For twenty-seven years, Invader has been decorating the walls, bridges, monuments, tunnels, sidewalks, staircases, railings, gates, curbs, benches, bollards, posts, poles, pipes, columns, fountains, pools, docks, seawalls, roofs, chimneys, medians, bus stops, train stations, storefronts, bookshops, and bars of Paris and beyond with playful mosaics. They have depicted everything from winged insects to cartoon characters and slot-machine fruits. Invader calls his interventions “invasions,” and the mosaics themselves are known as “invaders.” He has executed more than four thousand in a hundred and seventy-two cities in thirty-two countries, grazing permanence in the traditionally ephemeral world of street art.
Through an intimate portrait of sisters Jae and Jenni, Andriana Nativio recalls her own girlhood bond with nature, while commenting on the forces that seek to disrupt it
Through an intimate portrait of sisters Jae and Jenni, Andriana Nativio recalls her own girlhood bond with nature, while commenting on the forces that seek to disrupt it.
The camera that he used to create his early pictures, a square-format twin-lens Rolleiflex, was adapted to his disposition at the time. He had to look down into the lens at waist level to see and photograph what was in front of him, and this enabled him to approach people unobtrusively. As the contact sheet with his famous picture of a chihuahua at a woman’s feet shows, the camera could also be set on the ground to capture a worm’s-eye view
“Photography is an art of observation,” the artist said best. “It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
Among many other powerful documentary photographs this year are David Guttenfelder’s stark silhouette of soldiers on a wooded battlefield in Ukraine; Philip Montgomery’s instantly iconic image of United Auto Workers strikers in Toledo, Ohio; and Supranav Dash’s ingenious juxtaposition of a wizened goatherd and his flock ambling along a fence, behind which looms a vast sheet of solar panels in the Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park, in southern India. Carolyn Drake, who accompanied Paige Williams to Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, captured the legacy of a hundred and thirty-four years of history in her photograph of a sea of white faces in the fairground stands, ensconced in a joyful tradition that has roots in the state’s segregationist past.
It is with great pleasure we bring you our annual list of photobooks chosen by professionals who are deeply involved in the photobook world. This year we asked over 30 luminaries to choose, not one, but three of their favorite photobooks from the past year.
In a new edition of a long out-of-print volume, Webb draws from photographs across many locations. Here, he considers the act of photography as a form of dislocation in itself.
This new version of Dislocations—with some eighty photographs made on five continents—incorporates nearly half of the original photographs from the first edition, with the lion’s share comprised of later images
For the ongoing project “Silent General,” Lê turned her lens to the mainland, travelling from the sites of Confederate monuments and border crossings along the Gulf Coast and Rio Grande to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., and student protests in New York City
Looooong ago, when I was early in my photography career, I discovered F-Stop Magazine (celebrating their 20th Anniversary this year!). I was always so excited to get a photograph in one of their exhibitions and feel part of a community. When I started Lenscratch, Christy Karpinski was one of the few women in a landscape
One thing that I think generally is helpful with project based photography is to spend a good amount of time with your project before you share it as finished. With digital it can be so inexpensive, quick and easy to get images out into the world, and this is such a great thing! But I think it also tends to mean people don’t spend as much time with their work or never see it off the screen as a print before completing it
Traveling through Gabura Union in Bangladesh, Shunta Kimura documents impact, adaptation, and resilience in his quiet photographs of everyday life on the frontlines of rapid climate change
Traveling through Gabura Union in Bangladesh, Shunta Kimura documents impact, adaptation, and resilience in his quiet photographs of everyday life on the frontlines of rapid climate change.
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling.
A woman won the grand prize for the first time in the 17-year history of the Red Bull Illume Image Quest contest, the world’s largest action sports photo competition. Australian photographer Krystle Wright wowed the more than 50 contest judges with an incredible photo of climber Angela VanWiemeersch scaling a cliff in Long Canyon, Utah.
“You may not even know that you have a good picture unless you take a look. Taking pictures is a response to what you see and what you think you see. And it’s very easy not to respond to the quality of the image you shot until you see it in a different circumstance.”
In a series of three essays published in 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War, which ended up with more than a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, had not really taken place. In his inimitable fashion, his argument was filled with internal contradictions, annoying trolling (Baudrillard had initially written that the Gulf War would never actually happen, which, of course, it did), and some pockets of real clarity. His ultimate argument was that what had taken place wasn’t so much a war but a one-sided aerial slaughter that was scrubbed clean through intensive media control. What people in the West saw were so-called live feeds of missiles and aerial assaults fuelled by new forms of technology, whether the Patriot missile or the stealth bomber. The war was communicated to us almost like an advertisement for a new car—here are all the new features, and here are the salesmen in the form of generals or foreign-policy experts paraded on cable news. We did not see slain enemy combatants, destroyed civilian homes.
Huibo Hou is a landscape photographer based in San Diego, California. She fell in love with photography about 25 years ago as a hobbyist while working in the wireless communication industry. Then life got in the way and she had to set aside her pursuit of photography for some time. In early 2015, her love
Fink was celebrated for his distinct photographic style, which showed his subjects somewhat isolated from their surroundings thanks to his use of a handheld off-camera flash, and his authentic depictions of his diverse, wide-ranging subjects.
The rise of AI imagery is of real concern to public discourse: The actress Rosie O’Donnell shared this AI image from TikTok of a Palestinian mother dragging her children and belongings down a rubble-strewn road. She believed it was real stating that it was not an AI image — but she later deleted the post.
Below is the 2023 Greatest Hits version of “Did you see this photo??”: an unranked collection of 100 of the images that moved us the most. We hope that you’ll take some time to reflect on the year that was, with thoughtfulness, clarity, and wonder.
