Entourage.
 
Subatomic Tourism is the fantastic miniature world created by “bequiffed” Edinburgh-based visual art Mirren Audax. As he describes it on his site:

Subatomic Tourism is an ongoing project to big up the small with a hint of Irwin Allen and Richard Feynman, along with a touch of Marcel Duchamp and Ray Harryhausen; to bring by way of Joseph Cornell and Gerry Anderson a celebration of the wonderful world-sized diorama we find ourselves living in.

Audax photographs scenes created with toy figures placed in urban settings that resemble stills from classic TV series, science fiction films, pop culture and surreal portraiture. With references to Doctor Who, Star Trek, H. P. Lovecraft and American road movies, Audux’ fabulous images allow the viewer to invent their own narrative for each image.

See more Lilliputian worlds here, and you can follow the Museum of Subatomic Tourism on Facebook and Twitter.
 

Migration Tracking.
 

Lost In The Supermarket.
 

Silver Foil Nemesis.
 

The Saucer.
 
More miniature marvels after the jump…
 

 
Though Diane Arbus was famed for her photographs of “deviant and marginal” people “whose normality seems ugly or surreal,” she did not want to be thought solely as a photographer of freaks. This in part may explain why Arbus accepted a commission to take a portrait photograph of Germaine Greer for the publication New Woman. Unless, of course, the magazine’s editors thought there was something freakish about the Antipodean academic, journalist and feminist?

On a hot summer’s day in 1971, Arbus arrived to photograph Greer at the Chelsea Hotel. Greer was on tour with her book The Female Eunuch and had most recently taken part in an infamous head-to-head with Norman Mailer at New York City’s Town Hall. Seeing the diminutive photographer was overly laden with equipment, Greer helped Arbus up to her hotel suite.

Greer may have been showing consideration to the photographer, but the session soon turned into a battle of wills as Arbus ordered the Greer around the room, telling her to lie on the bed, and then straddling her as she snapped away. Greer later related meeting with Arbus to the photographer’s biographer Patricia Bosworth:

It developed into a sort of duel between us, because I resisted being photographed like that—close up with all my pores and lines showing!! She kept asking me all sorts of personal questions, and I became aware that she would only shoot when my face was showing tension or concern or boredom or annoyance (and there was plenty of that, let me tell you), but because she was a woman I didn’t tell her to fuck off. If she had been a man, I’d have kicked her in the balls.

Unable to deliver a telling kick, Greer opted not to co-operate.

‘I decided “Damn it, you’re not going to do this to me, lady. I’m not going to be photographed like one of your grotesque freaks!”  So I stiffened my face like a mask.

Greer would later claim the duel with Arbus as a draw, but as Howard Sounes noted in his superlative cultural biography of the Seventies:

The editors at New Woman evidently thought Greer vs. Arbus had resulted in defeat for the photographer, for her pictures were never used in the magazine. In a letter to [her husband] Allan, Diane discussed her attitude to the shoot, perhaps revealing her approach to her subjects generally. She wrote that she had liked Germaine Greer personally, considering her to be ‘fun and terrific looking…’ Nevertheless she went out of her way to depict her in an unflattering light. As she said, ‘I managed to managed to make otherwise.’

The picture from the session, printed posthumously as ‘Feminist in her hotel room, NYC, 1971’, is in fact fascinating, not least because in close-up, Greer’s neatly plucked and re-applied eyebrows more than a passing resemblance to the transvestite in curlers Arbus photographed back in 1966.

Arbus was not best suited to working as a freelance photographer—the hours spent pitching ideas that often came to nothing, or struggling to earn agreed fees from indifferent publishing houses to maintain her independence, caused her deep depression. Taking fashionable portraits of celebrity figures was hardly the work for an artist photographer who believed:

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Cholafied Jay-Z.
 
Cholafied comes from the mind of Michael Jason Enriques, an LA kid who grew up in the 1990s.

It’s a throwback to the Chola gangster style: “Sharpied” eyebrows, dark lipliner, and the fumes from a can of Aqua Net.

