New York City gallery W/—— ‘s Disposable Cameras project, on display at the NADA art fair in Miami through this weekend: If you visit W/——’s booth at the fair, you’ll find a wall of 24 hanging disposable cameras, each with a very hefty price tag.

Each of the 24 cameras was given to a photographer/artist to do with as they pleased. The cameras were then returned by the artists to W/—— in time for this art show. The cameras, filled with the undeveloped and therefore un-viewable work of their temporary owners, are now on sale for $1,000 a piece to optimistic patrons browsing NADA.

Ha: We are starting to commission artists to work with everyday objects and re-appropriate them to create functioning art.

“Random Selection in Random Image” is new website by Jan Robert Leegte. It does exactly that: it loads a random image from Flickr and it makes a random selection. Reload the website to get another random selection in a random image.

(via Random Selection in Random Image - today and tomorrow

There are thousands of gun shows in America each year, but machine gun shows are a rare spectacle. At the two-day hands-on shootfest that is the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot & Trade Show (OFASTS) exhibitors rent out fully automatic weapons to the public so that they may annihilate refrigerators, ovens and other household appliances.

Photojournalist Pete Muller recently scratched a years-long itch to visit OFASTS and documented his trip.

(via Machine Gun Expo Is Down-Home Americana Gone Ballistic | Raw File | Wired.com)

These megalopic creatures are the first paying audience for the latest cinematic novelty, Natural Vision. This process gets a three-dimensional effect by using two projectors with Polaroid filters and giving the spectators Polaroid spectacles to wear. The movie at the premiere, called Bwana Devil, did achieve some striking three-dimensional sequences. But members of the audience reported that the glasses were uncomfortable, the film itself — dealing with two scholarly looking lions who ate up quantities of humans in Africa — was dull, and it was generally agreed that the audience itself looked more startling than anything on the screen.

(via Iconic 3D movie audience photo taken 60 years ago this week - Boing Boing)

“To be absurd, to be part of an absurd event, is also a kind of release. I think on some level we empathize with Maddie’s readiness to be part of someone else’s story, to be medium and subject, and to take on these strange challenges created for her.” More here: aesthetics of joy » Blog Archive » Of animals and absurdity

Here are some uncropped (or “unzoomed”) versions of iconic photographs that show more context than their famous cropped counterparts. It’s interesting to see what photographers and photo editors chose to keep and what they chose to throw away. The image above is an alternate view of Tank Man.

Via Coudal.

For a period in the 1990s, John Schabel camped out on overpasses near New York airports, peering with a giant telephoto lens into the cabin windows of aircraft waiting, and waiting, for takeoff. “The psychological state of mind that I got into when I flew was always interesting to me,” said Schabel, who, from such a great distance, found small moments that air travelers will recognize with a voyeuristic thrill. His photos are finally collected in “Passengers” (Twin Palms Publishers, $60).

(via Cabin Pressure - NYTimes.com)

Ukrainian photographer Eugene Kotenko did something different: he spent four years documenting the life of a single park bench outside his house.

Bench by Eugene Kotenko

(via Photographer Documents Four Years in the Life of One Park Bench)

(via Andrew Sroka: photographer at Slag Gallery makes street photography look like Dutch masterpieces.)

Seeking to modernize the staid “Baron Von Sitting Down” and “Madame Miss No Emotion” portrait genre of yore, a couple of London creatives have launched an initiative to get as many Facebook profile pics as possible into the world’s leading museums.

“Each one of our profile pics is a statement about who we are,” says the video for The Profile Picture Exhibition project, which I won’t embed here due to its generous use of a word that starts with the same letter as Facebook does. “It’s finally time we claimed our space in art history.”

This isn’t a contest for the best Facebook profile photo. Rather, say Ben Beale and Rory Forrest, the duo behind the effort, it’s about democratizing portraiture, which once was mainly the purview of wealthy noblemen who wanted to secure their place in history.

There won’t be any long portrait sessions to sit through here. If you “Like” the project’s Facebook page, your profile picture could automatically show up in London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Louvre in Paris, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 (via Your Facebook profile pic, shown in the Louvre | Crave - CNET)

jomc:

(via Google’s Street View Sherpas Tackle the Grand Canyon - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic)

Earlier: Back in June, I wrote about these Trekker devices, and compared them to the observational instruments deployed by the amazing Venue project. Here.

Official Google post on this undertaking is here.

(via Creative Photos of Fruits and Veggies Cut and Arranged into Geometric Shapes)

It’s not a coincidence that these images are being released after a report from The New York Times about the wastefulness of data centers. Only a fraction—6 to 12 percent—of the energy used in such centers, The Times reported, went to computational services. Facebook was slammed by the investigation, but so was Google: The search company uses almost 300 million watts to power its centers, and it doesn’t always go to good use. “[D]ata centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid,” they wrote. 

(via 12 Beautiful Photos Of Google’s (Problematic) Data Centers | Popular Science)

Previously: The Infrastructure of the Cloud

Photographing with birds …  was  invented a little over a century ago, in 1907, by a German photography pioneer named Julius Neubronner.

Neubronner worked as an apothecary (i.e. an old-school independent pharmacist) and used carrier pigeons to rush deliver medications to clients. After one of his pigeons returned four weeks late, Neubronner came up with the wacky idea of sticking a camera onto his pigeons in order to glimpse into their activities.

 (via The Invention of the Pigeon Camera for Aerial Photography)

Google employee Masrur Odinaev recently shared this photograph — taken by a Street View car — showing one of Google’s Street View car parking lots.

(via A Glimpse of Google’s Fleet of Camera-Equipped Street View Cars)