Originality is non-existent

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.” ― Jim Jarmusch

[quillemons]

I’m a 19 year old black boy from South Philly premiering my first photo series “GLITTERBOY” on @i_D i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/… @frankocean

[noorannmatties]

Noorann Matties

Mental Illness is isolating in and of itself, but i’ve always felt further detached and embarrassingly “other” in the sense that I seem to experience my illness in far messier, more inconvenient ways than others I know struggling with similar diagnosis. Struggling with mental illness can make you feel disconnected from the general public in the sense that they don’t know what it is to face a large portion of your daily life, but it’s infinitely more disheartening to feel that you can’t relate to other people who are supposed to understand your struggle. My experience is exhausting and inconvenient, it is not a woman wrapped in a sweater staring out her window with a mug of tea in an anti-depressant commercial. My experience is sloppy and cumbersome, it seems too ugly to share with the world and too divergent from the experience of those close to me to share with my friends, so I keep it to myself. It occurs to me that perhaps the reasons I have kept the full extent of my illness so far away from the public eye is the reason I have no representations of illness to relate to, perhaps this is precisely how others around me feel about their struggle. It’s taken me most of adult life to realize that this struggle is not something that I asked for and not something to be ashamed of in the way that I have been. These self-portraits are an attempt to frankly and unashamedly represent the positions that my mental illness puts me in on a daily basis, easy to look at and otherwise.

[greatleapsideways-deactivated20]

The individual images have very limited powers to define the world. But, if individual images can’t define the world, perhaps a sufficient number of images could, at least, surround the world and thereby contain some part of it. My own solution to the problem of the veracity of photographs is to make the series, and not the single image, the unit of work. Grouping photographs allows points to be raised, asserted through repetition, criticized, restructured into sub-categories; in short, a coherent visual syntax can be developed to show a number of facets of the same general subject. The ability of such a group of photographs to describe a subject is comparable to that of non-narrative film.

Lewis Baltz in “Lewis Baltz and the Garden of False Reality,” by Wolfgang Scheppe, in Lewis Baltz Candlestick Point [Steidl, 2011] (via greatleapsideways)

[yagazieemezi-deactivated2022030]

[cloudylooks]

Golden Youth by Oliver Kruger. 

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Dedicated to the Cultural Preservation of the African Aesthetic

[530pm]

[vivuc]

About Portraying, Gestures and Borrowed Dogs: An essay by Richard Avedon

Borrowed Dogs

From Richard Avedon Portraits book, 2002

When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We dressed up. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes that weren’t ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it. The photographs on these pages are of my mother, my sister and myself. It seemed a necessary fiction that the Avedons owned dogs. Looking through our snapshots recently, I found eleven different dogs in one year of our family album. There we were in front of canopies and Packards with borrowed dogs, and always, forever, smiling. All of the photographs in our family album were built on some kind of lie about who we were, and revealed a truth about who we wanted to be.

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[novalisblueflowers]

Colin Gray ‘in sickness and in health’

[rogwalker-deactivated20170215]

Test Shots: Ouigi Theodore

[rogwalker-deactivated20170215]

Test Shots: Margaux

[hhobbess]

seattle, oct 2013

[hhobbess]

chloe, los angeles

jan 2014

[diverseiridescentbeings]

Follow: http://diverseiridescentbeings.tumblr.com/

Lovely Freckled faces Part 1.

[cloudylooks]

Joana Choumali - "Hââbré, The Last Generation" | LensCulture

Hââbré is the same word for writing / scarification” in Kô language from Burkina Faso. Scarification is the practice of performing a superficial incision in the human skin. This practice is disappearing due to the pressure of religious and state authorities, urban practices and the introduction of clothing in tribes. Nowadays, only the older people wear scarifications. During my research, all I found were pictures from the beginning of the century, and only a few contemporary images. I also had trouble finding people to photograph because of their rarity. I used studio portraits with the same background and same lighting to portray them in a neutral kind of way. No excuse, no judgment. This fact leads us to question the link between past and present, and self-image depending on a given environment. Opinions (sometimes conflicting) of our witnesses illustrate the complexity of African identity today in a contemporary Africa torn between its past and its future. This “last generation” of people bearing the imprint of the past on their faces, went from being the norm and having a high social value to being somewhat “excluded”. They are slowly becoming the last generation of scarified african people, living in the same city / Abidjan. They are the last witnesses of an Africa of a bygone era.

[cloudylooks]

[cloudylooks]

Shoot Stories: Mustafah Abdulaziz - Telegraph

Mustafah Abdulaziz talks to Lucy Davies about photographing water scarcity in rural Pakistan

[cloudylooks]

Portraits of Patagonian Cowboys

Mustafah Abdulaziz is a documentary photographer based in Berlin, Germany. He has been a member of the international photography collective MJR since 2008. This work is from his series, Patagonian Cowboys.

[cloudylooks]