Alan Sailer's high speed photography is beautiful and badass.

(literally) shooting a rose frozen in liquid nitrogen

From the Daily Mail:

An expert at high-speed photography, Mr Sailer takes the pictures in a dark room positioned around 20cm from the target. The camera, which features a unique home-made flash, is set at a one-second delay.

Mr Sailer, who describes the process as 'beyond dangerous, says: 'The special item is the flash. It is a home-built unit based on the design of Harold Edgerton*. The flash is about .5 microsecond in duration and runs at 17,000 volts. It is beyond dangerous, it's deadly.

'The flash is triggered when the pellet from a rifle travelling at about 200 metres per seconds passes through a laser beam. Its the same principle as those beams that set off a chime when you walk into a store,' he continues.

'The camera is set at one second and an f-stop of 9-13 depending on the reflectivity of the subject. The flash stops the action. The one second gives me time to click the camera shutter with one hand while I pull the trigger on the rifle with the other.'

'I have a delay circuit that I can use to time the flash, so that it goes off when the pellet hits the target. The explosion is the shock of the pellet hitting the target.'

Radish

Frozen strawberry

Bacon

Plum

Christmas bulb

Spanish photographer Reclarkgable's Couples:

Fanning the Flames

 Left to Right:

A lascivious man; a licentious man; an incestuous man

Feigning disgust though secretly she loves it

Breaking News

 Left to Right:

Just got engaged and waiting for the right moment to brag

It's her birthday. Nobody remembered.

Spilt the birthday girl's dog's ashes and is wondering whether to tell her

Wallflowers

Left to Right:

2010 or The Year I Decided to Become a Surfer Dude

Inexplicably and coquettishly flirting with my chair

The Many Faces of Dishevelledness

Borne from muted disgust, a naive contentment and general disapproval

The Tipping Point
Left to Right:
Distressed, she attempts to pick her nose with her shoulder
Seconds away from downing the beetle in his cider
Trying to hold the vom till the camera has moved on
Waiting for a taste

Molley Bosley's dioramas are stunning:

For as long as I can remember, I have been frequented by wildly vivid dreams. “Remember, Sebastian” is my series of work in which I finally address my subconscious by materializing it in form. I use pattern and repetitive imagery in my work to represent the recurring nature of dreams. Many of my dreams concern my fears and difficulties presented in forms whose intimacy contradicts their more ominous character. My sleeping life is such an integral part of myself that I am compelled to create art from the experiences I have in my dreamland.

While rooted in the familiar and comprised of tangible visions, dreams are more about feelings and notions–unspoken and unseen things. To create physical art which mirrors the discord between the substantial components of dreams and their abstract counterparts, I have found a medium which can create a visible landscape while remaining ambiguous in meaning. I manipulate blank, white paper into pieces that are detailed and intricate, yet simple and stark. In creating elaborate scenes with blank paper, I present an object which is tangible and familiar, yet the scene is only a silhouette of the actual affair. This leaves an entire world of hope and uncertainty. Just as in a dream, the possibilities of how things will unfold are limitless and this presents the potential for any amount of joyousness or treachery. My work is a tug of war between the immediately familiar and the infinitely imaginable.

Scherenschnitte, which means “scissor cuts” in German, is the art of papercutting design. Discovering this 500 year old tradition has opened up a universe of exploring the techniques and continuously learning to perfect the craft. This work emerged from ideas that have been steeping for years. I have, just now, in recent months discovered how to materialize them into artwork. I have seen them evolve and transform from the conventional use of paper to this elaborate new form of dissecting and altering. In my work, like the fairytales and story books of my childhood, an ominous presence lurks in the distance. Utilizing silhouette images of the commonplace and the eerie, I record glimpses into the narrative of a life lived in dreams. The intentions of these scenes are not necessarily revealed until one fully examines the hidden imagery. The landscape of my merged images is at once delicate and haunting.

We Know They Are Monsters

In Which She Revealed Her Characteristic Energy

A Lamb in Wolf's Clothing

A Pull at the Threads

A Wartime Loss

Pails and Bonnets

I love Brett Warren's vibrancy and sense of fun:

From Murder on Music Row:

Fig. 1.1. Three ducks on a lake.

Note: There is considerable debate surrounding the distinction between lakes and ponds, and no internationally accepted definition of either term currently exists.

Fig. 1. 2.  Extensive testing revealed that swans (a) preferred Freyas and/or (b) were unimpressed with Matthew's approach of flinging whole slices of Vogels at their feet

Fig. 1. 3. While the majority of scholars maintain that Dr Loverdale refused to acknowledge his (then forbidden) attraction to eels, recent theorists have proposed that he merely chose to keep it a private affair.

Fig. 1. 4. Cygnus atratus (not to be confused with Anguilliformes)

 we mingled one hahei afternoon
under the tangled shade,

salty whispers brushing against our lips.

He taught us the divine,

deep fried peanut butter sandwiches

leaving oil stains through history

and we lay and we smiled and we knew it was good.

I've admired Taryn Simon's work for a while now, and this video beautifully sums up her approach to photography.

From The New York Times :

During the past 50 years, American photographers have sought to reveal America to us mostly by showing, in pictures snapped casually, or better, “casually,” the weirdness hidden in plain sight — on our sidewalks, along our roadsides and in our public rituals and spectacles. (Think of Robert Frank’s touchstone volume, “The Americans.”)

Taryn Simon is of a younger generation (she is 31), and what she is after, in a remarkable new body of work she calls “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” is something altogether different: a sense of what we won’t allow one another to see. In the realms of government, science, security and nature, among others, Simon has gained access where few others have. Yet the resulting photographs carry no sense of struggle or shadowy danger. Like her pictures of tsunami victims and of men who were wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, which have appeared previously in our pages, these “Index” works are formal, carefully lighted, quiet, still: they’re portraits, not snapshots. (This March, these images will be collected in a book published by Steidl and also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.) What’s most strongly conveyed, perhaps, by a close study of these photographs, is how intricate and often systematic this off-limits land of ours is — how conscientious we can be about what we don’t want to be conscious of.

(thanks valentine)