A Different Kind Of Fashion

Fashion photography has grown in leaps and bounds ever since photography itself was invented. The field really took off when the likes of Edward Steichen added more flavor in 1930s, and then later on with the creativity of Richard Avedon in the 1970s. Today's images would look more or less the same if it weren't for the different kind of fashion photography created by Nick Knight.

A Different Kind Of Landscape

Landscape photography hasn't been as prominent on this blog as portraiture or photojournalism, so it's time to remedy that with a post that's worth a dozen other posts on the subject. With a requirement like that, it should be fitting to feature someone who has made the landscape photography field what it is today. The only way then would be to present the man who made mountains and valleys look like an altogether different kind of landscape with his black-and-white images, photographer Ansel Adams.

Equus or the Beauty of the Horse

The last two posts have been focused on the horsemen of the Americas, but not enough has been said about the horses themselves. Portrait photographer Tim Flach is no stranger to photographing pets and animals, but in his series Equus, he not only captures images of different breed and colors of these domesticated mounts, he shows the beauty of the horse in all its wild and noble ways.

The Middle Kingdom: Photographs of Old China

From the glorious cities and fields of the USA, it's time now to travel to the other side of the globe, to a place and time when the present world power that is the People's Republic of China was just breaking out of its centuries old dynastic monarchy and laying the foundations of its present day republic. These old photographs of China are now testament to what once was the Middle Kingdom.

Painting Chinese Photographs

The boundaries between photography and art have oftentimes blurred to produce a sum greater than its parts, and this blog has featured many such intersections, from Karl Blossfeldt's plant portraits that come to life, to Liu Bolin's self-portraits in cityscapes, to Pablo Picasso's paintings of light. In keeping with the eastern theme of this week, today's post features an intersection that's even blurrier than before; some say these are paintings, others photographs, and some say that Don Hong-Oai has done the impossible by painting Chinese photographs and producing a true marriage between the two mediums.

The Art of Jazz

A whiff of cigarette smoke, a touch of spotlight, a tenor saxophone taking the lead, it's as if you're in the very presence of the late great Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis or Ella Fitzgerald or Duke Ellington. It's an unlikely scenario now, but for Herman Leonard, photographing the art of Jazz was an everyday song.

The Glory that was the Russian Empire

In the United States, some of the earliest color photographs were made by the FSA-OWI and showed the country in the depression era and pre-war years. It's easy to think that these might be the earliest color images in photographic history, but some 20 years before the likes of Dorethea Lange and Walker Evans began taking color images on the more accessible Kodachrome film, chemist cum photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was taking color photographs of his native Russia through his own innovative technique. The following images are just a fraction of the color pictures made by the photographer depicting the glory that was the Russian Empire.