It seems to be a bright and colorful solo travel; the disguise hides the traveler’s loneliness. The same red dress re-appears in the vivid scenery, but the trip seems to be a series of surreal scenes. It may be just a dream or just a sense of relief and escape.
Instead of staging the scenes and stories, this time I place myself, the traveler, in real landscapes, in real deserts, and on real highways. It was a real trip, but I intentionally made the scenes look surreal and staged.
Overall, this series starts inside of a very realistic scene. Then, surreal imagery is overlaid within the works, creating a temporary escape from the reality of the everyday. Most people have flashes from the subconscious where they want to escape from their daily bonds and cares, not to run away, but to break free. We can call it dissociating by drifting away, creating an instantaneous sense of freedom, but then returning to realism with a better sense of harmony.
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You can find Fang Tong on the Web:
Copyrights: All the pictures in this post are copyrighted to Fang Tong. Their reproduction, even in part, is forbidden without the explicit approval of the rightful owners
Jeff Parshley and his partner, photographer Adam Bouska, were not activists until 2008. What got them started that year was the passage of Proposition 8, which prohibited same-sex marriage in California.
“Adam and myself were among the people who were always saying Prop 8 will never pass in California. We are a liberal state. Marriage equality was legal already. They wanted to make it illegal, to take it back away?” said Parshley, who lives in Los Angeles.
When it passed, the men were in shock. In reaction, Bouska took a picture of Parshley with masking tape over his mouth and “NOH8″ painted on his cheek.
He posted the photo online. It went viral. Parshley and Bouska were approached by countless people who wanted to be photographed, too. Many of them were celebrities. The project grew and grew. More than 14 years and 65,000 photo shoots later, the couple is established as LGBTQ rights standard bearers.
The NOH8 campaign is returning to Hartford and West Hartford this month. On Jan. 29 from 2 to 4 p.m., Bouska will be shooting photos at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St. in Hartford. On Jan. 30 from 6 to 8 p.m., he will be shooting at Playhouse on Park, 244 Park Road in West Hartford.
“I am so happy we are doing it in both locations. It sends a stronger unified message if both of our theaters do this hand in hand,” said Tracy Flater, executive director of Playhouse on Park.
In West Hartford, the event is presented by West Hartford Pride and scheduled to coincide with the run of “Indecent,” Paula Vogel’s drama about a groundbreaking LGBTQ play.
“It’s a good fit with the play, which is filled with antisemitism, censorship, violence against women and prejudice about the LGBTQ community,” Flater said.
Any single person or group of people can show up to have their pictures taken. The cost is $40 for one person and $25 per person for a group. Reservations are not necessary. The photography sessions will be first-come, first-served.
Proposition 8 is no longer a factor in the battle for LGBTQ rights. It was later ruled unconstitutional and today, same-sex marriage is legal nationwide. But Parshley said his travels around the country have taught him that the fight against hate always will be timely.
“Sadly, hate is prevalent today. You don’t need to be in the LGBT community to relate to hate,” he said. “Everyone has their own reason for coming to pose. People come out saying I believe in this, I am hated on account of my size, my religion, my gender, what I wear, where I live. This campaign is an outlet for that.”
Joanna Schubert, co-chair of West Hartford Pride, agrees.
“In this atmosphere of growing partisan tensions, certainly there is a lot of hate. You see it in the rise of antisemitism, anti-Asian hate, the rise of violent incidents with firearms like Pulse and Club Q,” Schubert said, referring to two mass shootings at LGBTQ social hubs.
Rob Ruggiero, producing artistic director of TheaterWorks, invoked last year’s overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court to emphasize that even in a relatively embracing state like Connecticut, the LGBTQ community can’t become complacent.
“That made the LGBTQ community sit forward. You start to worry, are our rights next? Our marriage rights? Any other really important rights we’ve got?,” Ruggiero said. “In the political arena, it seems like an uncertain time. You want to make sure you stay on top of it.”
Those who want to participate must wear a plain white shirt in the style of the photo project. (Examples: noh8campaign.com/photo-galleries). Each subject must sign a release. Subjects will have a “NOH8″ temporary tattoo put on their face and their mouths will be covered with electrical tape. Cash and credit cards only. Fees cover services and costs for one edited digital print and do not include physical prints. noh8campaign.com/events.
