Choros: A Hypnotic Short Film Featuring Single Dancer with 32 “Visual Echoes”

“Choros” is a beautiful experimental film by Michael Langan and dancer Terah Maher. It features a single dancer layered 32 times, which each layer slightly offset in time from the previous one. The “visual echo” technique turns a single woman into a “chorus of women,” and transform the dance from single movements into waves of motion. The 13-minute video is set to the songMusic for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich.

Langan is building on the work of famous pioneers in the history of photography, including Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Mare. The technique is a variation of what’s known aschronophotography, which captures movement in numerous frames.

In the late nineteenth century, a photographic technique called “chronophotography” began to develop, whereby multiple photographs would be taken in rapid succession to study the movement of a given subject. Eadweard Muybridge famously filmed a horse in motion in 1878, providing the world with its first taste of motion pictures when the images were displayed on a spinning zoetrope.
Several years later, the French physicist Etienne-Jules Marey developed a stunning variation of this technique when he captured multiple poses of a subject over time onto a single frame of film, rendering a kind of visual echo. The nature of this process limited the subject matter to that which could be photographed in a black studio using stark lighting, to prevent overexposure of the background when multiple images are layered over one another.
[...] “Choros” revisits these technical innovations and attempts to contribute original innovations of its own. Using recent advancements in digital compositing, the technique developed for “Choros” introduces color, frees the film from the confines of a black studio, and allows the dancer to linger in one position without risk of overexposure, resulting in a variation of this historical technique that allows a degree of subtlety heretofore prohibited by technical limitations. [#]

You can learn more about this film on its dedicated webpage.

Fashion Mag Uses Photos of White Model to Illustrate ‘African Queen’ Editorial

Make me Happy?

International fashion magazine Numero is raising some eyebrows with its choice of photography for an editorial titled, “African Queen.” The piece features 16-year-old Ondria Hardin — a caucasian model — with heavily darkened skin.

Foudre calls Hardin’s appearance blackfacebody, and writes, “why hire a black model when you could just paint a white one!”
Here are a selection of the photographs found in the piece:


Laura Beck over at Jezebel writes,

It’s impossible to look at this and not ache for young women of color who want to pursue careers in modeling (and arguably, fashion by extension). When they don’t see themselves on the runway or in magazines, it could be very easy for them to think, “huh, I guess modeling isn’t for me.” Then the status quo reigns, and the runways remain monotone. If jobs for “African Queen” photo spreads aren’t going to black women, what hope is there?

Julee Wilson of the Huffington Post offers a similar criticism:

[...] the editorial serves as another sad example of how the fashion industry continually ignores or exploits ethnic diversity rather than celebrating it. And to think how easy it would have been for Numéro to select one of the countless beautiful black models and avoid this justifiable backlash and contribution to an unrelenting problem.

Beck also did some digging, and found that Hardin’s modeling agency has a number of black models on its roster that could possibly have been used for this shoot.

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Thanks for the tip, Sam!

What If I Told You These Weren’t Photographs? (20 Photos)

That’s right, these are all amazing

 hyperreal paintings

 by various artists.

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READ ABOUT 

Hyperrealism

CATEGORY: ART, AWESOME, MIND BLOWING

Israeli Sniper’s Instagram Photo of a Child in His Crosshairs Sparks Outrage

A young Israeli soldier sparked outrage around the world and Web this past week after uploading an ill-advised photo on Instagram. The photo, pictured above, shows the back of a young Palestinian boy’s head in the crosshairs of 20-year-old Israeli sniper Mor Ostrovski’s rifle.
According to Al Jazeera, the photo was discovered Friday by blogger Ali Abunimah onOstrovski’s Instagram account. Abunimah immediately spread the photo, calling it “simply tasteless and dehumanizing,” and explaining that it “embodies the idea that Palestinian children are targets.”



