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Las Vegas is known as the city of lights and, at one time, that light was the glow of an atomic detonation in the Nevada desert. Starting in 1951, the US Army began testing nuclear ordnances just 65 miles from Sin City. At night, the glow of the bombs lit up the sky, and mushroom […]

Pereira, Colombia-born artist Velco stipples black-and-white tattoos that are patchwork compositions of dots. A densely inked patch might form a snoozing koala’s ear or human silhouette, while a fading gradient composes the steam emanating from a moka pot. Lighthearted and often evoking the surreal, the works are derived from conversations with clients and the artist’s interactions with the world. “The window frames that I’ve been designing and tattooing have been exactly that, a portal to another reality. And it’s beautiful to know that there are now multiple portals wandering around the world providing us with glances to other universes,” he shares.

After beginning his tattoo practice by working primarily with fine lines, Velco has shifted to the dotted style that now dominates his work. “The effect gave me the feel of the beautiful vintage, grainy texture in images captured with a film camera, and since then, I’ve been working on designs where I can integrate this effect,” he shares. “To create the graininess that we see on the tattoos, I swing/whip the machine at a slightly fast pace, yet very delicately, on the skin while using a fine line needle and lowering the voltage of the machine, causing the needle to come out at a slower rate.”

Velco works out of the Velours studio space in Montréal, which also has one of his prints in stock. Follow him on Instagram for his latest works and information on available bookings.

 

A vintage-inspired design from the team at the Ukrainian company Jollylook is combining the immediate joy of instant cameras with handcrafted charm. Slightly larger than an iPhone box, the Jollylook Pinhole is a DIY model constructed with recycled and biodegradable wood. The analog design uses Fuji Instax film and is equipped with a small crank for quick development. A pinhole feature and accordion-like bellows emphasize the retro feel.

Previously based in Irpin, Ukraine, the Jollylook team relocated to Zvolen, Slovakia, during the first days of Russia’s invasion. The company is in the process of rebuilding and is crowdfunding this latest project on Kickstarter. Although it already met its goal, there’s just a week left to snag some of the rewards. Shop additional models on the company’s site.

 

An album’s artwork represents the first impression to many fans and it creates an aesthetic vibe about its music. In the days before the internet, bands would have to rely on their covers to catch the eye of any potential fans. And many people discovered their favorite bands by simply picking up an album simply […]

In the 1950s, visionary business entrepreneur Lawrence Freiman opened a new concept store that tried to reinvent the way people purchased things. “Vis-O-Matic” was the Amazon Prime of its era: a store equipped with televisions where customers sat down, ordered products off the screen, and then headed home as the company shipped the purchases directly […]

These incredible black and white photographs document everyday life in New York City in the 1940s and offer a glimpse into a long-gone era. From street peddlers selling fish or fresh ears of corn, to cars stalled under mounds of snow, scenes are both familiar and nostalgic. The New York City that emerged from World […]

One of New York City’s most discerning and essential documentarians, photographer Jamel Shabazz has built a career around capturing the unique visual lexicon of the outer boroughs. His images are deeply empathetic and resolute in the value of all life regardless of race, class, and social status. With a self-described goal of preserving “the world history and culture,” Shabazz continually finds the joy and vibrancy emanating from communities like Brownsville, Red Hook, and Harlem.

His first institutional survey, an expansive exhibition of Shabazz’s photos is on view through September 4 at The Bronx Museum. Eyes on the Streets contains more than 150 images from his extensive archive, some of which are shown for the first time. Distinctly rooted in place, the collection transcends neighborhood and time period, creating a rich, photographic mosaic of New Yorkers through the last four decades. The exhibition also speaks to current conversations around policing and alternatives by showing how tight-knit communities and street activity have long bolstered public safety.

Often recognized for capturing hip-hop culture and the fashions of the 1980s, Shabazz’s photos range from the stylishly posed to the candid and serendipitous. He frames a pitbull mid-air as it grips a strap, children flipping onto a frayed mattress, and a beaming, rush-hour crowd grinning through an open window. Having recorded poverty, the widespread effects of racism, and those housed at Rikers Island during his time working for the Department of Corrections, Shabazz continually chooses humanity and happiness. “Some of the people in the community might see themselves when they were at a really bad point in their lives,” he told The New York Times in reference to the images he chose to leave out of Eyes on the Streets. “I wanted to focus more on the joy.”

