Stanley Kubrick was a writer and director famous for movies such as Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. Before he began directing, he was a photographer for LOOK Magazine between 1945 and 1950. The Museum of the City of New York and VandM have recently chosen 25 of Kubrick’s photographs out of 10,000 negatives to sell, with the majority of the proceeds going to the Museum of the City of New York.

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This is exactly as described: a wonderful ambiguity. In cityscapes with oblique lighting and long shadows, almost lit like a film noire set, strangers are caught going about their business but in such a mysterious way that the pictures throw up curious narratives. They are nearly all black and white, and some are by the masters of reportage. But there are also many great photographs by people you would never have heard of.

We like this blog, Silent Cities. We like seeing images of some of the most noisy and crowded places in the world momentarily bathed in silence. There is something both serene and eerie about these scenes. The images above and below are from London, Sydney and Detroit.

Will McBride is responsible for some of the most beautiful and honest photographs I’ve had the chance of encountering. His work collected in, ‘I, Will McBride’ is really fascinating and spans his career from iconic shots of JFK to reprinted telegraph correspondences with legendary Indian filmmaker Satijit Ray. My favorite photographs of McBride’s seem to capture a rare and unadorned, if not very momentary, kind of beauty.

David Jo Bradley is an Australian documentary photographer based in London. Of this confronting photo series, Cabbage Patch Politics, he says: ‘It’s an autobiographical documentation of my experiences with the cultural phenomenon of Bogans. I suppose you could say it’s a love story: I’ve always had a timid fascination for these rampant beast-people. As a small boy I lived in a rural town in Western Australia: going to school with Bogans meant I learnt their culture’.

‘Later, when I was a city kid with a camera, I started talking to them in bars, getting drunk with them. They would accept me, and I would photograph them. They liked me because I bought them drinks and ran amok with them, I suppose. Cabbage Patch Politics (the name relating to the callow nature of Bogan interaction) are photographs from 08 and 09, in bars, festivals, parties and sitting around Bogan houses’.

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Here’s a surprising and entertaining photographic collection of last centuries’ zaniest inventions, from motorcycle planes to avant-garde TV shapes!

Who needs a digital camera when you could be processing your portraits right there on the beach, with the subjects looking on? This is the approach taken by Joni Sternbach with her Surfland series, using a technique unchanged since the 19th century.

Sternbach’s tintype photos are made with a large format camera using wet plates developed on location, resulting in unpredictable, timeless images of surfers and locals. Landscapes look equally haunting using the wet plate collodion technique and the process just seems to slow time, to capture a slice of history more effectively than any SLR could ever hope to.

Photographic images by Bruce Davidson capture the essence of life spanning the late fifties and sixties to today. This is a beautiful retrospective of a creative and imaginative mind.

These close-ups of faces and people among scenes from everyday environments, as well as key moments in history, such as the African – American Civil Rights Movement in American history, create a feeling of being sucked into the frame and transported back in time. It is a stunning portrait of real life.

Dmitry G. Pavlov is a photographer from St. Petersburg with a liking for strong black and white contrasts and gloomy color settings. His fashion photography is quite evocative. I’m particularly moved by the full body portrait of the woman in veils.

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Six post war photographers, including Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein and Robert Frank, as well as their predecessors and contemporaries, are featured in this excellent book, Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959, published by Prestel. [Photo above by Weegee]

Most of the photographers were based in New York, and this book, among other things, is an atmospheric look back at the bustling, seedy and mysterious New York City streets during and immediately following WWII. It’s a great escape to imagine what it must have been like living in the city during that time.
[Photo by Saul Lieter]
[Photo by Louis Faurer]

Miwa Yanagi’s Fairytale series consists of very creepy photographic interpretations of classic Western fairytales.

Asger Carlson’s intentionally overexposed and blown-out photos all involve many layers of visual puns and optical illusions. For his Wrong series, Carlsen adds bug eyes, wooden legs, and second heads to the subjects of what appear to be found photos, confusing the images sources and the artist’s hand.

