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The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is visiting Lesbos to document the plight of thousands of refugees who arrive daily on the Greek island by boat from Turkey. For the past two days, Ai has been photographing orange rubber dinghies coming into shore, families huddled around fires, people queuing to register at the Moria refugee camp and piles of discarded lifejackets, among other scenes [...]
It is understood Ai will be creating a work in response to the refugee crisis.
— theartnewspaper.com
Here are just a few of Ai Weiwei's recent photos from the Lesbos refugee camp; giving a human face to people and entire families escaping war and persecution in their home countries of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, as well as documenting humanitarian workers, such as the Norwegian group, Drop... View full entry
Many in the west too often think of Beirut as a city scarred by war and terror. But the capital of Lebanon is a beautiful, modern city, one utterly remade after the country’s civil war ended in 1990. Gleaming skyscrapers tower over historic and pre-war modernist architecture, drenched in color and bathed in sunlight. It provides no end of inspiration for Serge Najjar, whose gorgeous photos of the city fill his Instagram. — Wired
Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. To accommodate a rapidly growing number of inhabitants in a limited area of land, the emphasis is on space efficiency – which often translates into extremes of verticality and compact living.
Alex Nimmo grew up in the English countryside but moved to Hong Kong three years ago. The contrast, as you might imagine, was sharp.
— theguardian.com
↑ Bel Air↑ Sheung Wan↑ Quarry BayAll images by @alexnimmo on Instagram.Related:Hong Kong tops Bloomberg's list of "Most Crowded Cities" by 2025Asia’s richest man is building Hong Kong apartments barely bigger than a prison cellVertical Horizon 2nd Edition: Romain Jacquet-Lagreze's... View full entry
Instagram may very well have enabled a whole generation of false artisans—and even encouraged cliché street imagery by promoting hashtags like #middleoftheroad and #strideby through its Weekend Hashtag Project—but the effect may not be so terrible. Quoted in The Telegraph in 2011, Teru Kuwayama, a photojournalist who is now photo community manager at Facebook, compared the rise of Instagram to the advent of electronic music, both of which stimulated “amateur expression.” — americanphotomag.com
There has long been a subculture of so-called “urban explorers” who have made a game of accessing off-limits places. [...] Urban explorers take photos mainly to document that they’ve been there, while for Deas the image is the whole point. The outlaw Instagrammers have more in common with graffiti artists, another subculture of underground creatives who make their work in the cracks of the urban landscape. — nymag.com
Previously in Russia: Skywalking - hacking architecture in Russia View full entry
Hans-Ulrich Obrist: The accompanying "Instagram" photos were sent to me from world-renowned architect Frank Gehry. I asked him, like I’ve asked many other artists, simply to write something in his or her own handwriting –- a disappearing art in the digital age. — huffingtonpost.com