Shabazz has published multiple monographs throughout his career, and his new A Time Before Crack is available for pre-order. The forthcoming Jamel Shabazz: Albums, which won the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize, is also slated for release next fall. You can find more of his photos on his site.

 

It’s generally understood that terrestrial plant life evolved from algae, one key to its successful adaptation being roots that sprawled underground to absorb important nutrients and water. Billions of years later, the fibrous networks are essential to life across the planet as they ensure the growth and health of individual specimens, help prevent erosion, and capture carbon from the air.

A collaborative project of the late botanists Erwin Lichtenegger and Lore Kutschera celebrates the power and beauty of these otherwise hidden systems through detailed drawings of agricultural crops, shrubs, trees, and weeds. Digitized by the Wageningen University & Research, the extensive archive is the culmination of 40 years of research in Austria that involved cultivating and carefully retrieving developed plant life from the soil for study. It now boasts more than 1,000 renderings of the winding, spindly roots, some of which branch multiple feet wide.

We’ve gathered some of the biological studies here, but you can pore through the full collection on the Wageningen University site. (via MetaFilter)

 

Eero Saarinen’s outlandish air terminal for TWA at New York’s JFK International Airport was sculpted as an abstract symbol of flight. Unlike most air terminals, which seemed intent on depressing passengers, Saarinen’s not only raised the spirits but also showed that concrete structures could be truly delightful. Saarinen himself described this intriguing building as one […]

Photographer Nils Olsson Reppen was born in 1856 on the farm Reppen in Sogndal in western Norway. In 1882, he immigrated to America and worked as a photographer in Browns Valley and Morris in Minnesota. He returned to Norway in the late 1890s and continued to work as a photographer in Sogndal, the village where […]

Every decade has a reputation and leaves a legacy for future generations. The 1950s were cool because of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, classy cars, and the economic boom. The 1960s had counter-cultural stuff with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and, obviously, a lot of drugs. But the 1970s? That decade still had the music, the sex, […]

These amazing vintage photos show what it was like to go holiday shopping in New York City in the 1910s. At the turn of the century, department stores in NYC amped up window displays in an attempt to charm window shoppers into actually coming into the store. These tactics proved successful, especially during the holiday […]

These are the offices of the Central Social Institution of Prague (Czechoslovakia back then) in 1937 and it contained the largest vertical letter file cabinets in the world. The office consists of cabinets arranged from floor to ceiling tiers covering over 4,000 square feet containing over 3000 drawers 10 feet high (3 meters). The builder […]

These stunning photographs show how New York City looked like in the 1880s and 1890s. The images depict the streets of the city that never sleeps, the hustling crowds of Manhattan, swimmers at Coney Island, and people’s everyday life. The photographs, taken by Wallace G. Levison, was a chemist, inventor, and lecturer who founded the […]

In his ongoing series titled Thin Places, Portland-based photographer Brendon Burton documents battered houses that stand alone in barren fields, amidst an encroaching marsh, or at the edge of the mountain. The decrepit structures have been Burton’s preferred subject matter since 2011 when he began seeking abandoned buildings across the continent that exude a sense of impermanence and the uncanny. “This series is for the sake of satisfying my curiosity about the past and exploring isolated parts of North America. It mixes archeology with fantasy,” he says.

Derived from Celtic culture, Thin Places refers to locales “where heaven and earth grow thin,” Burton says. “Traditionally, the term was meant as a place one would feel closer to God, or something otherworldly. In a more modern sense, it’s a form of liminality, areas that feel transitory.” Each property is shot with a drone, offering a detached view of the once-occupied spaces and a brief encounter with their former use. “What makes people leave, and what keeps things standing? How much of a life gets left along with it?” he asks.

Burton plans to visit Appalachia next, and you can follow his travels on Behance and Instagram. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

 

With illuminated slivers of the moon in the distance, a photographic series juxtaposes clusters of flowers in saturated reds and pink with expanses of cloudy, blue skies. Created by Sophia Ahamed, the dreamy works center on seasonal blooms at their peak, highlighting the soft, paper-thin petals of spring and the deep oranges associated with fall.

