Oscar Gustav Rejlander—Study for "The Two Ways of Life" (1857)

More about Oscar Gustav Rejlander

The Echo - Photographer: Julia Margaret Cameron - 1868

View more here

Couldn’t help myself. Had to include 2 images. Too beautiful.

Anna Morosini - Polaroid - private ritual

Anna Morosini - Polaroid

Love the contrast in more ways than one.

Photograph by Araki

This is new. I’m going to try to post one photo a day from myself and other photographers. I have to start it off with one of my favorite photographer alive today, Sally Mann.

Sally Mann - ‘Virginia #42′ - 2004 - from the series Faces

Bruno Bernard, professionelly known as Bernard of Hollywood, was a superlative glamour photographer of Holywood´s golden era. He was called the “king of Hollywood glamour”, the “Discoverer” of Marilyn Monroe, and the “Vargas of photography”.

Marilyn Monroes first professional sitting

Anita Ekberg, Vintage 1956

Norma Jeane – Pin-Up

I have been a slack ass blogger latey. Part of the reason is that I feel like I have to do these long postings here. This is not Twitter for God sakes, there should be some meat! Right?

I’m going to give myself a break for a while and do some simple posts and let the pictures speak for themselves. I’m assuming that everyone subscribed to this blog is here in some way or another for the pictures…

Today I’ve got photographer Ellen von Unwerth for you.

Ellen von Unwerth (born 1954 in Germany) is a photographer and director, specializing in erotic femininity. She worked as a fashion model for ten years herself before moving behind the camera, and now makes fashion, editorial, and advertising photographs.

Some of her work reminds me a lot of the Vee Speers Bordello series.

What do you think? Feel free to post your comments.

I’ve mentioned Les Krims a few times in passing. I’m very drawn to his work. It’s everything I love in art; raw, creative, funny, irreverent, slightly insane. Once I start looking I can’t seem to keep myself from flipping to the next image.

A little about Les

In 1971, a young boy was kidnapped in Memphis, Tennessee. The ransom requested for the boy’s return was the removal of Les Krims’s photographs then on exhibition in Memphis. Krims’ pictures were removed and the boy was released unharmed. A few years later, Light Gallery, in New York City, published an original print portfolio containing the Krims photographs on view at that exhibition. Light Gallery titled the portfolio, “The Only Photographs in the World to Ever Cause a Kidnapping.” Krims had nothing to do with the kidnapping.

Les Krims has published numerous offset works. Two of these, “Fictcryptokrimsographs,” and “Making Chicken Soup,” were published by Humpy Press, which he founded and incorporated in the mid-1970s, and has since been dissolved. Krims has also published original print portfolios such as, “Idiosyncratic Pictures,” and “Porsch Rainbows.” Most recently (November 2005), a Photo Poche monograph, “Les Krims,” edited by Robert Delpire, with an introduction by Bernard Noel, was published by Actes Sud, in France.

I see glimpses of his work in artists of today like David La Chapelle and he’s definitely inspired some of the projects that I’m currently working on so a big thanks to the twisted Maestro of Jackassery, Les Krims.

Saw this on Richard Renaldi’s Blog. Unique face mask designs from the streets of Mexico. We may all get to design our own masks soon. I already have a pretty fierce design in mind that involves a flying pig so back off, that one’s taken

View all the images here.

© 2009 Ged Murray

I came across and now subscribe to a blog by Pete Brook called simply “Prison Photography”. The blog features photos from many different sources, obviously with a focus on the prison system.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates.

Prison reform has always been a hot button issue for me. Our current system locks people up for absurd amounts of time in some cases. We have absolutely NO focus on rehabilitation in most prison systems. A typical scenario may go like this:

1. A person is an addict and perpetrates a crime to support their addiction.
2. We lock them up for their crime and do not do anything in the way of helping them overcome their addiction.
3. We send them back to the same environment they came from in a worse state than when they arrived in prison.
4. They re-offend and we give them more time.

And we’re surprised by the phenomenon of repeat offenders? As a society we set ourselves up for convicts to fail. Part of this is just laziness and part of it is the culture in our country of seeing in absolutes, black and white, instead of shades of gray.

I’ve met good men who carried around the label of murderer. And I’ve seen preachers who routinely and legally steal money from the less fortunate in the name of God. Things aren’t “good vs. evil” like so many believe and until we realize that we are ALL part of the same whole… then we’ll continue to build more prisons and hold the title of having more of our citizens behind bars than any place in the world.

Now that I got that out… Check it out if this is a subject you’re interested in. Some pretty cool work on Pete’s blog for sure.

In my blog reading recently I came across this video on A Photo Editor Blog. William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee. He is widely credited with securing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries.

If you can’t see the video below go to http://blip.tv/play/zEDd9XOK6hA

This recollection by his son is moving to me.

“I don’t think dad is a normal person. He has his own way of dealing with things. I’ve never met anyone like him.” — Winston Eggleston

Like any great artist, he sees something spectacular in the norm and brings it to reality for the rest of us.

Occasionally I come across a photographer who blows me away. I get that feeling every time I go back and look at Phil Borges work.

Borges has been a humanitarian photographer since the 1970s with his notable works being photographs of Tibetans who fled to Nepal, including the Dalai Lama. He found inspiration from Ron Zak who encouraged central themes through ‘bodies of work’. This led to Phil Borges’s signature style of black and white portraits with the subject’s skin toned in. His largest influences were Irving Penn and Edward Curtis.

I love raw and real photography. I’ve always been more drawn to it. And a lot of what I do is about that. Of course the pinup work I shoot is about “pretty” but even that has more of an edge to it than the typical pinup style.

I came across Clayton Patterson today. He’s been shooting on the Lower East Side of Manhattan since the early 80′s. A pretty amazing body of work of real people.