In the spring of 1950, Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine, returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. On assignment for the magazine, Parks photographed his middle…
I can tell this has been ‘shopped, on account of the pixels.
Mmxx
Faking photographs is not a new phenomenon. The Cottingley Fairies seemed convincing to some in 1917, just as the images recently broadcast on Russian television, purporting to be satellite images showing…
Corn marigold. Stained stem section constructed from 250 individual images.
Rob Kesseler, 2011
So the education secretary Nicky Morgan thinks that the arts and humanities run a poor second to the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) in the employability stakes. Over the past…
Asteroidea Electrica, first prize winner by Adrianus Indrat Aria.
Cambridge University
We all know engineering is useful, functional, even ingenious. But the engineering photography competition we hold each year provides us a chance to wander outside its merely utilitarian aspects into dimensions…
Immigrant faces from the early 1900s watch Ellis Island visitors pick their way through a crumbling hospital.
Aimee VonBokel
This fall, French street artist JR and American cinematographer Bradford Young each installed a series of portraits in crumbling New York buildings. The two projects were not coordinated, but together…
The Chicago photographer Vivian Maier is the subject of a documentary and an exhibition at this year’s Melbourne Festival.
Melbourne Festival
The Melbourne Festival is running two events dedicated to the recently-discovered American street photographer Vivian Maier. One is the exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Crossing Paths…
Journalists and photographers from various news agencies are shown a machine gun post in 1918.
PA/PA Archive
Taken immediately after the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War in 1991, Kenneth Jarecke’s photograph of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier in his burned-out jeep is one of the few memorable images…
Exhibit B: the shut down ‘human zoo’.
Sofie Knijff/Third World Bunfight
A large group of protesters have successfully shut down an exhibition in London. Curators intended Exhibit B, a “human zoo” comprising caged and chained black actors, to demonstrate the evils of slavery…
Horst directing fashion shoot with Lisa Fonssagrives.
Photo by Roy Stevens /Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
Fashion photography conjures together dress and body to create images that aim to seduce. On the cusp between art and commerce, this apparent dichotomy meant the genre only became a gallery staple in the…
Photos like this are doing more harm than good to wildlife.
eric molina/Flickr
You might have noticed recently that a plague of “selfies” with tigers appears to have overtaken mobile dating app Tinder (where users “swipe right” to indicate interest; left to reject). Globally, so…
The Wall of Death at the former Auschwitz concentration camp – a place for solemnity, not smiles.
Nicole Low/AAP Image
Ouch. I think my entire body physically cringed when I came across the latest story of a misjudged tweet gone viral this week: the case of Breanna Mitchell, the naïve teenager and self-styled “Princess…
The gorgeous, ethereal photographic portrait shot of Virginia Woolf taken in 1902 by George Beresford has become the iconic image of her, ubiquitous on mugs, mouse-mats and tea-towels. This image certainly…
BP Portrait Award 2014 Shortlisted entries, L to R: Richard Twose, Jean Woods 2013; Thomas Ganter, Man with a Plaid Blanket, 2013; David Jon Kassan, Letter to my Mom, 2013.
National Portrait Gallery
The BP Portrait Award 2014, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week, might seem to some like the celebration of a dying art. In our digital age, portraiture might seem to be less and less…
Photographic exhibitions feed the celebrity industry, in the way they exalt the status of individual photographers as well as how they represent their subjects. As such, they have had a history of being…
Street photography is almost as old as the camera itself.
Daniel Lee
In Brisbane, at one of the city’s main intersections, a local photographer gets into position to take snaps of the city’s passing parade. In photographing people who make their way along city streets…
Fairfax staff are on strike today in protest against cuts to the picture departments at the company’s mastheads.
AAP Image/Julian Smith
In the documentary Gallipoli from Above, an Australian production that recently aired on ABC TV, Hugh Dolan, author of 36 Days: The Untold Story Behind the Gallipoli Landings argues that at 4am on April…
Australian visual artist Sue Ford built a reputation as a feminist maverick through her 23 solo exhibitions from 1964 until her death in 2009, and a major exhibition of her work is on display at the National…
In an extraordinary moment at the Eichmann trial, an Auschwitz survivor who gave himself the name Ka-Tzetnick (from the German initials for concentration camp) described the world into which millions were…
Is analogue better than digital? Is digital better than dialogue? Though the source of much heated debate, it would seem digital is now virtually unstoppable. There’s not going to be any 35mm film at the…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne