Bernd + Hilla photographed the architecture of industrial areas of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK and USA. The composition of these works is primarily intended to draw attention to architectural and design features of buildings, placed in the center of the picture. The objects are depicted in a frontal perspective and they are usually made in a neutral daylight. There is no place for people.

The Bechers were not attempting to flatter architects or approve of the design and function of the buildings they photographed, as is often the case in the classic understanding of architectural photography. The photographs are in no way a sentimental harking back to the past or a reassurance of German identity.

Bernd and Hilla Becher have always held particular interest for the industrial architecture and landscape in the Ruhr region. They stand in a long tradition of proponents of the documentary gaze that includes Eugène Atget, Karl Blossfeldt, Walker Evans, Albert Renger-Patzsch and August Sander.

With an 8x10inch view camera they photographed the buildings from a number of different angles but always with a straightforward objective point of view. They photographed only on overcast days and early in the morning to avoid shadows.

Marvin Heiferman says that it is estimated that every day, 1.3 billion photographs are made. Of those, 350 million are uploaded to Facebook. Google+ users, who are currently being offered some of the most advanced and easy to use photo-editing tools to lure them away from Facebook, are posting another 214 million a day. 150 million photos are shared through Snapchat, 55 million via Instagram, and another 1.4 million are added to Flickr. Many of them are just going to disappear.

In the analogue past people photographed Kodak moments---the special moments/events in their lives. Now, with the smart phone, people are taking the representation into their own hands and to confront, rehearse, perform, and then publish images that track where or declare who they are. The current uses of images in our everyday lives suggests that photography traditional definition as a hobby or career is been replaced by photography central role in our culture. We are all image creators now and we are taking more and more pictures of details: coffee, signs, painted nails, plates of food, feet.

Rather than being a universal language photography is multiple visual languages. People have wildly different contexts in which they use photographs — different criteria for assessing them, reasons for taking them, priorities when looking at and evaluating them. Photographs are useful to people in different ways than they are useful to others. That means we need a broader appreciation of photography as it comes to play an ever more central role in our lives.

The most sustained and promoted discourse around photography has taken place in the worlds of art and art photography, which has been preoccupied with images made as art or the handful of vernacular images that get upgraded to that status. This is a very narrow focus that excludes most photographs and when reading and writing alone longer define 21st century literacy in a world where images and language are intertwined and of equal importance.

The Marvin Heiferman, edited Photography Changes Everything argues that rather than concentrating on fine art and documentary photography, as is usually the case in serious studies of the subject, we need to see photography as the sprawling, kaleidoscopic thing that it is. Most photography has nothing to do with art or documentary work. Instead everyone from scientists and engineers to soldiers, anthropologists, social reformers, fashion designers, diplomats, poets, and pornographers have used photography as a tool of their trade.

continually developing, growing and decidedly interactive Internet discourse on the medium of photography that features a multitude of participants; it is conceived as an online debate on forms of photographic production, techniques, applications, distribution strategies, contexts, theoretical foundations, ontology and perspectives on the medium. It explores photography’s role as a seminal visual medium of our time—as art, as a communication and information tool in the context of social media or photojournalism, and as a form of scientific or legal evidence.

In order to have anything to curate, critique, or discuss, a very small slice of the photographic landscape has to be carved out and isolated for discussion, such as “fine-art” photography, “documentary” photography, “historical” photography, even “analog” photography. As a consequence of narrowing the objects of inquiry so dramatically, he critical discussion around photography ends up inevitably admitting only a very small range of photographic practices into its purview. Consequently, critical discussions take shape around a small range of photographic images and practices which are extreme exceptions to the rule. Photography theory and criticism has less and less to do with the way photography is actually practiced by most people (and as we will see, most machines) most of the time. The corollary to this narrowing of the field is that traditional conversations and problems of photo theory have become largely exhausted. Simply put, there is probably not much more to say about such problems as “indexicality,” “truth claims,” “the rhetoric of the image,” and other touchstones of classical photography theory

Paglen then asks: if a traditional understanding of “photography” is ill-suited to making sense of the 21st Century’s photographic landscape, then how do we begin to think about what “photography” has become and is becoming?

He answers by developing an expanded definition of photography, and exploring the implications of that expanded definition.The expanded idea is photography as seeing machines.:

Seeing machines includes familiar photographic devices and categories like viewfinder cameras and photosensitive films and papers, but quickly moves far beyond that. It embraces everything from iPhones to airport security backscatter-imaging devices, from electro-optical reconnaissance satellites in low-earth orbit, to QR code readers at supermarket checkouts, from border checkpoint facial-recognition surveillance cameras to privatized networks of Automated License Plate Recognition systems, and from military wide-area-airborne-surveillance systems, to the roving cameras on board legions of Google’s Street View” cars.

Tuffin's image is part of the 'As Faulty As We Are’ series, which is an ongoing project of contemporary portraits using the historic photographic medium of Wet-Plate Collodion (ambrotypes and tintypes). Using this method allows the photographic artist to embrace imperfection as an integral part of the artistic process.

