photos

A photographer who worked on O'Connell Bridge for 50 years

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Man on Bridge is an interactive documentary about Arthur Fields, a Dublin based street photographer who captured an estimated 182,500 photos of passersby on O’Connell Bridge. Arthur was out in all weather with his camera 365 days a year for 50 years.

El Zorrero Films are producing a web-based documentary that lets people learn about Arthur and allows them to submit their own Arthur Fields photo or Arthur Fields-inspired photo into the online story of the photographer.

It has been entered into the Arthur Guinness Projects and the filmmakers are looking for votes to help them secure funding to complete the project.

Computer Dump in Ghana

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A photo of a partially buried keyboard in a computer dump in Ghana. It is taken from a slideshow on the New York Times website.

"In Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, the capital of Ghana, adults and children tear away at computers from abroad to get at the precious metals inside. Copper is perhaps the most desirable, then brass, then aluminum, then zinc. At the dump, the machines are dismantled and often burned to extract metals for resale. The equipment in this digital cemetery come mainly from Europe and the United States, sometimes as secondhand donations meant to reduce the "digital divide'' — the disparity in computer access between poor nations and rich.

Update: The photographer is Pieter Hugo

Photos of Atom Bomb

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I've been reading Terry Winters: Paintings, Drawings, Prints 1994-2004 in advance of the show of his work at IMMA coming up in a week or so. The book includes some pages from Winter's notebooks where he has pasted in found photos. One of the pages includes photographs of atomic bomb explosions (pictured above and below).

The photographs were taken by Harold Edgerton at night with an extremely fast a shutter speed and a special 10 feet long lens which was set up in a bunker 7 miles away. These 3 pictures show the first 3 milliseconds of an atomic bomb detonation. The bomb was at the top of a steel gantry anchored to the desert floor.

NY Public Library Online Picture Collection

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The New York Public library have a great selection of images from their picture collection available online available for research and non-commercial use.

For those who seek knowledge and inspiration from visual materials, the Picture Collection Online presents more than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.

Click here for the Picture Collection Online

Bird Imprints on Flickr

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Here is a photo of the imprint left by a bird flying into a window. Its from a flickr group called Bird Imprints on Glass which features 122 photos.

I think its really interesting the way various flickr users around the world make observations of simple phenomena like this independently and that they are then compiled through the site. This group and the previously posted chewing gum trees group remind me of some of the work I did as a student. I'm glad I don't work like that now because I don't think i could compete with the combined resources of the Flickr community.

Chewing Gum Trees

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Today I saw this photo taken in Mexico City by the artist Gabriel Kuri which shows a tree by a bus stop which is completely covered with chewing gum. I also recalled having read about a photograph by David Byrne of a tree covered in gum in Mexico City (possibly the same one).

I googled "chewing gum tree" and found this flickr group of 92 photos of various trees covered with chewing gum (including the one photographed by Kuri and possibly Byrne). 

Idris Kahn

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Every… Bernd and Hilla Becher Gable Sided Houses, 2004 and Every… Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholders, 2004 © Idris Khan

Idris Khan is an artist who makes images by layering multiple photograpghs. Here he is using photos by the Bechers. He will be participating in PROJECT bodycity in Dublin's Docklands.