Baby Girlz Gotta Mustang, 2008 (from The Mustang Suite)
Dye coupler print, 127 x 157.7 x 5.3 cm

I’d like for one day a year, maybe my birthday, every chick in Melbourne had to wear that outfit and ride a bike like that to work. It would be a logistical nightmare on a day i usually try to relax, sizing could be an issue, the cops would be all over the no helmet thing and let’s face it some chicks might not want to do it.

Family Portrait (Indians on a Blanket), 2008 (from The Mustang Suite)
Dye coupler print, 127 x 157.7 x 5.3 cm

Daddy’s Gotta New Ride, 2008 (from The Mustang Suite)
Dye coupler print, 127 x 157.7 x 5.3 cm

Baby Boyz Gotta Indian Horse, 2008 (from The Mustang Suite)
Dye coupler print, 127 x 157.7 x 5.3 cm

Wiki: Dana Claxton is a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux filmmaker, photographer and performance artist. Her work looks at stereotypes, historical context and gender studies of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, specifically those of the First Nations. Claxton’s family are descendents of Sitting Bull’s followers who escaped prosecution by the U.S. Army in 1876 after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, heading to Canada.

Amber Berson: Aboriginal people are often photographic subjects – it has been more rare to find them behind the camera. As subjects, First Nations people are often represented in a stereotypical manner as archetypes and symbols, expressing a make believe past rather than a contemporary lifestyle, as opposed to being portrayed in more realistic manners. As a result, contemporary Aboriginal photographic practice is often a reaction to canonical images by the likes of Edward S. Curtis, which portray the “Noble Savage” and the “Indian Princess” amongst other constructed types. Whereas Curtis gave the viewer staged and romanticised images of a “dying race”, contemporary photographers try to show current experience and conditions of living: rejecting costume and staged tableaux in exchange for real people in real places.

As David Garneau writes, “Indigenous presence in the popular media is usually a cue to stories of crime, abuse, poverty, loss, fluff and feathers pride, or government sponsored success.”24 The alternative is often serious works that demonstrate the reality of “rez” life or the effects of colonialism on present life. Claxton’s work is unapologetically neither.

Some of Franco Fontana’s untitled photos from Puglia, Italy in the 80s. 

AD: Fontana’s style was shaped in the late 1960s under the influence of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. In that his teachers were his older conpemporaries, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ed Reinhardt. Fontana’s work with its focus on form and colour was quite different from the classical black-and-white art photography that was predominant at that time. 

“It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.”

- Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

InFocus: Cattle walking the last mile to this slaughterhouse are treated to this dazzling, but incongruous display of light before the end in Gross-Umstadt near Darmstadt, West Germany, on November 29, 1962. The chandelier came from a nearby factory that didn’t have room to assemble it there, so they decided to assemble it in this slaughterhouse. The name of the Arab ruler who ordered the 532 bulb chandelier made up of 200,000 separate parts is a secret. Also, a secret is the price he paid for it. (AP Photo/Walter Lindlar)

See 49 more photos of the world 50 years ago

A Prisoner’s arm, scarred from a knifing. Alabama 1979. -Sean Kernan
Click through for a heap more photos

New York Times Lens:

Sean Kernan’s noirish photo essay on prison life was not the result of careful planning, research or even an interest in issues of incarceration.

It was a crime of opportunity.

His images evoke a moody B movie or pulp fiction. But he swears the story is true, and he has the pictures to prove it.

In 1977, Mr. Kernan was photographing a personal project on carnival workers in Ohio and West Virginia with little success. Driving home to New York slightly depressed, he passed a classic hulk of a prison. On a whim, he knocked on the door to ask if he could take some photos.

Now, here it comes: The warden let him in.

“I have no idea why,” said Mr. Kernan, now 69. “The odds against me getting in was enormous.”

So, the warden didn’t mind if people saw what the prison was really like. But there was one problem. Quite a few guards were out sick that day. Could a prisoner be his guide?

Mr. Kernan was uncontrolled, unsupervised and with his own fixer and translator.

Within a few hours, he knew he had “stumbled into another universe.” He kept arranging to go back. And the prison kept letting him return.

