In 2007 Margareta Kern travelled around Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina documenting old woman preparing the clothes in which they wish to be buried (via belencerezo). Kern kept a blog while making the project.

I've always loved the opening paragraph of Heinrich Böll's The Laugher.

"When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a bricklayer. I envy barbers, bookkeepers, and writers. All these professions speak for themselves. They need no lengthy explanation, while I am forced to reply to such questions: I am a laugher. Then I am always asked, "Is that how you make your living?" Truthfully I must say, "Yes." I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one, too. My laughing is - commercially speaking - much in demand. I am a good laugher, experienced. No one else laughs as well as I do. No one else has such command of the fine points of my art."

There is something pleasantly old fashioned about Guido Castagnoli's photographs of provincial Japan. The image above from his Korea set has the same quality. Find his images online on his portfolio site or, better yet, ask to see his work in person at the Sasha Wolf Gallery.

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky

Lovely & Sweet Thing
Egypt!
Club Night 20
Fashion Plates
Sweet Love Dream
USA Success
Love Bear
New Look Hero
Toil Through
Obama Obama Obama
Happy

I've been keeping very long hours lately have been bone tired pretty much all the time.

My 4 year old to me tonight: Dad you look tired.

Me: Yeah.

Raul Andres: I could tell you a story so you could take a nap.

Me: I like that idea.

Raul Andres: Once upon a time there was a daddy who was a giant.

[I close my eyes.]

Raul Andres: You can't sleep yet. I have to get to the best part. The giant was you! Wouldn't it be so much fun to be a giant?

Me: Why would it be so much fun?

Raul Andres: Because if you are a big giant everything is the size of a toy. The whole world. That's the story.

Me: I like that story.

Raul Andres: You can sleep now, but not too long because we have to play hide and go seek. Ok dream you are a giant now.

There's quite a kerfuffle brewing about Edgar Martins photoshopping some an image for a story in the NYTimes.
Specifically he mirrored an image to create symmetry and then changed a few things in photoshop to cover his tracks.

This is a story because Martins states emphatically that he does not use photoshop (or other "darkroom manipulations") and because he apparently duped the Times (he should have labeled the picture an editorial illustration rather than editorial photojournalism). I find the whole thing amusing because there are many images Martin's portfolio that are obviously photoshopped using exactly the same technique.

This is easily provable on a suspect image simply by taking half the image, flipping it horizontally and layering it over the other side of the image with say 80% opacity... At that point it's obvious which parts of the image are flipped and which parts are photoshopped in.

Here are two more examples of his work that easily debunk his "no photoshop" proclamation:

For the record, I like Martin's work, and I'm not anti-photoshop (and I'm certainly not anti-darkroom work) but I am anti-hypocrisy.

I've known for a long time that Nadav Kander was a photographer of broad and varied talents but I don't think understood how broad or how varied until I sat down to go through his website thoroughly tonight. From his always sharp editorial work (Obama's People) to large scale art projects (Yangtze, the Long River), to small personal projects (The Parade) Nadav produces striking picture after striking picture. It is curious that his projects while internally consistent lack a signature style. I don't think I've ever seen a specific image and said, "Oh that must be by Nadav." He reminds me of those filmmakers of the classic era like Howard Hawks who could direct a stylish gangster picture followed by western followed by a sci-fi flick and get them all right. All this is a long winded way of saying, spend some time getting to know Nadav's work because even if you think you know it, there is probably much more you are unaware of.

I love it when a single dusty bookshelf can telegraph so much about a person, even if that person has been gone for years.

These are just a few of the books found found on the shelf of an English woman who led a colorful young life and lived out her last years in the Mallorcan hills:

Claret And the White Whines of Bordeaux - Healy
Hedgerow and Pond - Lodge
A Short History of the English Peoples - Green
Annuals in Color and Cultivation - Mensfield
The KING of the DARK CHAMBER - Tagore
In Search of England - Morton
A History of Classical Scholarship - Sandy's
Poetic Works - Scott
The Twyborn Affair - Wythe
Winnie the Pooh - Milne
I Saw it happen in NORWAY - Hambro
Far Eastern Agent - Moore
The English Kings - Fowler

Imagine how much more fun the iOS video camera would be if it had a pause button. In camera cuts!

We released 4 editions today from yours truly on 20x200... All are from my project Travels Without Maps. Many of you have asked for small affordable prints, and now they are yours for the taking.

Additionally, I've seriously revamped my portfolio site and have now made it easier to grab big prints there. I have several new projects waiting in the wings will be putting them online in the coming weeks, so stay tuned, things are afoot!

I saw this bus the other day and it reminded me of something and I couldn't put my finger on it... was it a tattoo, something my wife drew in a letter, an old logo? I just couldn't place it...
...and then tonight during a wander it struck me. A few years ago I spent 6 hours on the back of a bike decorated with those hearts:

Mystery solved.

I believe most of us have a secret age separate from our actual age. It might be 4 or 8 or 62. If you want to know someone's secret age, watch them ride a bike.

I prefer my newspapers to be real things I can hold in my hands. Why?.. partially, so I can happen upon stories I would never read on the web (on the web I tend to self select stories I already know will hold my interest; in a real paper I read almost everything. Why? Because it's comprehensible. There is an end.)...

Anyway, I digress... Here are a few choice snippets from an article titled "An Independence Claim in Nicaragua" which I found the other day while reading the newspaper on the couch so you can read it here on the web...

Commercial sales of turtle meat, which has long been a delicacy here, is restricted in Nicaragua because of declining populations of endangered green sea turtles — one of many cultural clashes that the people in this remote corner of Nicaragua, who have eaten turtle for generations, say have propelled them to create their own country, which they have dubbed the Communitarian Nation of Mosquitia.

[snip]

Fed up, the separatists seized the region’s ruling party headquarters on April 19 and appointed Héctor Williams as their wihta tara, or great judge. Mr. Williams, a local religious leader whose thin black mustache stretches out toward his deep dimples, said the region suffered from a variety of woes — devastating hurricanes and rat plagues to a mysterious disease known as grisi siknis, which is marked by collective bouts of hysteria.

[snip]

The only weapons visible during a recent visit — before the weekend eviction — were slingshots, although the separatists said they were seeking financing to train and equip an army of 1,500.

“We’ll defend our natural resources,” vowed Guillermo Espinoza, the movement’s defense minister, who was known as Comandante Black Cat during the contra war. If no guns can be found, he said, the separatists will make weapons themselves.

I love photographers who see beauty in the mundane and then make you see what they see. Mike Sinclair is one of those photographers. I blogged one of his images 3 or 4 years ago and was pleased to come across his work again while helping judge the most recent Hey, Hot Shot! competition.