Despite their entirely organic subject matter and focus on naturally occurring colors and textures, each work is designed to skew perceptions of fiction and reality: Ahamed shoots all of the elements separately and then layers them into new compositions, positioning genuine images into fabricated contexts. “We associate colour with how we perceive the world around us, memories, and emotion,” she says, “Often at times, these elements can act as well as a gentle escape into something more soothing.”

Ahamed, who’s also the design director at the Vancouver-based agency Monograph & Co., shares that the Dark Night series originated from grief and loss, a theme that continues to veil the works with melancholy. “Sometimes we forget that the magic we are seeking in our day-to-day lives isn’t waiting for us on a lavish trip. That magic is all around us, all the time. We just have to be willing to pause and take a look around,” she says.

Prints are available on Ahamed’s site, and you can find more from the series on Instagram. (via designboom)

 

France became dominant in the high fashion (couture or haute couture) industry by the end of the 19th century through the establishment of the great couturier houses. The technology started to redefine Western society in many ways and this continued into the next decades as well. New inventions, the car, eased the lives of people. […]

Grant Wood‘s “American Gothic” shows the images of a man and a woman standing in front of a small wooden house. She woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 20th-century rural Americana while the man is adorned in overalls covered by a suit jacket and carries a pitchfork. The plants on the porch […]

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, photographer Clifton R. Adams was commissioned by the National Geographic to document life in England. Adams’ beautiful autochromes—a process of producing color images by using potato starch—present images that capture the last of an England that was slowly heading towards modernity. Adams, who died in 1934, was instructed […]

A kitchen table, countertop, or cluttered desk are all likely spots to encounter a piece by South Korean artist Yoonmi Nam. Encompassing ceramic sculptures and sparse lithographs, Nam’s body of work evokes “an ever-present, yet always changing still life,” one that displays the ubiquitous objects of her everyday in more permanent forms. A deep well to hold a bouquet carves out a stack of porcelain take-out containers, minimal prints depict a leafy branch resting in a fast-food cup, and splayed sketchbooks are covered with graph paper-style inlays that appear punctured, leaving frayed ends and stray lines.

Nam’s subject matter, whether a disposable container or notebook with a cracked cover, always has a limited lifespan, a recurring theme that tethers each of the works to questions about ephemerality and value. The artist elaborates in a statement:

I am drawn to man-made spaces and objects that we surround ourselves with, especially when they subtly suggest a contradicting sense of time that seems both temporary and lasting. In the arranged flower imagery, the flowers, once cut from their roots, have only a short remaining time to live. They will quickly wither and die, but before they do, they are elegantly and elaborately arranged, as if time will stand still for them. The containers that hold them are disposable objects, such as a yogurt cup, a Styrofoam take-out box, and an instant noodle bowl. These throwaway objects and cut flowers engage in a dialogue that speaks about impermanence and persistence.

Nam has a few ceramic pieces and lithographs available from Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia, and some of her new delivery box-inspired sculptures are on view as part of 2021 Kansas City Flatfile + Digitalfile, which runs through October 14 at the Kansas City Art Institute. You also can explore a larger selection of her works on Instagram.

 

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On a 34-day expedition around the Phoenix Islands Archipelago, marine scientists from the Schmidt Ocean Institute captured exceptionally rare footage of the elusive glass octopus. With a speckled, iridescent membrane, the aquatic animal is almost entirely transparent—only its optic nerve, eyes, and digestive tract are visible to humans—and sightings like these are so infrequent that scientists previously resorted to studying the species only after pulling it from the stomachs of its predators.

Along with successfully capturing this footage, the research team also identified new marine organisms and recorded the sought-after whale shark swimming through the Pacific Ocean during the expedition. For similar underwater reveals, check out a blanket octopus unveiling her membrane.

 

Formally trained in glassblowing, Stockholm-based artist Caroline Södergren transfers her experience working with a delicate, fragile material to an ornately illustrated collection of eggshells. She adapts the traditional Ukrainian craft called pysanky, a wax-resist method that involves drawing a design on a clean, empty chicken, turkey, goose, or ostrich egg with hot beeswax. The shell is then dipped in multiple baths of dye and the seal washed away with oil to reveal the colorful, layered design—you can watch the entire process in the video below.