The genre of portraiture in photography has always been personal and intriguing. Early photographers were drawn to capturing the likenesses and expressions of others through the lens, preserving a moment in time. Today, the interest in using people as subjects in photography remains strong, as their appearance, gestures, and emotions hint at deeper stories that remain just out of reach.
For Richard Renaldi, portraiture is definitely his passion, as his career is grounded in the exploration of this genre. The artist has released numerous portrait series. We’ve already showcased Richard’s captivating project, titled “Touching Strangers”, which got a lot of positive reactions. So, in today’s article, we want to share one of his other photo series, “Typology of the American Teenager”, containing pictures of teenagers from across the United States. The series depicts the diversity and individuality of American teenagers, highlighting their unique personalities and characteristics through the lens of Renaldi’s camera.
More info: Instagram | renaldi.com | twitter.com | flickr.com
My name is Anita. I’m from Poland. My adventure with photography started 8 years ago. I was photographing everything during my travels: a bit of city architecture, people, and landscapes. It soon turned out that landscape is something I love to photograph most because my favorite thing in the world is nature.
During the trips, I spent hours looking for beautiful places to take pictures of. With time, I started to miss something in landscape photography. I came to the conclusion that I need a human being in my photos, but only as an addition that would reflect the scale of the majestic places that I photograph.
With time, I felt unsatisfied again. Then the idea came to my mind that in every country I visit, I should photograph a person wearing a costume typical to the region. Because I usually travel alone, I decided to photograph myself in the costumes. And so the project “Traditional world costumes” came to life.
I started to realize it in 2016 and the first country was the Czech Republic. It was not easy. In general, renting or finding costumes in many countries turned out to be impossible (Scotland), practically impossible (e.g. Norway) or very expensive (e.g. the Czech Republic or Panama, where I didn’t manage to take a picture.)
However, I knew that this project will last a very long time and even though I publish these dozens of photos from 12 different countries, it does not mean that I finished the project. It’s still ongoing.
Nicaragua, Leon
Italia, Dolomites
Guatemala, Volcan Acatenango
El Salvador, Puerta del Diablo
Costa Rica, Rincon de Vieja
France, Provance
Norway, Lofoten
Scotland, Isle of Skye
Germany, Saxony
Czech Republic, Moravia
Spain, Tenerife
Mexico, Yukatan
You can find Anita Demianowicz on the Web:
Copyrights: All the pictures in this post are copyrighted to Anita Demianowicz. Their reproduction, even in part, is forbidden without the explicit approval of the rightful owners.
Watch video: Use digital backdrops for baby photography
Although sleep-deprived new parents might not agree at the time, babies grow and change incredibly fast. Before you know it, a newborn is a rampaging toddler. So, if you’re planning on arranging a baby photo shoot for friends or family, or for your own little bundle, now is the time to do it. But how do you approach a shoot like this?
One technique is the baby composite. For this, we take a photo of the baby and then combine it with an eye-catching backdrop. You can find lots of stunning backdrops online, such as the autumnal setup we downloaded from Adobe Stock (free with an Adobe CC subscription).
• Prefer using a physical background? Check out the best backdrops for photography
Of course, if you prefer, you could always take the Anne Geddes approach and create your own intricate baby backdrops and costumes. But depending on the props needed, this could prove expensive. With a few simple camera and Photoshop skills, you can combine your subject with all kinds of ready made digital backdrops.
You don’t need loads of studio lighting kit, either; window light is perfect for baby portraits at home. A window with non-direct sunlight offers a bank of lovely soft illumination, and it costs nothing.
We’ll also show you how to get your camera set up for window-light portraits, which is invaluable whether you’re planning on shooting for a composite like this or for any kind of portrait.
Once done, we’ll take you step-by-step through the technique for combining your portraits with the stock backdrop. (You’ll find a full walkthrough of the Photoshop technique in the above video.)