It’s a product of LA where subculture, celebrity obsession, street art, and stupidity are rolled up together like one of those bacon wraped hot dogs sold on Hollywood Blvd.

See more of Michael’s “Cholafied” celebrities here.
 

‘Do you feel lucky, Chola?’: Clint Eastwood.
 

The Royal Chola Queen Elizabeth dos.
 

Chola Wonder Woman
 

Chola Mark Zuckerberg
 
More after the jump…
 

 
James Ostrer’s “Wotsit All About” makes use of junk food in the most revolting of ways (even worse than actually eating it!) Models are adorned in hamburgers, cheese puffs, whipped cream and all manner of processed goodies, creating a sort of anthropological fashion spread of the crap we consume. There are full-body photographs of his tribesman, but it’s the faces that stand out, reminiscent of religious or ceremonial masks belonging to some long lost sugar clan.

Ostrer avoids what could have very well been a preachy lesson in healthy eating and instead approaches the modern world’s victual vices with a bit of humor. Like many of us, he dreams of a day when junk food is deemed subversive, saying, “Eventually I could see refined sugar being viewed in the same way as smoking is. The only difference is no one in fashion or film ever regarded being fat as cool.”

Some images may be NSFW, if your work holds an objection to breasts, which may or may not be unadorned in meringue.
 

 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
During his lifetime William Hope was hailed as a pioneer of “spirit photography.” He was also exposed as a cynical fraudster who conned people out of money with his pictures of ghosts apparently photo-bombing loved ones’ portraits.

William Hope was born in 1863. He was a carpenter from Cheshire, England. His hobby was photography. In 1905, he chanced upon the potential of the double exposure. He quickly realised he could pass off double-exposed images as “genuine” photographs of ghosts. His pictures achieved considerable acclaim with some notable fans—including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who penned The Case for Spirit Photography in support of Hope’s work. The creator of Sherlock Holmes also believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

After the slaughter of the First World War, Hope was able to use his “ghost portraits” to exploit the genuine need of many bereaved families to be reassured in life after death. To give his ghost portraits credence, Hope established the Crewe Circle—a group of like-minded spirit photographers, which included Archbishop Thomas Colley..

In 1922, Hope was eventually exposed as a fraud by Harry Price—a famous psychic investigator. Price marked Hope’s photographic plates, which when printed proved the spirit photographer was merely double exposing negatives to achieve his famed paranormal portraits. At the time, Price wrote in his report:

William Hope has been found guilty of deliberately substituting his own plates for those of a sitter… It implies that the medium brings to the sitting a duplicate slide and faked plates for fraudulent purposes.

In our digital world of endless streaming images, it may be difficult to imagine how these ghostly portraits were ever taken seriously. But it was the very human need to believe that was the determining factor in why William Hope succeeded in conning so many people for so long.
 

 

 

 

 
More ghostly portraits, after the jump…
 

 
Photographer Andrea Frazzetta‘s “Urban Shaman” series captures a strange array of commerce, tradition and mysticism. The faces and rituals of the curanderos are documented with an eye for intense beauty, but the photos still manage to feel educational, and not voyeuristic—the series is very intimate. Frazzetta provides a context for the shamans of Peru on his website:

”I MAKE LOVE TIES”

”I PASS THE BLACK CUY”

”REFLOWERING BATHS DONE HERE”

”ORIGINAL CURANDERA OF THE NORTH HEALS ALL ILLS”

Writings such as there are ever present, hanging on the streetlights in Lima. Peru’s capital is full of shamans and ”curanderos” who compete with doctors and psychiatrists. The Peruvian parliament even discussed a controversial law proposal that equates curanderos to doctors.

A large percentage of the Peruvian population habitually visits curanderos and shamans to solve a very wide array of issues: health, work, business, travels, etc. Curanderos, on their part, offer a lot of different healing methods.

In Lima, where more than half of the population is the result of migrations, it’s possible to find any type of curanderos. The chaotic and overpopulated capital of Peru assures shamans a very large quantity of patients.