The technique often is combined with folk art, although Södergren illustrates her own botanical motifs, beetles, and mythical creatures that stray from traditional designs. “You have to think before you start a pattern as the different color layers must come in the right order,” she says. “If you make a mistake with the wax, it is not possible to change, and a written line is where it is. A constant challenge that makes it so fun to work with!”

Konsthantverkets Vänner, an organization dedicated to supporting Swedish arts and crafts, just awarded Södergren a scholarship for her batik designs. Browse available eggs in her shop, and find a larger collection on Instagram. (via Lustik)

 

From dilapidated power plants, abandoned medical facilities, and amusement parks left in rusted ruin, the compelling scenes that French photographer Jonathan Jimenez, aka Jonk (previously), captures are evidence of nature’s endurance and power to reclaim spaces transformed by people. Now compiled in a new book titled Naturalia II, 221 images shot across 17 countries frame the thriving vegetation that crawls across chipped concrete and architecture in unruly masses.

This succeeding volume is a follow-up to Jonk’s first book by the same name and focuses on the ways the ecological crisis has evolved during the last three years. He explains the impetus for the book in a statement:

On the one hand, the situation has deteriorated even further with yet another species becoming extinct every single day. Global warming continues and has caused repeated natural catastrophes: floods, fires, droughts, etc. On the other hand, our collective awareness has widely increased. We are still a long way from the commitment needed to really change things, but we are heading in the right direction. Millions of initiatives have already emerged, and I hope that my photos and the message contained within them can play a small part in the collective challenge facing us all.

Pick up a copy of Naturalia II, which has text in both French and English, from Jonk’s site, and follow him on Instagram to keep up with his travels and reclaimed findings.

 

Havva Karabudak, who works as Eva Krbdk, thrives on inking minuscule details. Focusing on innumerable lines and dot work, the Turkish tattoo artist (previously) illustrates textured florals in cross-stitch, realistic portraits of animals, and micro-paintings in the likes of van Gogh, Magritte, and Fornasetti. Many of the vivid renderings are small enough to fit into a perfectly round circle or a skinny stretch of a client’s upper arm.

Karabudak’s background coalesces in her tattoos, including her formal education at the Fine Arts Academy of Ankara in Turkey and her love of textiles. “It’s pretty customary for young women to learn (embroidery) from their grandmothers in Turkey,” a statement about her work says. “As a result, tiny cross-stitch patterns were among the first tattooing styles that Eva embraced.”

Karabudak just opened her studio Atelier Eva in Brooklyn, and although she’s currently booked, you can watch for openings on Instagram.

 

 

After sunset, self-taught photographer Steven Kovacs plunges into the open ocean around Palm Beach to shoot the minuscule, unassuming creatures floating in the depths. He’s spent the last eight years on blackwater dives about 730 feet off the eastern coast of Florida in a process that “entails drifting near the surface at night from 0 to 100 feet over very deep water.” Often framing species rarely seen by humans, Kovac shoots the larval fish against the dark backdrop in a way that highlights the most striking aspects of their bodies, including wispy, translucent fins, iridescent features, and bulbous eyes.

Because Kovacs doesn’t have formal training in marine biology, he often enlists the help of scientists around the world to identify many of the rare fish he photographs. At the top of his list for future encounters are three cusk eel species and the female blanket octopus, a creature known for unveiling a billowing membrane that’s shown above.

Prints of Kovacs’s images are available from Blue Planet, and you can keep up with his underwater excursions on Instagram.

 

The use of mechanical means for the application of exercise in therapeutics was first systematized and employed in a complete way by Dr, Gustav Zander, of Stockholm, about 1857. Zander’s vision of regular exertion using machines to honor health and well-being was certainly a novel idea in an age when the rising industrialization and mechanization […]

The racetrack on top of a factory is actually a very famous now-defunct Fiat factory located in the city Turin in North Italy. When Giovanni Agnelli, the CEO of Fiat, had visited the Ford factory in Detroit, he then decided to expand production by adopting new and evolutionary production technologies in a state-of-the-art building that […]