My own collection of works of French photographer Bernand Plossu. In this publication I have included more than 30 pictures, which he took at different times since 1965.
photographers
A set of photographs by Cristina Garcia Rodero (Magnum Photos)
Let me share with you a set of my favorite photos by Cristina Garcia Rodero, one of the Magnum Photos photographer. Here are black & white and colour pictures of different years, from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Venezuela, USA, India, Cuba and Haiti.
A set of photographs by Laura Letinsky
Today I’m going to show you a small selection from the works of a contemporary Canadian photographer, Laura Letinsky. Letinsky is best known for her poignant still lifes. Her photographs are narratives of ageing and loss; her subjects basking in the characteristic soft light and subtle tonal transitions. She prefers shooting on film and mostly uses a large format Kardan camera.
A set of photographs by Bernand Plossu
1904-1916. Color photographs by S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944)
Let me share with you a set of good quality photos by S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) — chemist and one of the first color photographer in the world, best known for his pioneering work in color photography of early 20th-century. All of these photos were taken in Russia, Belarus, Ukrain, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Turkey, Switzerland and Western Europe in 1904-1916. My selection of 64 photos contains almost only photos with people.
1909, Russua. Three generations. A.P. Kalganov with son and granddaughter. The last two work in the shops of the Zlatoust plant.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand, “Earth From The Air”
Just 3-4 years ago aerial photography was available to a handful of photographers. When Ilya Varlamov‘s team got a mini copter able to lift a DSLR, they were giddy with excitement. The guys tried to get it to climb higher and higher for longer and longer shots until it went the Icarus way and they were $20,000 poorer. This didn’t stop them, and they bought another, even more powerful heli.
Not everybody knows that Air Pano had been taking pictures from the air for years then, but they weren’t the first in large-scale aerial image-taking. By large-scale I mean industrial production of devices to churn out hundreds and thousands of pictures. Air Pano specializes in 3D panoramas of famous landmarks and unusual corners of the planet – erupting volcanoes and such.
Nowadays, with quadro/octocopters widely available, thousands of photographers have taken off. Every other blogger uploads still pictures and videos of places he’s going through, seen from the air. All that is very curious, but, unfortunately, has nothing to do with creative photography. Of course, it’s different hawks for different folks – I have no objections to plain useful, informative pictures. But my own interests lie in expressive, not informative photography.
Can aerial photography be expressive – meaningful, sensual, personal? Or is it always about tourist-driven drone races? To answer I suggest going back 20 years and looking at some works by the wizard aerial photography, the great Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Here is a selection from his project Earth From The Air (1995). Notice what relatively short shots – close to the ground, not far from it – he preferred and at what time of the day he flew. Many newcomers to aerial photography fail to understand that driving the drone as high above the ground as possible takes them away from actual creative work and makes pictures look like Google Maps, shot from space and glued together by robots.
A set of photographs by Saul Leiter (1923-2013)
Lovely sets of photos by Saul Leiter was published in the Andrey Zeigarnik‘s and Dasha Kuzmina‘s blogs. But I want to share with you my favorite pictures. It’s amazing but true – a very good photographer made almost exclusively vertical frames.
A set of photographs by Sergey Maximishin
Let me share with you a set of photos by Sergey Maximishin, one of the famous russian photographer. Here are pictures of different years, from different countries, and a series of journalistic photo stories.
Bio
Sergey Maximishin was born in 1964. Spent childhood in Kerch, the Crimea. Moved to Leningrad in 1982. Served in the Soviet army as a photographer the Soviet Military Force Group on Cuba from 1985 to 1987. Graduated from Leningrad Politechnical Inctitute in 1991 with a B.A. in physics. Worked in the laboratory of scientific and technical expertise in the Hermitage Museum. Graduated from St-Petersburg Faculty of photojournalism in 1998. In 1999-2003 was a staff photographer for the “Izvestia” newspaper. Since 2003 works with a German agency “Focus”.
Publications:
The Times, Time, Newsweek, Parool, Liberation, Washington Post, The Wall Street Jornal, Stern, Business Week, Focus, Der Profile, Corriere della Sera, Izvestia, Ogonyok, Itogi and other.
Awards:
World Press Photo (2004, 2006), Russia Press Photo contest (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), UNEP International Photographic Competition on the Environmental (2005) and others.
A set of photographs by Gueorgui Pinkhassov
My new website has launched
The previous version of my site, in place from December 2009 to June 2012 (for 2.5 years) has become seriously obsolete. Both its design and functionality have dated, just as, even more importantly – its content. The old website was some kind of a personal photobank with a lot of technical details on each photo (detailed EXIF data, GPS geo-tagging), providing a possibility to use advanced search criteria (for example by camera or lens type, ISO or aperture settings, or a combination of those), linking groups of photos to GPS tracks, and with a small online shop for selling the images (files, prints and dibond prints).
It used to be a good, handy and practical website for a travel photographer, but with the time passing, my artistic priorities have changed completely. As a result, the whole website had to be recreated, with all the things unnecessary, including some of the images, technical information, and the online shop features, removed. I needed the new site to serve as a portfolio, be very simple and aesthetically appealing, provide the possibility for comfortable viewing of the photos individually or in series, as well as having rich admin options for uploading the pictures, and working with the series (layout design, editing, sorting, etc.). And all that, of course, in two languages – Russian and English.
And now, thanks to Oleg Kotenko and Constantin Mashinskiy, the new website has launched! Seemingly, a website as simple as this, could have been built in a few days. But it took us several months to do that. To a large degree, it’s me to blame, since I needed time to digest the interim results after each phase of the process. For simplifying the things and polishing the details we have had a lot of discussions – we were sharing ideas, talking them over, putting them to life, killing our own ideas and generating new ones. And now I can confidently say that I really do like the results.
P.S. By the way, the website is optimized for viewing on mobile devices, such as an iPhone and iPad.
I will be glad if you like my website and my photos!
My thanks to Karen Hovhannisian for translating this post in English.
Pavel Kosenko 