Ostrovski has since deactivated both his Instagram and Facebook accounts, but not before this and other photos of his went viral on social networks the world over. The photo above, for example, was published by the New York Times before his Facebook account was taken down.
The Israeli Defense Forces have since issued a statement to the press, speaking out against the photo and making it clear that they do not approve of such actions:

The picture in question does not coincide with I.D.F.’s values or code of ethics. The soldier’s commanders have been notified. The issue will be investigated and dealt with accordingly.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the only controversial photo taken by an Israeli soldier, or even the only one of a Palestinian in their crosshairs: The New York Times explained that several of the photos on Ostrovski’s Facebook showed him using his rifle as “a comic prop.” And shortly after the photo went viral, Israeli veterans group Breaking the Silence shared it side-by-side with the eerily similar photo above, taken in 2003 by another Israeli soldier.

Maybe this is Better?

Don’t Zoom, Move: Treating Your Zoom Lens as a Series of Primes

We’ve shared some funny pictures in the past that illustrate how distance, not focal length, changes perspective — but nothing beats a video walk through. So, in this short video, photographer Mike Browne explains why you should treat your zoom lens as a series of prime lenses, and not the equivalent of getting physically closer to your subject.
Here are the final shots, one focal length at a time:





Each shot is framed identically using the lens’ focal length, but because the photographer had to move away to properly frame the shot at any given focal length, the perspective still changed. It’s a simple concept, but even if you’ve heard it explained a million times, you should really give it a try yourself.

So, if the video, the pictures, and the fat cat don’t offer sufficient explanation — or even if they do — grab your camera and a willing subject (we find inanimate subjects rarely object to being photographed) and give this experiment a shot.
(via Reddit)

The Fascinating Story Behind The Oldest Surviving Photograph of a US President

In June of last year, we gave you a quick “photo trivia o’ the day” lesson on the history of presidential photography. We told you that John Quincy Adams sat for what is currently the oldest surviving photo of a US President, that James Polk sat for the oldest of a US President in office, and that President Obama was actually the first to have his official photo taken digitally. That first of those three facts, however, comes with an interesting story.

The photo of John Quincy Adams we shared that day (above) is one of two taken around the same time in 1843, both of which vie for the title of “oldest” surviving photo of a US President. Unfortunately, other than the fact that it was taken by Philip Haas at Adams’ home in Quincy, MA, we know very little about that photograph.
The other of the two (top) we know quite a bit more about. It was taken on a trip to New York, during which the president visited Niagara Falls, shook too many hands, visited an all-girls school, and spent some time with a child dwarf dressed as Napoleon. We know these bizarre details thanks to the meticulous diary Adams kept.
Here’s an excerpt from that diary:

The shaking of some hundred hands then followed and on my way returning to Mr. Johnson’s, I stopped and four daguerreotype likenesses of my head were taken, two of them jointly with the head of Mr. Bacon — all hideous.

That sentence is all the attention that was paid to the historic photograph, in a three paragraph entry that devoted almost an entire third to a pebble that lodged itself in the former president’s eye. But then that’s not surprising, as far as he was concerned his photos were “hideous” and “too true to the original.”
The last bit of interesting history behind the photo is how it came to be [arguably] the oldestsurviving photo of a US President. The first photo ever taken of a sitting US President was taken long before the one of Polk mentioned above. It was actually of William Henry Harrison, and it was taken in 1841. That one, however, was lost somewhere in the junk pile of history.

This one barely escaped, surfacing in 1970 at an antique shop where it was bought for a more than reasonable $0.50. That copy is now kept in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian where all of us can visit and admire just how “hideous” the portrait really is.
(via The Atlantic)

Taboo : Nudity by National Geographic

Taboo is a documentary television series that premiered in 2002 on the National Geographic Channel. The program is an educational look into "taboo" rituals and traditions practiced in some societies, yet forbidden and illegal in others.[1] Each hour long episode details a specific topic, such as marriage or initiation rituals, and explores how such topics are viewed throughout the world. Taboo generally focuses on the most misunderstood, despised, or disagreed-upon activities, jobs, and roles.