Mondo Pre-Teen

Pimping up kids to look like creepy adults seems to be a common ritual in Northern America and Papua New Guinea.

Lux Exterior

Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) 1946 - 2009




At times The Cramps kept me sane, at times I forgot about them. There are not many bands that are so beloved by so many different sub-cultures over such a long time.

Who wouldn´t have loved to hang out with Lux and Ivy in their rumpus room, playing records while nibbling hot peanuts fresh from their "Liberace Hot Peanuts Dispenser"?!

For a far better and informative write up, link-parade and lots of exquisite videos head over to Media Funhouse!

Mondo Mini

A vast collection of b/w photos showing the international impact the mini skirt (and other fashion trends of the late 60s and early 70s) had on the look of models, actresses, hookers and everybody else.

Italian Bunnies

Charlotte Rampling

London 1971

Hookers ´70, NYC

Prototype

Someone, Sidney, Summertime

Tina Turner

Ireland 1968

Rocket USA

Many more StellaVista Ultramodels at Sixties Seventies

Pierre Cardin

Borderline

Julien Chatelin is a photographer who likes to photograph the places most of us only know from the news. News which are seldom good and as long as there are no newsworthy reports we don´t hear anything at all about them.


In his recent book "Borderline" Chatelin assembled a collection of b/w photographs from the borderland between Israel and Palestine. Some of the pictures are pretty unremarkable if you take them out of context.



We see young people partying on the beach, gay parades, nightclub excess and streetlife. Then there are soldiers, orthodox jews and the wastelands beyond the borderline.
In succession we get a glimpse into life at a boiling point. The exhausted and frightened soldiers could be the same people we have seen a few pages ealier, partying the night away.



My attention to the book was clearly drawn by the great cover design with it´s fold out title.


Extensive coverage of Chatelin´s work can be seen on his Website.

Not So Quiet Village

I´m So Totally, Digitally Close to You by Clive Thompson is an intelligent view on social networking and how it continues to change and re-define our perception of ourselves and others. Surrounded by constant "ambient information" we see the internet changing from "global village" to an enclave before our eyes.


Only a short time ago the Internet was an anonymous, virtual place where everyone could define his own appearance. New social networks are reversing this trend at a rapid space, making it hard at all to lie about yourself.

Quote from the article: ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

First Class Shower Scene

This is a picture of a shower. One of two showers that are accessible to the fourteen 1st class passengers onboard the Airbus A380 that is now part of the Emirate-Fleet.

I don´t know exactly how pampered 1st class travellers will deal with the 5-minute time limit for each shower-session, but they will probably complain to the two designated shower attendants who make sure that your precious feet don´t have to squish through puddles your insanely rich predecessor left on the floor.

Read a report of a test-flight at Telstar Logistics and see more photos (including in-flight toasters) here.

All in all there are a few gold trims too many for my taste, but I guess that I won´t have to worry about this style-dilemma any time soon.

My Home is Takeshi´s Castle

More of the winning entries of Fresh & Wildeyed 08 at Fotonet.
A pretty popular subject is taking pictures/filma of people in their own homes. Trying to find a little bit of "reality" in an increasingly virtual world (and how to escape from it) is the subject of Steve Schofield.

Apart from being pure voyeurism, his photos of Sci-Fi geeks at home are wonderfully stylized and will probably make most viewers feel ashamed of their own boring normality. Admittedly, I could not get rid of doubts that these photos are not staged.
If you check Schofields Website you will probably think the same before you start (or want) to believe that these scenes are actually real.

Schofield explains: "My practice is concerned with the hyper-real. I reflect the desire of my sitters to create a utopian existence based on their obsessions and hobbies, each influenced by popular culture. By photographing science-fiction costumers in their own homes in Britain, I have sought to show how, through this strange sub-cultural world of fandom, like-minded people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday."





I recently posted this bizarre collection of photos found on gay dating sites.
Ben Bailey from Brighton did a video project -"Real Virtuality"- filming "Gaydar"-participants in their homes.

Bailey explains: "This video work examines how the dating website Gaydar, and other virtual forums, rely on the human drive to encounter those we do not yet know. Through a reciprocal agreement to meet, two strangers can share a very intimate period of time. The sitters are filmed for a ten-minute period within the boundaries of a still photograph."

Compared to my "Atrocity Exhibition"-post, the stills from his project are very...well, healthy. I guess if you really want to see what is behind the monitor, you can´t make dates and bring your camera. You have to look for what people are giving away on their own. And this is virtually everything!

Chique in the Deutsche Demokratische Republique

Sweet & Sexy


Kodak Instamatik Reflection

Fiesta (probably not) in Belo Horizonte

Fotomodelle

Blofeld Seams

Strahler 70


Moulinex

The b/w photos are by great photographer Arno Fischer, who is the most prominent fashion-photographer of former German Democratic Republic.

The colour photos were taken from the book Off the Wall.

Click the legends to listen to great (west)-German ad-music and stock-jazz of the era.

The Atrocity Exhibition

You got to be tough for this one, but somebody had to do it!

German blog Antiteilchen has descended into the deepest deep of online hook-up sites and brought amazing treasures to the surface. Whatever he hoped to find there, I doubt it was this!

At the time of writing, "Antiteilchen" has compiled 24 parts of a photo-series called "Schwule Wohnkultur (gay way of living), challenging the cliche that gay men have better taste in decorating their habitat.

Surreal to a point that no artist could have imagined, these photos are either funny and/or repelling. You can easily forget that these men are actually trying to "promote" themselves.

Either oblivious to their surroundings, or completely unfazed by a globalized vision of "good taste", but always true to their obsessions, they put themselves into the center of attention. Everything else is just a bonus!
Clicking the pictures will make them larger (I am sorry!). Watch for the details!









Desktop



Hang ten squared

Record collector

Symmetry & Sunburn


Siegfried without Roy

Snoop Dog