50 Watts is still going strong after almost 20 years. It describes itself accurately as "a growing archive of weird and wonderful visual ephemera from around the world."
Art
183 PostsI was once somewhat obsessed with Orange Grove Tool Sheds and Utility Boxes of Oliva, Spain. I photographed thousands over the course of just a few months.
Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter of Basic Instinct, Flashdance, Betrayed, Music Box, and many others, once said that all his screenplays discuss the same thing. If you've seen these films, you'll know that they're quite different from one another, so it's a rather curious comment. Then he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "But I wasn't aware of it. It was someone else who pointed it out to me, the theme that I return to over and over again: Can you really know the one you love?" Indeed, that is what all those films are about.
I once heard author and Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano say that he writes the same book over and over again and that he likes to think of himself as a photographer with one subject. Before exploring them again, he just moves the camera to see them from another angle.
I like when artists do this. When they repeat themselves without being repetitive. It seems to me that this is what Seth Armstrong is doing with his urban landscapes:
Wonderful stuff. More on Armstrong's site.
That's three from Laurie Lipton. See the complete series: Day of the Dead.
There's also this, should you want more:
There's an airport in St. Maarten (SXM) that's famous for how close it is to the beach. Josef Hoflehner's got some spectacular shots of the planes coming and going.
You can view the whole series on Hoflehner's site.
For those of you who think these may be faked, or collages, here's an extraordinary vid of one landing (posted 9 years ago, so pre-mainstream-AI):
On Youtube you can also find vids of tourists intentionally standing behind the planes in order to be propelled by their exhausts during takeoff.
From Square America.
A few photos taken by a Chicago cabby in the 70s, including several great portraits of his fellow drivers. From Square America, which has the rest of the series.
Someone vandalised our building, so we had to do something about it.
There are few things I hate more than taggers. RevengeFont is a very cute response.
The first four pictures are from DiDonato's Home series. The last two are from the Elsewhere series.
Everything visible at BookeDiDonato.com.
Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris has been made into two films, one by Andrai Tarkovsky and the other by Stephen Soderbergh. Honestly, I cannot stand either one (though the Cliff Martinez score for the Soderbergh film is delightful).
The novel has been published in numerous languages in dozes of editions. The Hype & Hyper site has cataloged a ton of them. Wonderful to see how one title can inspire so many different interpretations.
‘A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema’ is an exhibition showing at Milan’s Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio from January 30th to September 8, 2025.
ArtNet’s got a great article on the exhibit: From ‘Raging Bull’ to ‘Un Chien Andalou’—A New Show Traces Cinema’s Greatest Storyboards.
Via Metafilter