1. Match the lighting
The key to composites is in matching the lighting. Our background image (a free Adobe Stock image – search for “Newborn Digital Background Autumn Pumpkin”) is lit with soft frontal light, so we lit our baby in a similar way, with a large bay window behind the camera.
2. Select the foreground
In the Photoshop Libraries panel (Window > Libraries), double-click to open your stock image. Select a part of the fluff to go in front of the baby. Hit Q, grab the brush and paint black to select. Hit Q again, go to Select > Inverse and press Cmd/Ctrl + J to copy to a new layer.
3. Cut out the baby
In the baby image, go to Select > Subject. Then Select > Select And Mask. Paint with the Refine Edge brush along the hair to improve the selection edge. Go to Output > Layer Mask and hit OK. Grab the Brush tool and perfect the mask by painting with black to hide or white to reveal.
4. Paste and position
Grab the Move tool and drag the cut-out baby into the background image. Hit Cmd/Ctrl + T to transform, then resize and position the baby. Drag the layer below the selection we made earlier of the front of the bucket so the baby looks like he’s behind the fluff.
5. Paint shadows
Make a new layer above the baby layer. Right-click and Create Clipping Mask. Grab the Brush tool, hit D for black and 2 for 20% opacity; now paint to add a shadow where the baby meets the bucket. Make another layer below the baby layer, and paint black to add shadow behind the baby.
6. Add a vignette
Press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E to merge all the layers, then go to Filter > Camera Raw Filter. Hit J for Radial filter and drag a circle, then hit X to invert and drag down on Exposure to add a vignette. Add grain in the Effects panel and choose a Profile to skew the colors.
7 Angle from above
Window light works best over faces when it comes from slightly above, which is why a high window or skylight works well. With babies, keep in mind that if they’re on their back, ‘above’ to them might be different from the camera position, so angle them so the window is above the face.
8. Try backlighting
As well as straight-on or side-on, you can get great light over a face by positioning the subject so that the window is behind and to one side. This way, the window backlights the subject. It’s usually best to have the face side-on in profile for this kind of portrait shot.
9. Check for catchlights
One of the great things about shooting with window light is the lovely catchlights that it usually creates in your subject’s eyes. If you’re not seeing catchlights, it might be because the subject is at the wrong angle to the window, so adjust the position until you see the eyes light up.
10 Create a Compilation of baby portraits
Once you get started taking window-lit baby photos, it’s difficult to stop, and you might find you end up with a whole memory card full of great portraits.
A wonderful way to display these is as a collection of nine images arranged in a square. This could then be printed on a canvas or put together using a large frame and a custom-made mount. You can combine the set of images with ease in Photoshop.
Begin by making a square document, then turn on the grid (View > Grid). Grab the Rectangle Shape tool and drag boxes for each image window. Once done, drag in your photos, position on layers above each shape and right-click to Create Clipping Mask. Clip each image to a shape, then fine-tune the positioning.
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You might like the best photo editing software and the best photo-editing laptops. Check out these 10 landscape photography pro tips.
Sharjah: Xposure International Photography Festival this year will feature 74 photographers specialising in a range of genres and categories. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from 14 of the world’s best photojournalists, environmentalists and experts in portraiture, to explore the many cultures of different nations around the world, experiencing the stories of their people, captured through the lens of photographers and filmmakers. Visitors will also get a chance to hear directly from these world-renowned visual storytellers about their journeys and how they managed to encapsulate the world through their art.
The festival is a major highlight for the public and with the featured photographers and filmmakers listed below it will be a must-attend event for photojournalists, travel bloggers, creative professionals, media specialists and art collectors, to name a few. Xposure is celebrating its seventh edition this year and will be held between February 9 and 15 at Expo Centre Sharjah.
This year at the Xposure International Photography Festival, visitors can expect the world’s best photographers and visual artists.
Photojournalists: Using the lens to give coverage to those who need it the most
Elisa Iannacone, Giles Clarke, Philip Lee Harvey, Abir Abdullah, and Tommy Trenchard are all photographers or cinematographers who have dedicated their careers to covering important societal issues. Through their work, they have shed light on important social, political, and environmental issues happening around the globe. Each of these photographers has a unique style and approach to their work, but they all share a common goal of using their camera to tell important stories and bring attention to important issues.
