook, and prints are available at 23 Sandy Gallery.

(via An Architect Gone Mad: Mysterious Buildings Assembled from Found Photographs by Jim Kazanjian | Colossal)

Photographer Dave Jordano – fresh out of college after being born and raised in the Motor City – was part of the exodus when he headed for Chicago to start a commercial photography studio in the late ’70s. Jordano’s father worked for General Motors and joked that motor oil ran in the family’s veins. Three years ago, Jordano returned to Detroit and began photographing the neighborhoods, people, vistas and communities of his hometown. His resulting body of work is an endearing and sprawling document of a city close to his heart.

“This is the most emotional work I’ve made,” he says. “I don’t get tired and I just keep wanting to go back. I find more and more material every time I go.”

Unbroken Down is also an attempt to set the photographic record straight. Jordano believes that Detroit is more than a tale of decline and images of the associated urban decay. Yet, a lot of celebrated photography projects made in Detroit recently have focused on ruination as if the apocalypse passed through and kept going.

. (via Captivating Photos of Detroit Delve Deep to Reveal a Beautiful, Struggling City | Raw File | Wired.com)

photographer Thomas Barbéy, on the other hand, turns familiar cityscapes on their head (or side, for that matter). Barbéy, whose work was just spotlighted on My Modern Met, twists familiar scenes until they’re nearly unrecognizable. Photo via Thomas Barbéy Official Site In his “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” men from the Carnival of Venice float across the Paris skyline.

(via See Venice in Paris and Other Divine Rehashed Architecture - Artistry - Curbed National)

Using tags, with which users describe the content of the photos, he presented popular subjects as word clouds, located at the weighted center of frequency. We can see below, for example, that visitors are photographing the Golden Gate Bridge mostly from two places: the three Fort Mason piers, and halfway out on the Van Ness pier. For photographs of Alcatraz, the legendary island-prison, one viewpoint, at the end of the jetty, is predominant. The red-to-blue color scale of the circles indicates what Dunkel calls “second-level clustering” — whether a viewpoint is marginally more or less popular than the area mean.

(via What Flickr Can Teach Us About the Way We Photograph Cities - Technology - The Atlantic Cities)

Previously: Pictures of the Familiar

Detroiturbex - a website dedicated to raising awareness of the social and economic challenges the city of Detroit faces through photography - have created a new series entitled “Now and Then.” Taken in the now dilapidated and abandoned Lewis Cass Technical High School, the series shows us the striking difference between the boom years of the establishment and its current state by combining old and new images. For the full series, head over to Detroiturbex.com.

(via Detroit: Now and Then | HUH.)

George Steinmetz‘s new exhibition and book, Desert Air, is the first comprehensive photographic collection of the world’s “extreme deserts”, which receive less than four inches of precipitation a year.  This body of work, culled from 15 years of shooting, takes the viewer from China’s Gobi Desert to the Sahara in northern Africa to Death Valley in California.

Steinmetz photographs from a motorized paraglider which he describes as a “flying lawn chair”. Using the slowest and quietest powered aircraft in the world, he is not only able to take off and land without an airfield or government permission but is also likely to land in someone’s yard and be invited in for tea, becoming the talk of the town.

In his thirty year career, Steinmetz has been a regular contributor to National Geographic and GEO magazines and has won numerous awards including two first prizes in science and technology from World Press Photo.  Desert Air will be on view through March 3, 2013 at Anastasia Photo.

. (via Up in the Air (10 Photos) | PDN Photo of the Day)

The winner of this year’s Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, photographer David Byrne, has been disqualified and stripped of his title for violating contest rules regarding digital manipulation. His winning image, titled “Lindisfarne Boats” and shown above, is a black-and-white photo showing beached fishing boats with Lindisfarne Castle in the background.

Contest founder Charlie Waite of Take a View writes in an announcement that although a certain degree of digital editing is allowed, “the extent of the changes” to Byrne’s image caused it to violate the contest’s rules. Waite does note that it doesn’t not appear that Byrne was trying to deceive the judges.

 (via Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012 Stripped of Title for Too Much ‘Shoppin)

Andy Adams of FlakPhoto has an interesting new digital exhibition titled Looking at the Land — 21st Century American Views that features 88 landscape photographs captured around the United States since 2000.

 (via Looking at the Land: Landscape Photogs Explain the “Why” Behind Their Shots)

Great work here: http://jorgetaboada.com/altadensidad.html

Also: Tumblr of note: http://architectureofdoom.tumblr.com/

(via grossnational)