LIFE: ”Here,” Ray points out, “you’ve got some locals checking things out, outside the Blackboard Cafe in Bakersfield, and I think those two kissing there in front of the bikes just decided to shock them. In fact, that might be two guys there, making out. It’s hard to say — some of the Angels’ women dressed in biker boots, vests and jean jackets, just like the Angels did. But that’s the sort of thing they would do all the time, just to freak people out. As if to say, ‘What’re you looking at? You got a problem with this?’”

In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our schizoid relationship with the rebel: the Hells Angels. Click through to LIFE for 34 more photos.

This reminds me of Arrested Development when George Michael is after a kiss from Maybe, with the excuse to ‘We’ll freak them out…’

A member of Magnum photos since the 1960′s, photographer Constantine Manos and his Leica rangefinder have been creating beautiful photography for many years. Perhaps best known for his work in Boston and Greece, much of Manos work revolves around his South Carolina upbringing and Greek heritage.

Now, in order to celebrate some of his best and most striking work (section two on the KKK is absolutely chilling) Leica and Magnum have partnered up and put together a short “Personal Documentary” narrated by the photographer himself.

(Source:PetaPixel)

TimeLightbox:

A soldier of the northern regime’s army, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), lies dead, immersed in oil next to a leaking petroleum facility after heavy fighting with southern SPLA troops after they entered Heglig in mid April.

Photojournalist Dominic Nahr recounts the difficulties of covering a war with quickly shifting front lines—and a complex map of rebellions and enmities. See more here.

In 2009 Kodak announced that they were to stop making Kodachrome film, one of the most distinctive types of films ever created, because the company could not afford to keep up with the digital camera market.

Steve McCurry – the photographer who shot perhaps the most famous Kodachrome image of all time – was given the very last roll of Kodachrome film. This is frame 36 of 36 – the very last photograph taken with Kodachrome film – taken in a cemetery not far from the Kodachrome factory.

You can view the full gallery of all 36 photographs taken with the last roll of film here.

(Source:nedhepburn)

Watch Taryn Simon’s new TED talk on her new work A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I – XVIII. 

Taryn Simon: This work was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. 

The above photo is from Chapter VI – Test Rabbits
In Australia, Simon photographed over 100 rabbits that had been injected with a lethal disease generated by the government to control rabbit populations.
 “Twenty-four European rabbits were introduced to Australia in 1859 for hunting purposes on an estate in Victoria. Within one hundred years the rabbit population exploded to half a billion. European rabbits have no natural predators in Australia. They compete with native wildlife, degrade land, and damage native plants and vegetation.”
“Haigh’s chocolate Easter Bilby replaced Haigh’s Easter Bunny in 1993. Haigh’s stopped making chocolate bunnies and joined forces with the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia in an effort to counter the annual celebration of rabbits.”

(Source:TED)

The other great news photo site, The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has a great article entitled Mustang: Nepal’s former Kingdom of Lo.

Big Picture: Photographer Taylor Weidman was given special permission by the government of Nepal to travel in the restricted area of Mustang. He writes, “Mustang, or the former Kingdom of Lo, is hidden in the rain shadow of the Himalaya in one of the most remote corners of Nepal. Hemmed in by the world’s highest mountain range to the south and an occupied and shuttered Tibet to the north, this tiny Tibetan kingdom has remained virtually unchanged since the 15th century.

6 year old child, Diamond, shouts at his father as the police arrest him for domestic violence, Minneapolis, 1986. -Donna Ferrato.

‘This is, by far, the most powerful picture I’ve ever taken because it shows exactly how a child feels when they see their mother being beaten.’

‘The boy is saying to his father, ‘I hate you for hitting my mother, and I hope you never come back to this house.’ Nobody, even the parents who signed a release for this picture, realized how powerful it was going to be until they saw it in the magazine and they flipped out.’ -Donna Ferrato.

Click through to ASX for an interview with Donna Ferrato

Melissa Ludtke: You’ve spent nearly two decades of your life documenting domestic violence and focusing to a great extent on the impact it has on children. Why do you think this is such an important story to tell?

Donna Ferrato: I see the children as the ones who suffer repercussions more strongly than the women do. In my experience, women who’ve been abused by their husbands, if they can get away from him, get into a shelter, and start going to support groups, they heal. They are able to make sense out of what happened and go on with their lives. But the children I usually come in contact with, they are like time bombs. In a therapy session, I saw a young boy climb the wall, scale it like a human fly when forced to remember what his father had done to his mother again and again and again.