In addition to their individual careers, these photographers have also contributed to the larger photojournalism community through their participation in exhibitions and organisations dedicated to this type of storytelling. Whether they are documenting conflict and humanitarian crises, or shining a light on social and environmental issues, the visual storytellers are using their craft to make a difference in the world.
Travel photographers: Documenting the world around us
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Randy Olson, David Learman, Tim Smith and Ahmad Alsaif are all photographers who have dedicated a significant portion of their careers to documenting their environments and the world around them. Through their work, they aim to bring attention to the importance of preserving and protecting our planet. Sutton-Hibbert, in particular, has focused on social and environmental issues in his documentary photography, using his camera to shed light on concerns such as climate change and conservation.
David Learman is a visual storyteller born in Yorkshire, known for his striking and artistic images of people and their surrounding landscapes. David is passionate about telling visual stories and capturing scenes in nature and life that invite the viewer to explore and discover subtle nuances and hidden secrets.
Randy, on the other hand, has travelled to numerous countries around the world as a documentary photographer, capturing the beauty and diversity of our planet. Similarly, Tim Smith is a landscape and travel photographer who has documented stunning natural landscapes and the cultures of various destinations around the world. Ahmad Alsaif is a Saudi Arabian photographer who specialises in capturing the beauty and culture of his home country, with a focus on landscape and traditional architecture. All of them use their talents to raise awareness about the importance of preserving and protecting the environment, and the unique and diverse places that make up our world.
Portraiture: Capturing the human experience
Greg Gorman, Brian Hodges, César Balcázar and Karen Zusman are all photographers who have built their careers around the art of portraiture or capturing the human spirit in their environments, whether in the streets, their homes or in nature. Although they bring their own flare when capturing the human essence in their images, they all share a common goal of using their camera to create striking and memorable portraits.
Gorman is a well-known celebrity photographer who has shot portraits of numerous iconic figures. Hodges, an internationally recognised photographer specialising in portraits and documentary photojournalism who captures personal stories through his striking shots and highlights socio-economic issues in the process.
César’s photography focuses on creating iconic images that convey the movement, emotions and turmoil of a social setting and its connection to his subjects. He incorporates techniques from theatre and talent direction to create a personal atmosphere of exploration with the person being photographed, resulting in co-created stories that often reflect his own emotions.
Zusman is a portrait photographer, known for her ability to capture the personality and emotion of her subjects. Whether they are shooting celebrities or everyday people, these photographers are skilled at using their craft to create powerful and enduring images of the human experience.
Engaging Talks and Seminars: An exchange of stories and journey of discovery
Xposure festival will be hosting seminars and panel discussions featuring renowned photojournalists, who will discuss their experiences covering significant and dangerous stories and shedding light on important issues. These professionals often risk their lives to document important stories, but do not always receive the recognition they deserve. Xposure provides a platform for photojournalists to share their work and receive recognition in a safe, non-partisan environment. One of the highlights of the festival is the “Credible Witness” panel featuring Muhammed Muheisen, Giles Clarke, Jodi Cobb, Tommy Trenchard, and former Sunday Times picture editor Ray Wells.
Additionally, Karen Zusman will be discussing how her unique experiences and activism have influenced her career, including her Leica Award-winning project at “From Poetry To Protests To Super Powered Youth: An Unconventional Journey”.
Tim Smith will be talking about his personal photography focused on capturing the prairies of Manitoba, Canada and the Hutterite culture through long-term projects at “The Gift Of Time In Long Term Documentary Photography”, and Elisa Iannacone will be discussing her evolution from conflict reporting to finding new ways to tell meaningful stories, focusing on the intimacy and connection that drive her process at “Conflict Reporting To Magical Realism”. Engaging talks
Xposure will also be hosting eight seminars that will explore the art of capturing the essence of a person or a place and delivering a moment in time that encapsulates the subject. Greg Gorman, a portrait photographer, will share an inside look at his 50-year long career in Hollywood, including stories and anecdotes about his famous subjects.