Many, unfortunately, exploit the people’s trust and it is estimated that about three quarters of those so called ”healing masters” are fakes.

But there are others who have inherited a tradition, and a popular knowledge, passed on from father to son for decades.

It’s strange to think of shamans being divided into frauds versus bona fides, but there’s a distinct sense of training and tradition involved that at the very least suggests some kind of “pedigreed” expertise. From Frazetta’s further exposition, we learn that animals are used to absorb illness (then they are killed and their remains are “read” for health indicators), a doll is the artifact of a love ritual, and that one of the most popular curanderos in Lima has his own daily TV show.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Feature Shoot

 
During the eight years it took Jim and Karla Murray to photograph these New York storefronts, a third of them had closed down. According to the Murrays:

...the influx of big box retailers and chain stores pose a serious threat to these humble institutions, and neighborhood modernization and the anonymity it brings are replacing the unique appearance and character of what were once incredibly colourful streets.

Taken from their book The Disappearing Face of New York, these beautiful photographs of neon-lit, window-crammed, characterful storefronts document the cultural cost of the malls and online retailers that have taken business from small shopkeepers, in favor of the supposed “choice” offered by corporations. As the general Julius Agricola noted way, way back in the invasion of Britain circa 73 AD, when the invading armies brought bath houses, roads, and alike, the so-called advancement of civilisation can often disguise its inherent servitude.
 

 

 

 

 
More disappearing New York stores, after the jump…
 

 
At first, these remarkable photographs by Jonathan Keys appear to have been taken some time in the distant 1800s. But on closer inspection, the presense of cars, neon signs and spray-painted graffiti, reveal these pictures to be photos of present-day England.

To achieve this richly textured, retro aesthetic, Keys uses a 130-year-old Circa camera and a 1920’s lens, with a wet plate collodion process, a photographic technique developed by Frederick Scott Archer in the 1850s, to take the pictures. In a darkroom, Keys pours collodion onto one side of a glass plate, then dips it into silver nitrate making it sensitive to light. This is then loaded into his camera, with which he travels around Newcastle looking for suitable subjects and locations. One an image has been selected, Keys takes off the lens cap and exposes the plate, which is then developed.

As the whole process is so time-consuming, Keys only takes two-to-six photographs a day. However, he finds the whole experience far more satisfying than digital photography.

View more of Jonathan keys work here.
 

 

 

 
More images after the jump…
 

 
The pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii was born in Kirzhachsky District, Vladimir Oblast, Russia in 1863. His parents were of Russian nobility with a long military history. The family moved to St. Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorskii began his studies in chemistry. He was also interested in the arts, and enrolled for studies in painting.

Prokudin-Gorskii’s interest in chemistry and art fused with the study and practice of photography. By 1905, he had formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances in color photography to document life in Russia.  Using different techniques, including those first formulated by Scottish pioneer James Clerk Maxwell, Prokudin-Gorskii started taking color pictures of his homeland in 1909.

Tsar Nicholas II supplied Prokudin-Gorskii with a specially designed rail-road carriage which had been converted into a darkroom. Prokudin-Gorskii’s intention in documenting Russian life was to educate children about their country’s rich history and culture. In 1917, the Russian Revolution put an end to Prokudin-Gorskii’s plans, and the photographer left Russia in 1918, eventually settling in France.

These beautiful color photographs were first recorded on glass plates. In 1948 they were purchased by the Library of Congress, who have since scanned the images, through a process called digichromatography, and made them available to the public. 
 

 

 

 

 

 
More beautiful color photos of Imperial Russia, after the jump…
 

Self-portrait, 1927. Her shirt says, “I am in training, don’t kiss me.”
 
While David Bowie will always be my very first cultural touchstone of avant-garde androgyny, it’s Claude Cahun that’s my absolute favorite. And I’m sure Bowie would approve. He once said of Cahun, “You could call her transgressive or you could call her a cross dressing Man Ray with surrealist tendencies. I find this work really quite mad, in the nicest way.” You don’t really get much of a better recommendation than that, and looking as alien and draggy as anything Mr. Rebel Rebel ever dreamed of, her many photographic incarnations are just mesmerizing.

