First Tears Over Another Man, 2002
© Elinor Carucci

Women in Photography has just launched with their first online exhibition of photographs by women photographers: photographs by Elinor Carucci from her projects Crisis and Pain. Every other Tuesday of the month, WIP will present a new photographer, co-curated by my lovely friends Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips.

Visit the site to see more from Carucci. If you’re a woman photographer, you can also find the submission guidelines there.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Thanks to Leslie, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last fifteen minutes with this great little Java applet that can turn any website into a graph.

For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):

Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):

Curious what the colors mean?

blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s Google (google.com):

Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.

Head to the site and try it for yourself!

Popularity: 37% [?]

Stephen Sasson with his digital camera prototype
© James Rajotte / New York Times

For her New York Times article, At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again, Claudia H. Deutsch spoke with Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the “first digital camera.” When Sasson created his prototype at Eastman Kodak in the ‘70s, he told her, the idea was not as easy to pitch as you might think.

“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’”

In her article, Deutsch discusses how Kodak has since learned to embrace digital technology and takes a look at what new technologies they releasing and researching for.

Read it online here.

Popularity: 36% [?]

© Hannah Whitaker

I have to admit – even though I still don’t quite get what she’s going for – a few of Hannah Whitaker’s photographs have really grown on me.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Untitled, 1968 (from “RFK Funeral Train”)
© Paul Fusco

If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the New York Times’ slideshow, The Fallen, where Magnum photographer Paul Fusco talks about the photographs he made in 1968 aboard the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin from New York City to Washington.

Popularity: 28% [?]

David Byrne’s Playing the Building, 2008
© Justin Ouellette

To say that David Byrne is a prolific artist is an understatement. The work just keeps coming. His latest piece, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation entitled Playing the Building, “transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and ‘play.’”

The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features – metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.

Brilliant. Check out this video to see/hear it in action.

Find out more about Playing the Building here (don’t miss the interview).

UPDATE: Here is another interview with Byrne where you can hear him talk about the piece (thanks Sarah!):

Popularity: 29% [?]

Quinton, New Jersey, 2007
© Justin James Reed

Justin James Reed (previously mentioned on the blog here) has just updated his website with a new, currently untitled body of work and made a few updates to his earlier projects New Cities and South Philadelphia.

Take a moment to look around!

Popularity: 26% [?]

Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, is raising a lot of interesting questions about sharing ideas and the role of the internet. (Along with the above video, also see his TED talk on collaborative innovation and the “rise of the amateur professional” and, if you have the time, read the first three chapters of his book, We Think.)

Lately I’ve been considering how this all affects photographers and bloggers and would love to host some conversation on the topic here.

Share your thoughts (because you can?)!

Popularity: 30% [?]

Ilulissat, Greenland, 2008
© Joel Tettamanti

I recently came across some great landscape work by Joel Tettamanti. His book, entitled Local Studies, features photographs from various regions across the globe. I was particularly drawn to the set of photographs from Ilulissat, Greenland.

You can see more work on his website and purchase a copy of the book here.

Popularity: 27% [?]

detail from Blown-Up Blow-Up (blownupblowup.com), 2008
© Constant Dullart

If you haven’t seen Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up (even more of a shame if you’re a photographer), you might not understand but should still take a look at Constant Dullaart’s latest web project Blown-Up Blow-Up (following, of course, Blown-Up Balloon and Blown-Up Explosion).

See more of Dullaart’s work here.

Popularity: 25% [?]