Philip Lee Harvey will share his perspective on the craft, including how his approach has evolved, his influences, and how he maintains creativity. Souhayl.A will reveal how street photography serves as a foundation for his long-term, post-documentary projects. Michael Aboya, a Ghana-based fine art and fashion photographer will be discussing how he uses photography to explore and discover deeper, more beautiful and untold stories within people’s roots. Incredibly enlightening, the seminars are sure to provide insights and inspiration to all levels of photographers.
Exhibitions: Be transported through the lens and learn about places and people
The Xposure exhibitions this year will connect the visitors with distant lands and their people, and provide insight into many ways of life, as well as shining light on critical social and political issues facing the world. These displays of work from the world’s best photographers will be an incredible source of inspiration for creatives, journalists and the general public and demonstrate the hard work and vision that goes into bringing images to life.
With portraiture from Greg Gorman, César Balcázar, Brian Hodges and Karen Zusman to eye-opening photojournalism from the likes of Elisa Iannacone, Giles Clarke, Philip Lee Harvey, Abir Abdullah and Tommy Trenchard, and environmental and travel photography from Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Randy Olson, Tim Smith and David Learman Xposure is guaranteed to give visitors a unique perspective on the world and the pieces of the puzzle that constitute it.
As a global attraction for the public and creative professionals, Xposure boasts 74 of the world’s best photographers and filmmakers, displaying their works through 68 solo and group exhibitions, it is so much more than an expansive gallery, it’s a festival of inspiration, education and a gathering of cultural exchange. Through talks, workshops, a book fair and trade show, conservation summit, portfolio reviews, and an extensive awards programme, it’s easy to see why the festival takes place over 7 days and why people return day after day to experience Xposure. Find more details about photographers, talks and exhibitions at www.xposure.ae.
Artist and graphic designer Swaroop Guhathakurta creates stunning AI-generated portraits of people ornated with lush jewelry. Swaroop masters human & artificial intelligence creating digital art in the realm of reallusion. In this gallery, you can find his skills with the power of artificial intelligence to create lush portraits of people ornated with bright jewelry.
Scroll down and inspire yourself. Check Swaroop’s Instagram and Website for more information.
You can find more info about Swaroop Guhathakurta:
My mother had four different first names, depending on which language she was speaking at the time. She was Anka in German, Hanka in Polish, Chanka in Yiddish, and after arriving in Australia on a refugee passport in 1949, she adopted the anglicised version of herself, Hannah. Her surname was Altman, although after she married my father, that vestige of her former life disappeared too. The only remnants of her years in Europe were captured in a few black-and-white photographs kept in an old shoebox, hidden away in the hallway cupboard, together with a leather suitcase and tailored winter coat she never wore. As a young girl, I would secretly rummage through these photos, searching for my mother’s story in the anonymous faces I knew no longer walked this earth.
When the ghosts of her past became too much for her to bear, my mother took her own life. I was 21 years old at the time, left to deal with my own ghosts. More than 30 years later, on one otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon, I tried to resurrect my mother’s past.
I wanted to explain the burnt branches of our family tree to my children, the eldest of whom was turning 21. I had spent my youth running away from my mother’s story. Now, as a mother of the grandchildren she would never know, I felt an urgency to piece together her life. Typing one of the versions of her name into Google – Hanka Altman – up came a link to a photo of her seated in the middle of a group of young men in uniform. She was the secretary for the Jewish Civil Police at Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons camp in 1946. At 21, she was alone in the world, a survivor of the horrors of the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen in turn. She was smiling.
There was the reason why. Nandi. Top row, fourth from the left. Handsome and tall, I recognised him immediately from the only black-and-white photo my mother would show me from that hidden shoebox.
“He was the love of my life,” she used to tell me.
Hanka Altman (second row, third from left), secretary of the Jewish Civil Police at Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons camp, and Ned ‘Nandi’ Aron (back row, fourth from left)
And as a young girl, hearing stories of how Nandi made her feel alive again after she had lost her entire world, I kind of fell for him too. She reminisced about how they would go for drives into the countryside on weekends, hiking in the forest, picnicking beside lakes. Licking the wounds of their recent traumas, they spoke headily of a future together, once they could find a country that agreed to take them in as refugees.