Born in 1894 as Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in Nantes, France, she was from a family of artistic Jewish intellectuals. Cahun chose her pseudonym for its unisex ambiguity—the surname was her paternal grandmother’s who raised her, as Cahun’s mother struggled with mental illness. Her life-long artistic collaborator, romantic partner, and step-sister, Suzanne Malherbe, went by Marcel Moore, and together they fostered a true avant-garde community, hosting salons in their Paris home. André Breton, author of Surrealist Manifesto, was a regular attendant. Though photography is her most famous medium, she was also a painter, collage artist, sculptor, novelist, playwright and essayist—many of her published essays pertained to the avant-garde artistic community.

Cahun and Moore eventually moved to Jersey, in the Channel Islands, which was occupied by Germany during World War Two. Cahun and Moore were active in the resistance, feverishly creating protest materials of collage and poetry fliers denouncing the Nazis. The two actually attended German military events to discreetly hide their propaganda fliers on cars, in windows, in the seats of the crowd, and even in the pockets of Nazi soldiers. They were eventually arrested and sentenced to death. They spent some time in prison before the liberation, and though their sentencing was never carried out, Cahun’s death in 1954 is largely believed to have been the premature direct result of health problems she developed in prison. She is buried next to Moore in a church in Jersey.
 

Le Mystère d’Adam (The Mystery of Adam) 1929
 

Self-portrait, 1939
 

Self-portrait, 1929
 
More after the jump…

 
As long as we’re all watching black and white videos of strangers kissing, (and now their X-rated parodies), why don’t we take a stroll down memory lane to the very first filmed kiss, shot by groundbreaking English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, sometime between 1872 and 1885. The kiss was (gasp) between two women, but lest your prurient interests get the better of you, remember that Victorian culture didn’t really “get” lesbianism, and the nudity was to aid in Muybridge’s dedicated study of motion. From the Muybridge online archives:

While the Victorians were extremely sexually prudish by modern standards and commonly considered male homosexuality a serious threat to their society they believed women had little or no sex drive. Therefore the possibility of lesbianism was commonly ignored.

Because of Victorian sexual taboos Muybridge was not able to photograph men and women naked together and was only able to publish images of naked men together engaging in sports or work. Because he was free to show women naked together he used female models when he wanted to show two people engaging in ordinary activities. In many plates he had one of the women assume a typically male role and these are the plates which today we tend to perceive as homo-erotic.

You can see photos from the series below, as well as Muybridge’s “movie,” The Kiss. Of course, this was well before the invention of the motion picture camera—he simply set up a rig of rapidly firing cameras in sequence.

Fun fact: Muybridge actually shot and killed his wife’s lover, a man called Major Harry Larkyns, upon learning that he may have fathered their seven-month-old son. Muybridge actually tracked the guy down and said,  “Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife,” right before shooting him, point blank. Larkyns died that night, and Muybridge was arrested. He pleaded insanity on account of a 12 year old head head injury. While the jury dismissed the insanity plea, they actually acquitted him for justifiable homicide. Muybridge and his wife divorced, she died, the son was sent to an orphanage, and though Muybridge paid the boy’s childhood expenses, he did not maintain contact.

So to review: Shooting people who sleep with your wife—ok. Women and men being filmed together—very not ok. That’s those wacky Victorians for you!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Photographer Alyse Emdur’s affecting book of photography, Prison Landscapes explores one of the lesser known traditions of the U.S. correctional system—the commemorative prison portrait. Whether it’s the memento of a family visit or the celebration of an achievement like acquiring a GED, Emdur’s photographs evoke a lot of emotions. On the one hand, some of the subjects look legitimately happy, and small joys are the stuff of prison survival. On the other hand, the chintzy backdrops are reminiscent of aquarium decorations, complete with fake foliage and fantasy scenes.

