Photography | artistvenu

Stunning Footage of Neurons Forming Inside a Chick Embryo Wins Nikon’s Small World in Motion

September 28, 2023 (updated September 28, 2023) Published by artistvenu

For 13 years, Nikon’s Small World in Motion has celebrated the most alluring footage captured through a microscope that spotlights a range of biological processes, from viral infections to blood flow. The 2023 competition garnered nearly 400 entries from photographers and researchers in 41 countries with Dr. Alexandre Dumoulin winning the top prize for his 48-hour timelapse of neurons developing in a chick embryo.

Featured Image: Dr. Alexandre Dumoulin, a 48-hour time-lapse of developing neurons connecting the opposite side of the central nervous system in a chick embryo

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Woman Uses Hidden Cameras To Get Candid Look at Birds in Her Backyard

September 15, 2023 (updated September 15, 2023) Published by artistvenu

For years we’ve been following Lisa, aka Ostdrossel, as she documents the incredible feathered friends who frequent her backyard. The German bird lover, who is based in Michigan, uses several backyard cameras that allow her to get a candid look at the birds. Luckily, she’s more than happy to share the results, which show all of the birds and critters that eat and drink in her backyard.

Her most popular setup is her homemade feeder camera fitted with a macro lens inside a weatherproof box. It allows her to see everything from a nuthatch snacking on a nut to young birds molting into their adult feathers. And while her bird images are fascinating, the candid camera also catches some unexpected guests at the feeders.

Male northern cardinal

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Bird Photographer of the Year 2023 Highlights Avian Attitudes and Winged Wonders Around the World

September 5, 2023 (updated September 5, 2023) Published by artistvenu

The judges of the 2023 Bird Photographer of the Year competition (previously) sifted through more than 20,000 images submitted from photographers around the globe. With lenses trained on a variety of avians and their habitats, the makers of this year’s winning images highlight diverse behavior, sizes, colors, and environments, from enigmatic and elusive species to familiar backyard friends.

Jack Zhi’s grand prize-winning image catches the dramatic moment that a Peregrine Falcon attacks a Brown Pelican in mid-flight.

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Featured Image: Arto Leppänen, “A Moment of Prayer,” Great Grey Owl (Strix nebulosa), Helsinki, Finland. Gold Award Winner: Urban Birds

Incredible Winners of the 2023 Portrait Photographer of the Year Contest

August 22, 2023 (updated August 22, 2023) Published by artistvenu

“Salvation” by Forough Yavari. Overall winner, International Portrait Photographer of the Year.

Iranian photographer Forough Yavari was honored as the International Portrait Photographer of the Year for a stunning portfolio of work that shows off skills as a fine art and fashion photographer. Based in Melbourne, her photography draws on her life experiences as a woman, with her work portraying the narratives behind the lives of women around the work.

Yavari topped the list of talented amateur and professional portrait photographers who entered this year’s contest. Aside from Yavari, winners were also named in four categories—Character Study, Environmental Portrait, Portrait Story, and Family Sitting. All of the portraits have their own unique stories to tell.

Frederic Aranda won the Character Study category for his candid portrait of actor Ian McKellen in his dressing room. Wearing full padding and bright blue eye shadow, the esteemed actor was preparing to tackle the role of Mother Goose in a pantomime in London.

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Shyam Rathod, India, the crystal of a topical medicine used to treat warts

August 14, 2023 (updated August 14, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Shyam Rathod, India, the crystal of a topical medicine used to treat warts

Science meets psychedelic color in the 2022 Evident Image of the Year awards. From the vibrant, feather-like crystals of a topical medicine to the shimmering scales of a Urania ripheus moth, the winning works unveil a slew of vibrant, microscopic wonders found around the world. This year’s top image comes from molecular biologist Laurent Formery, who documented the spindly, spiky nervous system of a young sea star.

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Powerful or Problematic? Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photographs

August 8, 2023 (updated August 8, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1980, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

Controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) shocked the world with his images of bondage, gay-sex, female bodybuilders, and naked black men. Always technically brilliant, sometimes politically problematic, these photographs captured a New York community during times of intense social change.

Moments in Time

Mapplethorpe was an artist whose work became completely bound up with the times in which he lived. He captured moments in time that will be forever remembered; while street photography ruled, he retreated back to the studio, producing tightly composed, black and white portraits, still lives, and erotic art.

