Rare photograph of a rainbow's end

I came across this image of the end of a rainbow by Jason Erdkam via About.com's Art History blogger. Apparently, it IS possible to experience and capture such an event. Some folks have even stated that they have stood INSIDE the end of a rainbow. How cool is that? Lucky ducks!

Click here or above to see more end of the rainbow images.

Guess Who? Fun photos of famous photogs

I had such a good time composing this post over on the PRC's blog, I thought I'd cast it out into the world again here. Enjoy!

Photoshelter’s Shoot the Blog had another great recent post, pointing me to a treasure trove of wonderful portraits. Photographer Bill Jay has been photographing photographers for close to 40 years. Currently, he has over 1,000 portraits in his files, with more to be added.

Guess who that is above….? John Pfahl in 1980.

I just sent a good 30+ minutes cruising Jay’s amazing Web site and its curious organization, until I realized that I could look at the portraits alphabetically. Oh well, my bad is your gain. Below are some of my favorites from page 1 alone as well as some folks of local interest. Be sure to look up past PRC Lecturers as well! Good news for us, he’ll be releasing a book with Nazraeli Press soon.

CAUTION, this is VERY ADDICTIVE. Enjoy!

Aaron Siskind
Frederick Sommers
A young Jerry Uelsmann
Lucien Clergue, who looks a lot like Dustin Hoffman
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
Martin Parr
Paul Caponigro
Robert Heinecken
Russell Lee

Of local interest:
PRC founder Chris Enos
Nick Nixon
Marie Cosindas and John Szarkowski
Joe Deal
Diana Gaston

ABOVE IMAGE: John Pfahl, copyright Bill Jay

Recreated iconic photos...in legos

Here's something fun to peruse this week/weekend.

Inspired by my last post on iconic photos recreated by senior citizens, I present iconic photos redux -- this time done in legos, and quite well I might add -- in an amazing flickr set. You can click here or on the above image to browse other odes to Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eddie Adams, and Alfred Eisenstaedt. (You can also check out a behind-the-scenes setup shot showing how he made the above image right here.) Thanks to DK for pointing me to this!

ABOVE: An homage to Henri Cartier-Bresson's "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare" by Balakov

Fun Photo Tests

Along the lines of snopes.com, the Museum of Hoaxes brings you not one, but four photo/ fauxtography tests!

Below are two examples of the questions to get you started. You can take Test #1 here, #2 here, #3 here and #4 here. Be sure to click on the "What's My Score," but don't miss the explanation link in red at the bottom for the skinny behind the images.

Sample Question: Fire devastates a San Diego neighborhood, but leaves one house miraculously untouched. Hoax or Real?

See the image here.
(If you can't stand it, read more here...)

Sample Question: Supporters of Osama bin Laden hold a poster showing their hero sitting beside Bert from Sesame Street (see bottom right corner). Hoax or Real?

See the image here.
(If you really can't stand it, you can read more on snopes.com)

Recreated Iconic Photos

First, I apologize, it's been a long time since I've blogged. In typical fashion, I installed an exhibition and promptly got sick for over a week. Today, I am feeling slightly better and surfed around to find today's featured images via Your Daily Awesome.

As far as I can tell, these photos might be authored by a collective called Henry VIII's Wives (it's a little hard to tell from this website). Funny, then disturbing, then provocative, these staged images of famous photographs featuring senior citizens remind me a bit of Vik Muniz's hand-drawn pictures from memory titled "The Best of Life," an example of which is seen at the very bottom of this post. The above images are by far the best from a small online selection; I hope that they continue along these lines. A quote from the mystery site:

The series of photographs entitled The Iconic Moments of the 20th Century emerged in the processual (?) work with the pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow emanates the same impression. A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. - Jelena Velcic in Breaking Step—Displacement, Compasion (sic) and Humour in Recent Art From Britain, Catalog, 2007 Belgrad

I conclude with a quote by Muniz on his series from an interview with Peter Galassi:

The Best of Life Series, for example, are drawings of very famous photographs made entirely from memory. When the drawings were good enough to look like a bad reproduction of the original image, I photographed them and printed them with the same half tone pattern we usually see in these images for the first time in the papers. In these works I tried to find out what a photograph looks like in your head when you are not looking at it. They carried the structure of the famous news pictures but they were in fact very different.

Vik Muniz, Best of Life, Memory Rendering of the Man on the Moon, 1989.