The youngest of six siblings, and the sole survivor of her entire family who had all been murdered during the war, my mother had nowhere to go. Nandi had an uncle in America and promised her they would travel there together one day to start a new life. But she told me the love of her life ended up breaking her heart and left Europe without her.
In the photo, she sat looking forward, not knowing how the rest of her life might unfold. She had met Nandi and fallen in love. Although she told me a little about her time in Germany after the war with Nandi, that hopeful moment captured by the camera can never be retrieved. Which leads me back to why I googled her name almost 70 years after the photo was taken. I ached to find out more about their relationship. Who was this man to whom I felt so strangely drawn to?
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I decided to stalk him online. The same photo that was in my mother’s shoebox appeared on the screen. Five people’s names were identified in the caption underneath, one of whom was Ned, an abbreviation for Ferdinand, Nandi’s real name. He had donated his own copy of the photo to the Holocaust museum in Washington. My heart raced as I ran to tell my children that I had found my mother’s old boyfriend. They had grown up with my curious fascination around Nandi. We quickly looked him up in the phone book and found a number in the US.
“Call him!” my son urged.
We rehearsed how I might introduce myself and explain that I am trying to find out more information about my mother. I would tell Nandi she had spoken so warmly of him. With trepidation, I finally dialled the number. A woman with a heavy eastern European accent answered.
“Hullo?”
“Oh, hello,” I said, my voice shaky. “May I please speak to Ned.”
There was a short pause before she sobbed into the receiver, her anguish reaching right across the Pacific Ocean: “He’s dead.”
I had missed Nandi by two years.
When she calmed down a little, I told her who my mother was and why I was calling.
Herszek Altman, Hanka Altman’s brother, who was murdered at Dachau in 1944. These are his work papers from the Łódź ghetto, where he, along with Hanka and their family, were interned from 1941-42
“I remember Hanka Altman,” she said. I thought I heard a tinge of jealousy rising in her voice, even though decades had passed since they would have met. The two of them used to go away together for weekends, she said.
As we kept talking, I learned the reason Nandi and my mother never ended up together. Something she had never told me. He had left her for Anna, who he ended up marrying in Belsen in late 1946. The same woman I was speaking to on the phone.
There was a pause, before Nandi’s widow added: “He was the love of my life.”
****
In her seminal work On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself – a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.” My children’s formative years are heavily documented – each birthday, vacation, trip to the beach. Recording these ordinary events, I have labelled them all, carefully placing them in albums which we hardly ever look at nowadays. It seems that in taking so many photos I was somehow trying to compensate for my mother’s undocumented life.
In my mother’s old shoebox, among the pile of photos, are snaps taken on her voyage aboard the SS Sagittaire from Marseilles, via New Caledonia, arriving in Sydney on 27 July 1949. In one of the black-and-white photographs my mother is wearing a swimsuit as she paddles in the shallows on a tropical beach with four other women. She is holding a half-eaten banana in her left hand. Another snap captures her at the wheel of a convertible, dressed in elegant European style as she stares at the camera. In yet another she is standing on a bridge in some European city I feel I should recognise, wearing a tailored frock and clutching a chic handbag. There are no photos of her family in the shoebox. I don’t know which is worse – to have old photos with images of nameless people you knew were once dear to those you loved, or to have no photos at all. Throughout my life I have tried to imagine what my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins might have looked like.
Hanka Altman (standing, right) in New Caledonia in 1949, en route to Australia
Recently, my husband surprised me with a gift. As I unwrapped it, a photo of a man who looked very familiar stared out at me from the past. I couldn’t place him, but he bore a strange resemblance to my son.
“Who is this?” I asked.
My husband smiled. He had also been stalking the dead. He passed me an official document only recently released from a Polish archive. It was an inmate’s ID card from the Łódź ghetto, dated 11 May 1941. Printed at the top was the name Herszek Altman, born 1911, 43 years of age. My mother’s older brother.
I held the photo of my uncle and gasped for air, feeling like I was drowning in a sea of whispering voices calling out to me from the past. I wondered if it might have saved my mother’s life to have such a tangible link to a loved one.
The people in these photos are now long gone. Yet finally being able to match their names to their faces, I feel like they get to live on just a little longer. “The shortest prayer is a name,” writes Canadian poet Anne Michaels. My mother gazes out from that photo from the displaced persons camp and I wonder what she might ask of me. The faultline between the living and the dead means I can never really know. Perhaps it is simply to ensure that her name, her four names, will not to be lost to history. I do not believe in God, but I am drawn once a year to attend a part of the Yom Kippur service, called Yizkor. Remembrance. The names of those who have died are called out loud by congregants, their presence recreated among the living, if only for a moment. I speak my mother’s name quietly, offering her memory up to strangers. The echoes haunt the synagogue like an incantation, returning her to me in some small way. I could not bear to lose her twice.
Here are the 30 adorable photos of fruits and vegetables that seem to have come alive. Unusually shaped fruits and vegetables have a shape, not in line with their normal body plan. While some examples are just oddly shaped, others are heralded for their amusing appearance, often because they resemble body parts. Pareidolia can be common in vegetables, with some people reporting the appearance of religious imagery.
Here in this gallery, you can find the 30 best photos of fruits and vegetables in different shapes. Scroll below and enjoy yourself. All photos are linked and lead to the sources from which they were taken. Please feel free to explore further works of these photographers on their collections or their personal sites.
#1. The tomato we grew looks like Sauron’s eye
Source: coffeeandpuppers
#2. My cactus looks like a long-necked dinosaur trying to escape its cup
Source: bldega
#3. This cactus looks like it’s giving the middle finger
Source: MBisme
#4. My sweet potato looks like a sea lion
Source: cheese–girl
#5. This tomato looks like a rubber duckie
Source: SpuddyMcSpud
#6. This orchid really looks like an eagle
Source: kYlejAEnz
#7. My friend’s strawberry looks like a baby elephant
Source: casos92
#8. So aparrotly this is milkweed
Source: thingamajiggy
#9. This pumpkin stem looks like a dragon!
Source: uglypatty
#10. She thought he did not carrot at all, but he bought her a 21-carrot ring!
Source: imgur.com
#11. That owl is just like “mmhhmmm, yes, this is very good”
Source: reddit.com
#12. My bonsai looks like it has legs
Source: dioshin
#13. Just a little make-out session
Source: imgur.com
#14. This pumpkin that looks like a swan
Source: Chibi_Kitchen
#15. Here is a strawberry shaped like a butterfly
Source: imgur.com
#16. An exceptionally suave and sophisticated daikon radish
Source: the2belo
#17. A carrot busting a move
Source: Tatsputin
#18. That’s a sweet potato
Source: TheHighFlyer
#19. F**k you too, broccoli…
Source: imgur.com
#20. This carrot really wants to be an astronaut
Source: atillathehunniee
#21. This bitter gourd seems to be happy about something
Source: tumblr
#22. I present to you a Buddha’s Hand fruit!
Source: BILLYMAYSHEREFOROXYCONTIN
#23. This tomato looks like a duck
Source: 266785
#24. The veggie wars have begun
Source: stan0
#25. This peanut looks like a duck
Source: kidamy
#26. A cherry tomato that looks like it has horns like Satan
Source: quartamilk
#27. My potato looks like it’s trying to escape itself
“A path along the floor, of proportions 1×21 units, photographed. Photographs printed to actual size of objects and prints attached to floor so that images are perfectly congruent with their objects.”
So read a set of simple, if ambiguous, instructions that Victor Burgin wrote on a single index card in 1967. When followed, the prompt yields a line of photographs that are exactingly printed to mimic the floor on which they’re installed—so much so, in fact, that it’s easy to miss them altogether.
This was Photopath (1967-69), an era-defining work of mid-century photo-conceptualism that still mystifies today, even if—or, indeed, because—it leaves its viewers with more questions than answers. Photopath is the subject of both a new book and a show. The latter, a dedicated exhibition at Cristin Tierney Gallery that opens today, marks the first time in more than 50 years that the influential artwork will be installed in New York.
