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

The optics of the camera obscura ha­ve faithfully served photographers for ages. The recipe has been simple: a lens, aperture, dark box and something to record the light.

But the camera as we know it is changing. A revolution in digital imaging research could surpass the camera obscura in almost every technical way... It’s called computational photography, and it stems from the idea that if you can capture visual data instead of a true image, then the picture can be reconstructed with software. — NY Times

Morpholio held another successful EyeTime photography competition! The popular contest for designers was established by photographers, professors and students to highlight the ongoing research and investigation brewing within today's emerging design talent. — Bustler

Architectural photography is supposed to be different from the airbrushed images of nude women that are about to disappear from the centerfold of Playboy magazine. But what if an edited photograph of a building doesn't just crop out visual clutter like street lights but alters the contours of the building itself? What should we think about an architectural award that was bestowed on the basis of such a doctored image? — Blair Kamin | Chicago Tribune

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

You're familiar with pretty much every phase of Julius Shulman's long career as an architectural photographer. You started following the globe-trotting Iwan Baan on Instagram way before he became a design-world celebrity. You can't recommend Ezra Stoller's black-and-white pictures of midcentury Manhattan highly enough.

But Wayne Thom? The name may draw a blank. — LA Times

That’s why a team from the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) is turning to the next best option—using technology to protect cultural heritage.

Founded in 2012 by Roger Michel, IDA is a joint effort between Harvard University and Oxford University to create an open-source database of high-resolution images and three-dimensional graphics of things like paper and papyrus documents, epigraphs and small artifacts.

Work on what IDA has named the Million Image Database began in early 2015. — newsweek.com

Smithsonian photographer Carolyn Russo first found herself drawn to air traffic control towers in 2006 on a flight into LaGuardia when she first studied the architectural details and circular windows of that now inactive structure [...]

I viewed each tower as both an essential aviation artifact and a vessel with a powerful presence—watching over the vastness of the airport and sky; a non-judgmental cultural greeter [...] In the presence of the tower, I sensed the complex orchestration of humans — smithsonianmag.com

This is the work of Canadian architectural photographer Chris Forsyth who has been sharing his pictures on Instagram, looking to show how beautiful design is all around us. [...]

"What draws me to the architecture in the metro system is its variety from station to station. I love the colours, the architectural styles and influences, and above all its very bold graphic appearance." [...]

Forsyth uses long exposures to blur the motion and to remove traces of people passing through the shot. — bbc.com

For the past seven years, Ewan has been painstakingly researching London's pubs, both past and present, cataloguing them and taking photos before uploading details to his online database Pubology...his mission is to photograph every pub in London – although, as he tells me, it's difficult to know just how close he is to that goal. — Vice

Photographers who shoot the work of famous artists are rarely celebrated in their own right...'Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey'...tracks the career of Pedro E. Guerrero (1917-2012), a Mexican American photographer from Mesa, Arizona, who, at age 22, got his first job taking photos for Wright during the construction of his Taliesin West complex... — Hyperallergic

In western Europe, the bus stop is the most humble of building types, a meanly utilitarian structure that adds little or nothing to the roadside. But in the old Soviet empire, from the shores of the Black Sea to the Kazakh steppe, the norm is “wild going on savage”, as Jonathan Meades writes in a beautiful new photobook featuring 159 bus stops, each illuminating “the Soviet empire’s taste for the utterly fantastical”. — theguardian.com

In Stefano Cerio's series “Chinese Fun,” he explores the facades of amusement without an audience’s reaction. The photographer enters areas built for fun and leisure in the off months or closing hours, exploring the absurdity that creeps into the architecture of entertainment when there is no one to enjoy it but a single camera. — Colossal

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

[Jon] Sojkowski worries that these building types, made with materials that are abundant in Africa and sustainable, will soon be lost to history because of a misconception that they are inefficient, outdated and only used by the poor. At one point during his research, he met a man who told him he wanted a Western-style metal roof. 'I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because then I would be somebody,' Sojkowski recalls. — CityLab