Kate Flint, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Images of wildfires are powerful, but can make climate catastrophe seem like something spectacular and distant. So some artists are focusing on the plants and bugs in our immediate surroundings.
Detail from Reed Plummer’s photograph Surge, in which a breaking wave drops tons of water even as it pulls tons of sand from the sea bed.
South Australian Museum
In the days before scuba technology, the celebrated photographer sought to capture the beauty of the reef by placing corals in an aquarium and shooting them. But under stress, they released algae.
Untitled. 2015. Pen and Ink on Paper. 60 x 71 cm.
Ernst van der Wal
Many cities have no standard method for counting the number of people who live in their cars. This means that their issues are often overlooked in policies designed to help the homeless.
Idi Amin at a press conference in Jjaja Marina, Uganda in July 1975.
Courtesy of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Hidden for decades in a vault at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the photographs depict a regime fixated on establishing order, meting out punishment and stoking nationalism.
If you know how photo editing works, you might have a leg up at spotting fakes.
Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
People fall for fake photos regardless of whether they seem to come from Facebook or The New York Times. What actually helps?
Dallas Dellaforce, Queer Central, Imperial Hotel, Erskineville, 2018. ‘Queerdom’ presents an archive of queer and trans life in Sydney.
Queerdom/James Eades
Queerdom, an exhibition of photography and poetry, presents a history of queer and trans performance in Sydney that challenges recent narratives about queer life in Australia.
These small ‘robots’ can create a complex system when they find each other as they roam around.
Felice Frankel
Felice Frankel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Using an artistic eye when creating pictures of scientific phenomena and new technologies can elevate the resulting images in terms of both their beauty and how informative they are.
Peta Clancy, Undercurrent 1, from the series Undercurrent, 2018-19, inkjet pigment print, W120 x H85cm each image approx.
Courtesy the artist
There is a long history of cultural silence on the frontier wars that characterised Australia’s colonisation. Peta Clancy’s exhibition invites us to see this history in the Victorian landscape.
These images of Cherine Fahd’s grandfather’s funeral were tucked away in a brown paper envelope for decades. As a society, we too often keep grief hidden from view.
Sometimes photographic images are not able to capture and accurately represent science – especially at very tiny scales. This is where scientific visualisation comes in.
Nope, not a real news report from Hurricane Irma.
Snopes
It’s easier than ever to create a fake image and spread it far and wide online. But there are steps that you can take to protect yourself from fishy photos.
Seahorse in aquariums and the wild can be photographed safely.
BARBARA WALTON/EPA
Lynes was a highly sought-after commercial and fashion photographer in the 1930s and 1940s. But he had to keep his most important body of work hidden away.
A light-trails long exposure of London’s Tower Bridge, shot on iPhone8Plus using the NightCap app.
Rob Layton
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne