Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008

Above are the winners in the Overall category, in the "Animal Behavior - Birds" category, and "Underwater World" category. The awards are organized by the Natural History Museum of London and BBC Wildlife Magazine. Check out the winners at National Geographic.

Or visit the NHM to browse the entire gallery of photos.

How'd That Get There?

A giant Lego man mysteriously washed up on a beach in Brighton. It's the 30th anniversary of the Lego man, so I'm guessing publicity stunt. Article.


This ain't no publicity stunt. Just a horse who got his head stuck in a tree. Now that's mystery. Article.

Both of these photos are brought to you by the Telegraph.co.uk, which is obviously very dedicated to hard news. They're also reporting that a flying car based on a Ferrari design could be reality within two years. They make it sound like that's so soon - more like way overdue. I've been waiting on that shit since '98.

Boo!

"Child with Hallowe'en mask". Toronto, 1957. Credit: Archives of Canada

Here's a couple more neat-o photos from the vault of Canadian Halloweenin':

On the Road with Obama

Photojournalist Callie Shell's beautiful and unusually candid photos of Barack Obama:





Visit full gallery here.

Women Are Heroes

"Women Are Heroes" is a photography project celebrating women who must struggle with the hardships in often terrible circumstance. The artist behind the work is JR and the results are wonderful.

JR travels to the women and gets them to tell their sometimes brutal stories - then, they turn around this moment of profound sadness and make a funny face for the camera. The photos are then enlarged to huge sizes and posted within the women's own communities.

The project has taken place in Sierra Leone, Kenya, Sudan, Liberia, and Brazil and is headed to Cambodia, India, Laos, and Morocco. Afterwards the photos will be displayed in Western cities, which has already happened in Brussels.

'Morro da Providencia' favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil:



Brussels, Belgium:


There's a video on the official site where you can see more about the process.

You can read more about the "WaR" series here or see another gallery of the Brazil photos here.

Thanks to the awesome Wooster Collective for the tip, a site that celebrates ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.

Collisions of the Real: Fantastic Quotidian

Another photo series chronicling the fantasy's invasion into our lives has been caught in the internets.

Via the always entertaining Kung Fu Rodeo, comes artist Steve Schofield's oddly touching photos of superfans in domestic settings.



Follow link below to see more...





Half upsetting, half inspiring, these photos are reminiscent of Cedric Delsaux's photography and fall into the same category of work that I recently posted about:

there is some kind of need out there to invest in magic and make believe having a place in our physical world.

Is the real world that awful? Probably, yes.

Collisions in the Real

As we move out of the noughts and into the 10s or the teens, 'the now' seems to be developing a few definitive character traits. One of which that is emerging is the invasion of childhood fantasies into the real - whether it's life imitating art or vice versa.

While religious fundamentalism, terrorism, natural disasters, the oil panic, and the food shortage crisis are dominating socio-polit-economic concerns, a remarkable number of people/artists are transforming their real worlds into fantastic ones that hearken back to their childhoods.

In an era where superhero movies like The Dark Knight and Hancock go to great lengths to make the division between fantasy and reality seamless, there is some kind of need out there to invest in magic and make believe having a place in our physical world. It's no surprise then either, that the biggest literary phenomenon of the last decade is the Harry Potter series, which cast its spell on adults as much as children. [Read Rachel Abromowitz's article in the LA Times for more dissection of the current superhero trend in film.]

Lately I've noticed a bunch of art-work floating around the internet that speaks to this psych-aesthetic. I've collected a few examples below:

Retro Video Games Invade the Physical World
Retronoob, aka Lee Vidal, merges such classics as Street Fighter and Mario Kart into natural landscape photography.



Kids Drawings as Photographs
Photographer Yeonjoo Dung creates elaborate, posed photos based on children's crayon drawings. Via boingboing



Kids Animal Drawings as Stuffed Toys
Lizette Greco and family "create sewn art and artifacts based on the drawings of our two children using only thrifted and recycled materials." Via Drawn!

Urban Futurism

Something out of place here?

Yes, that's a Clone Trooper lurking around your local subway concourse. Watch it Trekkies.

Artist Cedric Delsaux created this realm traveling urban Star Wars photoset. Check out Cinematical's photo gallery for the rest.