Phillip Stearns’ Year of the Glitch: glitch art from ‘prepared’ digital cameras.

While there’s a lot of interesting things to discover in pushing cameras way past their standard mode of operation — through circuit-bending or digital cross-processing (that is, ‘databending’) —, I’m still a big fan of the glitch art resulting from true malfunctions.

Photos of an abandoned Disneyland-like theme park in China. (via Karen Abad)

Eric Cahan’s Sky Series is highly collectible.

In a good example of our foolishness in expecting certain things on the Internet, I just spent close to one hour trying to track down the author of this photo. I like it and, considering the other thousand reblogs on Tumblr, so do many others.

I started by trying to find whoever posted this to Tumblr originally. And I found Tumblr’s ‘notes’ UI could be a bit more useful if it didn’t force users to click through ‘show more’ dozens of times before getting to the ‘patient zero’. I made some stops on a few blogs I found along the way but no sign of any attribution — and again, Tumblr gave no link to the post on each blog, so I often found myself scrolling down until I found it. Dammit, Tumblr: I’ll dust off my API skills and program something to be able to decently track reblogs. I’ll leave it to another day though, as I decided I would get faster results through Google Image Search, and what I wanted was to pay attribution to the damn picture anyway. Not much luck though. The earliest appearances of the image were on Eastern European websites (Russian and what I believe is Lithuanian) three or four years ago, so I’d volunteeer the anonymous photographer is from one of those places (and the snow makes it more plausible than, say, a Trinidadian photographer). But that’s a far as I got. It’s late and I’ll be teaching a class at nine in the morning. I give up.

So, enjoy a photograph by… Presumably Eastern European Anonymous Photographer.

Max de Esteban’s Proposition One, x-ray photographs of mechanical devices. Many small appliances would have been saved had I watched these photos when I was a kid, as I’d take things apart to be able to watch the innards — or then again, maybe I would have done it anyway: I had too much fun doing it. (via Fubiz)

Alain Delorme’s Totems depicts the heavy-load-bearing bicycle couriers he found in Shangai. But what I find most striking about the images are the careful composition and the saturated colors which seem straight out of glossy fashion magazines. A welcome departure from the muted tones and sloppy framing often mistaken for ‘stark realism’.

A set of unexplainable old photos. Be warned some are somewhat disturbing, while others are just weird and others yet seem the old times’ idea of dark humour. My favourite is #43, which has a sailor grooming a hunting trophy, but lest it upsets readers feeling strongly about the rights of long deceased animals, here’s a brass band bolted on a locomotive. (via Neato)

This photo by Luigi Ghirri (Modena, 1972) is the very synthetic definition of the kind of Photograph I Like. So there. (via Pedro Quintas)

Devour by Christopher Jonassen. A series of planets found in frying pans. (via Neato)

Mathieu Grac’s Boyz and Girlz du net: a.k.a. behind the scenes of the typical Facebook profile picture. (via Fubiz)