Naturally by Bertil Nilsson

Being the art/design/social media obsessed person I am, I spend a good deal of my time on the internet and come across hundreds and hundreds of photos everyday. Most of them interest me but those that I find super duper interesting of course catch my attention a lot more than others. A lot of times I'll see a photo I like and ask myself questions like, "who designed those shoes?"… "what's this model's name?" … "does this person have an Instagram?" and so on and so forth. But, as a photographer first, and a social media fiend second, the question I ask myself most frequently is the "who shot this?" question. 80% of the time the answer to that is not hard to find and little work needs to be done to figure out the source or artist behind a photograph. However, every once in a while when it isn't as easy; I've found myself googling key words, clicking links that lead to more links and going through different processes just to find an artist's name. Once I discovered Google Image Search, my life got a lot easier. I saw the image on the upper right on Tumblr and unfortunately because it was a reposted photograph (meaning it lacked the original basic information such as who the artist was or a link to their website), I had to look through notes and blogs to try and find more of this artist's work and ultimately just searched the image on Google.

Simply put, I find these images absolutely breathtaking. They're the work of artist Bertil Nilsson and a reminder that contemporary photography doesn't need much editing or manipulation to be appealing, but if one focuses on the core concepts like tonal range and contrast, you can produce some beautiful photographs. These photos don't look very edited at all but the creative concept behind it make them so powerful. Enjoy.

101

Can't believe I've never done a post about Gordon Parks, he's my favorite photographer ever. I first learned about him just last year when I stopped by a tribute show that the Schomburg Museum in Harlem, which I passed everyday on my way to school, was doing in celebration of his (would be) 100th birthday a year ago. During its installment, I visited twice and it was my first time ever crying from looking at works of art. His work is such a testament to the way that art can really affect people mostly because of the raw emotion and authenticity of a lot of his subject material. As an artist, Parks focused on photographing social realism and captured several aspects of Black America for about five decades. Not only were his photographs amazing, but he made history while making contact sheets (google it if you don't know what those are). 

Parks was the first African-American photographer for both LIFE and Vogue magazines and donned "Hollywood's first major black film director", most well known for Shaft. During his life he also explored careers in music and writing and is the co-founder of Essence Magazine. His photographs ranged from the depiction of poverty to high fashion and everything in between including several portraits of famous celebrities, many of whom he became good friends with. Parks unfortunately passed away in the spring of 2006 from cancer but his legacy lives on in the works of so many photographers today and especially amongst the Black community. So in honor of his birthday I decided to post some of his work. Enjoy.

Ali

Monroe

Malcolm X

(BTW, the rest of the photographs from this color series on segregation are so cool, click this)

Basquiat

“… I feel it’s the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.”  - Gordon Parks

Osma Harvilahti

I'm obsessed with tabs, ask any of my siblings. It's a problem, I have some kind of attachment to information when I'm in the process of learning that makes it hard for me to close one thing if I find something within it that triggers another search or another safari window to open. So, as a result I always have lots of different tumblrs, blogs, or websites open, and it's thanks to this method of compulsive tab opening that I found Mr. Osma Harvilahti. What first struck me about his work is the cleanliness of it all, the technical make up of his shots are so beautiful that even when he photographs subjects like poles, sinks or pieces of fruit, they look more beautiful than they may have seemed before. I love his work, I love it so much.

good shit, right?

 

flosmups.tumblr.com

ladies and gentlemen, i couldn't help myself. soon after my mom blessed me with an iPhone 5 a few days ago i realized that if i shared photos on instagram or facebook as much i'd like to, it'd be straight up spam. obviously one of the best features on an iphone is the camera, so after a little contemplation i decided to start another photo blog, but this is different. in addition to my main photo blog, http://flongala.tumblr.com/ this one is less fancy and more for daily documentation, they're just mobile uploads, hence the blog name. i'm not sure if i'll keep it for too long but i'm really enjoying it so far. the best part is that i don't have to scan negatives or prints to post photos, so i'll be uploading frequently. here's some of the coolest from the pack.

Sebastião Salgado's "Genesis"

“In Genesis, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.”-  Sebastião Salgado

The photos you're about to see can no doubt speak for themselves, but for the sake of my not feeling like I just copied and pasted a bunch of pictures on to this blog post, I'll just say a little something. At times, in life, I think it's easy to lose track of the clear ways in which nature so beautifully displays God's handiwork simply because we've become so accustomed to a modern way of living where that stuff just doesn't make it to our conscious "things to give a f*ck" about list. We'd rather look at text messages or an email before watching a sunrise or sunset, or spend time posting pictures of our "outfit of the day" on Instagram than give the beautiful flowers on the corner of our block a chance to make an Instagram debut. Seriously though, when's the last time you sat in a park for a while and just observed, or listened to what was around you? Personally, I think the closest I get to nature is probably the mosquitoes that attack me when I open my window, or when I get caught in the rain and am left damning the weather gods simply because I didn't check the weather.

Sebastião Salgado decided to spend eight years of his life traveling to 32 countries to document amazing places that, in his words, look just as they did since the time of Genesis. His objective? To photograph locations that remain as untouched by the modern man as possible, and the animals and primitive peoples that inhabit these rarely visited places. I was sitting in Barnes and Noble flipping through the pages literally blown away that such beauty exists. Honestly, I began to feel really small and insignificant-- in the end you're just one person, in a neighborhood, in a city, in a state, in a country, in a continent, and there are people out there who don't even know what wifi is! Anyway, I hope in looking at these photos they might inspire you as much as they inspired me, feel free to read more about the project here. I also encourage you to take a trip to Barnes and Noble and look at these on a larger scale, there are hundreds of pages that will just amaze you as well as pages of Salgado's own words on what traveling to such places was like, and some of the things he learned and experienced.