Victor Burgin, typed instruction for Photopath, 1967. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Burgin, now 81, wasn’t a photographer when he created Photopath 51 years ago. He didn’t own, or even really know how to use, a camera. What the technology represented to him was a means to an end—or, more accurately, the “solution to a problem,” he said in a recent interview.
The British-born artist was getting his graduate degree at Yale in the late ‘60s and was hyper-conscious, as many young artists are, of his place in the iterative evolution of artistic ideas and movements—that process where a generation of makers responds to the one that preceded it, and in doing so, establishes a new set of issues for the successive generation to take up.
“We felt, back then, that our generation had to find the problem. Once you found the problem, then you knew what your artistic problem was; it was solving that,” Burgin said.
On the artist’s mind were the slightly older mid-century minimalists—Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and his then-teacher at Yale, Robert Morris—whose formally rigorous work often resisted close examination and instead gestured outward, to the spaces in which it was installed. But Burgin was after something more elusive, something even non-material.
“It struck me then that maybe I found the problem,” he said, recalling it in the form of a question: “What could I do in a gallery that would not add anything significant to the space yet would direct the viewer’s attention to [their] being there?” It was into this context that Photopath was born.
Victor Burgin, Photopath (1967-69), installation view, Nottingham, 1967. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
The artwork was one of several index cards that Burgin wrote after he had returned to the U.K. Creating instructions for hypothetical artworks satisfied his desire “to do away with the object” in his work, but the cards, too, felt unfulfilled; he needed to enact the prompts to complete them.
So he did. Photopath was first realized on the scarred wooden floor of a friend’s apartment in Nottingham in 1967, then again at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1969 and at the Guggenheim in 1971.
Though the piece was conceived as a kind of sculpture—or an anti-sculpture, perhaps—its impact, in retrospect, feels emphatically photographic. Like few artworks before it, Photopath exploited the medium’s uncanny ability to nestle in between image and object, illusion and idea. If the artwork doesn’t compel its viewers to consider these ideas intellectually, it at least makes one feel them through interaction. Do you treat it like a sculpture or a picture? Or is it not an artwork at all and instead just another stretch of floor? Do you step on Photopath’s prints or walk around them?
“It is hard to imagine an act of photography more straightforward and uncompromising than Photopath,” writer and curator David Campany explained in his recent book on the artwork and its legacy, published last October by MACK.
“It aims to fulfill the basic potential of the medium, which is to copy and to put itself forward as a stand-in or substitute. Yet,” Campany went on, “in meeting this expectation so literally, it somehow estranges itself.”
To date, Photopath has only been installed a handful of times, the most recent instance of which came in 2012 at the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977” exhibition, when it was laid upon the polished wood boards of the museum’s Renzo Piano-designed atrium. After the run of the show, Burgin’s prints were discarded, leaving a dark, ghostly silhouette on the sun-soaked floor. He had, in a sense, created another type of photograph.
“I thought, ‘That’s just perfect.’ It really returns [the artwork] to the origin of photography,” Burgin said, noting that the show felt like a fitting conclusion for the artwork. He thought that would be the final time Photopath would be shown.
But that changed last year when Campany approached the artist with the idea of writing his short book about the artwork—a piece of writing that blends analytic art theory and personal experience, often to lyrical effect. What Campany identified in Burgin’s artwork was a kind of foresight for how photographic technology is used today.
David Campany, Victor Burgin’s Photopath, 2022. Courtesy of MACK.
“[J]ust as Vermeer had pursued an important technical development in the picturing of three-dimensional space, so too had Burgin anticipated aspects of representation that are just as pervasive: the replication of surfaces, and the uncertain space between images and their mental impressions. Fake leaves on plastic plants. Laminated tabletops imitating stone or wood. Synthetic clothing pretending to be denim or leather.”
“Photographic ‘skins’ are everywhere in contemporary life,” Campany concluded. “They are not pictures, at least not in the conventional sense, but are a fact of our contemporary material, visual, and virtual experience.”
“Victor Burgin: Photopath” is on view now through March 4, 2023 at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York. Victor Burgin’s Photopath by David Campany is available now through MACK.
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