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A Fitting Tribute to Carrie Mae Weems’s Monumentality

July 30, 2023 (updated July 30, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Carrie Mae Weems, from the series Roaming (2006) (photo Naomi Polonsky/Hyperallergic)

LONDON — A woman with an austere bun stands in a floor-length black gown, her back to the camera. First she’s pictured looking out at the Roman-era Pyramid of Cestius, then the 16th-century Jewish ghetto in Rome, then Mussolini’s Palace of Italian Civilization. These monumental structures tower over her, but her stance is stately and defiant. The woman is Carrie Mae Weems and the photographs form part of her series Roaming (2006), now on view in Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now at the Barbican Art Gallery. In these carefully conceived black-and-white images, she poses as a timeless “muse” in front of architectural sites that chronicle Italy’s history of imperialism.

Roaming was one of the series included in Weems’s exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2014, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video — her first significant show at a New York museum and, as the Guggenheim was keen to highlight, its first-ever retrospective dedicated to an African-American woman. What the museum was less vocal about is that the exhibition ran in parallel with a major survey on Italian Futurism, the controversial early 20th-century movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of the first members of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, Marinetti tried to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist Italy. In the movement’s manifesto, he stated his intention to “demolish museums and libraries” and “fight feminism.”

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Brad Walls Captures Aerial Ballet Against Utah’s Expansive Salt Flats

July 28, 2023 (updated July 28, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Walls uses shadows of the natural landscape creatively to evoke various emotions

‘SWAN LAKE MEETS SALT LAKE’ IN BRAD WALLS’S NEW AERIAL SERIES

Intrigued by the dark and light sides of humanity, Brad Walls captures the elegant motions and poignant sentiments of Swan Lake against the vast and barren backdrop of the Salt Flats in Utah. The New York City Ballet has teamed up with the aerial photographer to produce this distinct aerial photographic series which sees Sasonah Huttenbach in motion from new perspectives. The chosen location, an expansive and glistening natural landscape, allowed Walls to use shadows creatively to evoke various emotions. As the photographer puts it, ‘Depending on your state of mind, your shadow could offer comfort or reflect a darker mood.’

A CAPTIVATING EXPLORATION OF HUMANITY’S DARK AND LIGHT SIDES

The overarching objective of the project was to challenge the conventional norms of ballet photography, shifting the focus from the confines of the theatre to the boundless world outside. ‘While theatre ballet performances are undoubtedly breathtaking, there exists a captivating harmony between the natural wonders of our world and the art of Ballet — it’s a seamless fusion,’ Brad Walls notes.

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Summer Memories

July 28, 2023 (updated July 28, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Summer Lovin’ also features work by Julie Blackmon (b. 1966). In Flatboat (2022), from the series Homegrown, children gather around a platform in the centre of a picturesque lake. Balanced on a box, a girl stands tall in the centre of the frame and gazes up at the clear sky. In an interview with KCUR 89.3, Blackmon explains that her photograph was inspired by a piece from American painter George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846). The resemblance is immediately noticeable. In the painting, a group of men watch a figure dance on a box in the middle of a near-identical platform, on a similar body of water. These comparisons reveal the careful staging that goes into making scenes that look effortless and carefree. As i-D’s Emma Russell describes, Blackmon’s photography only seems spontaneous. In reality, it is “meticulously planned, thought out and orchestrated”. Thin Mints is from the same series, showing a band of youngsters walk in single file across the road – reminiscent of The Beatles’ Abbey Road cover. In Stock Tank, five children swim inside a container usually used as a drinking place for cattle and horses. Cheeky, joyful yet bittersweet, these images present summer as a backdrop for growing up.

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In an Ecuadorian Cloud Forest, Two Mycologists Catalogue Hundreds of Fantastical Fungi

July 18, 2023 (updated July 18, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Scientists believe that less than 4% percent of the world’s fungi have been documented, which adds up to only 150,000 species described out of an estimated 2.2-3.8 million worldwide. Mycologists Danny Newman and Roo Vandegrift have spent the last 12 years focusing on locations impacted by the climate crisis and increasing human interference, like Ecuador’s Reserva Los Cedros. Their stunning photographs (previously) capture the vibrant hues, delicate gills, and thin stems of a vast range of fungi in the mountainous cloud forest.

In 2016, the Ecuadorian government declared the Los Cedros reserve—one of the last unlogged watersheds on the western slope of the Andes—open for mining, putting countless flora, fauna, and funga at risk. “In a stunning legal upset, the mining concessions which threatened to turn Los Cedros into a toxic, barren wasteland were rescinded by the Ecuadorian supreme court, who specifically cited…our fungal diversity research in their ruling,” Newman says.

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