Of course, U.S. prisons are notorious for their lack of transparency, so Emdur compiled her material from inmates and their loved ones themselves. She spent years collecting the pictures, corresponding with contacts to, in her own words, “document a system that I did not have physical access to.” Refusing to shy away from the political implications of her work, she explicitly deconstructs the facade of the backdrops, saying:

“Prison visiting room portraits are constructed to intentionally leave out the reality of prison. The aim of my project is not to be an authority on that which is left out, but to rather make the artifice visible. Although the paintings on the backdrops represent freedom, they are vehicles to control the representation of prisons and prisoners.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Beautiful Decay

Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Murray from Where the Buffalo Roam.

Polaroid photographs are used by make-up artists, costume designers, props, and set designers to maintain visual continuity in films and television dramas. It doesn’t always work, as I recall one tale (probably apocryphal) told to me during the filming of the BBC’s drama Your Cheating Heart, which was written by artist John Byrne, and starred Tilda Swinton, John Gordon Sinclair and Ken Stott. In one scene, Byrne was allegedly unhappy that the set was not “messy” as he had described it in the script. Therefore, he supposedly moved props around the set to make it more convincing, in particular a yellow telephone. After lunch break, Byrne returned to the set and moved the props again. This (allegedly) happened throughout the day’s filming. The end result was apparent on screen, as the yellow telephone was visibly seen moving around the back shot in one key scene.

This is a selection of Polaroids taken for continuity or for fun on a variety of film sets from the 1960s to 2004.
 

Winona Ryder, Girl Interrupted.
 

Johnny Depp, Benny and Joon.
 

Kate Winslet and Jim Carey, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
 

Sean Young and Harrison Ford, Blade Runner.
 
More film set photos, after the jump…

 
There are people who love Halloween. Then there are people who LOVE Halloween. Like, really, really LOVE Halloween.

Brooklyn-based photographer Krys Fox is one of the latter. To show how much he loves the witching season, Krys has just completed the mammoth feat of of shooting 31 different photos shoots in 31 days—one for each day of October—with each shoot based around one of his favourtie horror movies. Now THAT is dedication to the Halloween spirit! I sent Krys some questions to find out what had inspired him to undertake this epic task, why invert the gender roles in these photos, and what got him in to photography in the first place…
 

 
THE NIALLIST: So, how are you handling Hurricane Sandy? That seems like a real horror movie. Has it affected your shoots?

KRYS FOX: Hurricane Sandy scared me last night. It got violent out there. Our building in Brooklyn was shaking and swaying. It sounded like a monster was out there in the wind. Very much like a scary movie. Luckily, we didn’t lose power. Just internet and cable… and I own a LOT of movies so we just had a movie marathon. Halloween, The Mist, Hide & Seek and Sleepy Hollow were our films… As far as my shoots go, I shot four on my last day, I finished the last shot for the series at 9pm on Saturday night. The subways and buses were already shut down by then (and still are) so, I walked a half an hour back home (with all my props, equipment and camera on me) while Sandy started getting windy. It was a bit freaky, but also pretty cool. It was eerie outside and fun to be in it before it got too serious. So, I lucked out. If the storm had started a day earlier, I wouldn’t have finished this epic project.
 

 
More photos, and questions with Krys, after the jump. Let’s see, can you name the horror movies referenced in his work?
 

 
After Monday’s post about Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of NYC, here are pictures that delve even further into the often under-acknowledged history of gay men within the black community. Historian Trent Kelley has been collecting these photos - which span the last 140 years and mostly (but not exclusively) feature gay men - and has put them online for people to see on his Climbing Kilimanjaro Flickr account. Via Colorlines.com, Kelley says:

Afro American gay men are ignored into nonexistence in parts of black culture and are basically second class citizens in gay culture. The black church which has historically played a fundamental role in protesting against civil injustices toward its parishioners has been want to deny its gay members their right to live a life free and open without prejudice. Despite public projections of a “rainbow” community living together in harmonious co-habitation, openly active and passive prejudices exist in the larger gay community against gay Afro Americans.

 

 

 
These make for some beautiful and touching pictures. See more here.

Thanks to Chloe Cousins.