He says:

I was keen to capture the sometimes ephemeral beauty of Queensland’s heritage. Time and progress keep moving and I soon discovered with some of my favourite structures that all that remained were my photos, so I was prompted to adopt a medium that recorded as much as possible i.e. large format sheet film where you can control perspective and count every brick. My aim became to examine my subjects dispassionately, to identify their characteristics, record them faithfully and present them to people and allow them to make up their own minds.

The beaten-up buildings of early Australia endure as a nineteenth-century version of Critical Regionalism (if you like). This was a European model adapted to the local climate and the local lousy budget.

This is a landscape that is shaped by fire:

These pictures are less about the light and more about the darkness of light.

Both landscape painting and photography are underpinned by the ideal of the detached view, capturing the meaning of a place and a culture at a precise moment for ever. The assumption is the desire to see life clearly and to see it whole. Usually, the photographs are taken from an elevated position looking down.

Black and white photography seems to belong not just to another era, but to another world and it seems antiquated in an era of digital colour photography.

The results are unpredictable because of the finicky nature of the chemistry but the process does suit portraiture:

The results can be quite haunting at times.

Her playacting amounts to a total rejection of identity—the self—for Cahun, is inherently multiple and mobile, recreated and reinvented from moment to moment, and gender is a mask which can be put on or taken off according to whim or necessity.

However, during the 1930s, Cahun produced a less known body of work, including photographs and objects, relating to the surrealist object. Conceptualised in 1931 by the surrealists Salvador Dalí (1904-89) and André Breton (1896-1966) as an avant-garde art form transcending the formal concerns of modernism and at the same time refusing the traditional craft skills of the artist celebrated by the Communist party with whom the surrealist group was at first linked, the surrealist object was typically an assemblage made from unusual juxtapositions of ordinary things.

Cahun participated regularly in surrealist demonstrations, strategy meetings, publications, and exhibitions during this period, while Moore remained active behind the scenes. The puppets and surrealist objects that Cahun produced and photographed during the 1930s negotiated between the theater of political opposition and the theater of dreams, the psyche and the revolution, the two poles, in other words, of surrealist practice.

While attending the Rhode Island School of Design, Woodman lived and worked in an old industrial space that served as a setting for both her photos and her performative personality. She traveled to Rome independently to study art for a year. Woodman was also deeply interested in the Surrealist movement and neo-Pictorialism—as seen in the work of fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville—and both movements are evident in the abstraction, motifs, and ghostly air of Woodman's work.

Since her suicide in 1981, her work has been remarkably acknowledged by the contemporary art world especially, the late photographer’s black and white images of young women often expressing through nudity. Some of her photographs were shot with long exposure and slow shutter speed. Among the photos, are self portraits as well however her face is mostly obstructed often with sporadic presence of men.

Her images open up questions in regard to the gaze, the spectator/subject and discussions on fetishism and objectification of the body, particularly a woman’s body

To the naked eye, these structures would not be seen. But here, they stand out in blue and red. The crater has a diameter of 2.7 miles (4.3 kilometers). The exact origin of the flow structures is unknown. A possible explanation is that the impact that produced the crater could have created liquid material with different minerals than the surroundings.

Ghostbird has been acquired by Yahoo in mid-2013 and the app--along with Ghostbird's Photoforge2 has been taken off the App Store! So I cannot buy it. PhotoForge (and later PhotoForge2) were among the best image editors for iPhone and iPad, period.

KitCam was an excellent, powerful, and popular camera replacement app with an excellent set of tools, filters and a powerful built-in image editing module. It was a great app that combined the best features of ProCamera, Camera+, Hipstamatic, Instagram, PhotoForge and a number of others. -

I'm left with the standard iPhone Camera. Do I turn to Pro Camera 7?

This is conceptual rigorous work premised on groups of images or a series. As a body of work---not individual images---it involves a different kind of thinking to much contemporary art photography---Baltz is more closely aligned with conceptual art than with traditional medium of photographic culture with its parochial, provincial culture that was suffocating.

He works from small aircraft such as a Cessna flying between 500 and 1,000 metres above the ground and uses three different cameras, a Pentax 6x7, a Fuji 6x9 and a Canon 5D looking down on a landscape from the aeroplane at noon. The emphasis is on form and design and his latest book is Abstract Earth, which draws on over 20 years of work.

These are not some painterly abstractions for their own sake or glib, graphic compositions. Many of the photos of the Western Australian landscape, for instance, show a landscape that has been badly damaged by farming.

In the above picture the rising saltwater table from the surrounding wheat farms has killed the forest and the freshwater dam.

So we have pictures of the Wall Street walkers, the darkness of the afternoon, and desolate streets. It's street photography with an strong emphasis on form and mood.

Gatewood used Kodak Pan-X, which is a very slow black and white film. He used it for more contrast. If you shoot in the street the shadow background gets dark in a nicer way. And you just get the person with a black background. He would let the background go as black as possible.