Award-winning photojournalist James Mackay’s latest project comes at a time when the world’s eyes are fixed on Burma and the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi. By photographing former political prisoners displaying the names of their colleagues and friends who remain behind bars, Even Though I’m Free I Am Not exposes the enduring pain faced by Burma’s opposition movement. Over 2,100 activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians languish in prisons across the country, and on Friday Aung San Suu Kyi will likely join them.

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‘I love awkwardness. Some honest, little fleeting moment’, says photographer Erica Shires. ‘This could be anything from a detail of a bent wrist or a subtle personal gesture, to a look the model gives me. I am a quiet shooter, giving minimal direction. Many of the images evolve as my model settles into this quietness. I am inspired by creepy stories, ghosts, old children’s toys, doll heads – things with scars and past lives. Memory’.

From the cutting rooms of Dior through to the backstages of the Babyshambles, and even These New Puritans, it seems former Dior designer Hedi Slimane has seen it all. But his newly published photography concept book — Rock Diary — leaves me asking many questions about the symbiosis of fashion and music, especially the glorification of renowned drug addict Pete Doherty. There are some beautiful pictures of pure unadulterated youth, but overall this seems like a very late catch on to the very fashion orientated music scene in London. As Slimane himself notes, ‘I started taking pictures before I even began in fashion. I didn’t start with clothes until I was 16, but I had my first camera when I was 11. I’ve always taken pictures, almost like some people take notes or write down their thoughts’.

Part of the DIY glitterati, the Hamburger Eyes crew are finally getting some props in the publishing world after years of hustling San Francisco streets. Inside Burgerland is a look back at their photography zine, which humbly began as a stapled xerox five years ago. These guys only shoot in black and white with good ol’ fashion film. A style that they unabashedly prefer because ‘it’s cheap’. Their collection of photos are unsettling, subversive, dreamy, and illuminating.

Shorpy is a great blog dedicated to digitally restored photos, mostly from the first half of the 20th century, but some from as early as the 1840s. Some images are by renowned photographers such as Ansel Adams, G.G. Bain, and Dorothea Lange, while others are merely snapshots by unknown shutterbugs that time forgot.

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Russian artist DOU creates beautiful C-print images, most 100cm by 100cm, that are coated with DiaSec, a silicone coating and mounting process that is common overseas to give extra depth and crispness to colors. Not much personal information has been found about DOU, adding to the enigma and general weirdness factor.

It’s at a bookstore table that we meet for the first time. Hedi Slimane is not only a photographer. After he studied literature, political science, and art history, he was a talented tailor and today is also one of the most famous fashion designers, in touch with most of the Parisian creators like YSL and Christian Dior. But in fact, I don’t care. The only thing I really care about is his diary. Slimane gives me, with a kind of insulting diffuseness, his diary of large-size shots of an everyday reality that nobody but his acute vision can see. Some of these make me think of the universe of Hunter S. Thompson, a black and white world, sometimes as dirty as a paragraph of Easton Ellis, but more often as bright as the Californian sun.

I recently discovered Lauren Fleishman’s work while looking at an old copy of The Fader. After a visit to her website, I found myself especially captivated with her Indiana series. Here she talks about her experience shooting in this rural area and exploring the stories that hide beneath the surface. ‘In May of 2002, I was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to go to Northern Indiana and document the life of a 22 year old factory worker. I was 23 and had never traveled within The United States. From someone growing up in a small apartment in a big city, Northern Indiana was very different from what I was used to.

There I met groups of young people, ages not so far from my own, living in a vast space of farmland and factory. The beauty of the area was often strikingly disrupted by the cold exterior of the many factories in town. Prefabricated housing was spread out in what could be perceived aa neighborhood with the same precision and planning in which they had been built. The consistency was a striking contrast to the nature that surrounded it. I was always struck by these opposites. On one hand there was incredible beauty in the light and the animals and land that, having grown up in Brooklyn, I had never seen. What was there naturally and what had been allowed to flourish and grow would always contrast with what had been built for maximum efficiency.

There was also the way things seemed they should be, especially in a community so heavily based around religion and church. Nothing was exactly how it was intended. The influence of religion cast a striking contrast to the enormous amount of drug dependency, broken families and relationships. For years the people of Goshen have welcomed me into their homes and their community. I’ve used my camera to try to make sense of this place and my feelings about it.

These images are from my trip in September of 2007′.