nprfreshair:

50 Year Old Photographs Get Transformed Into GIFs. (click on photo full effect)

Awesome.

Design Taxi:

In the daytime Cari Vander Yacht works as a designer, but at night, she gets busy with experimental projects that would rightly make her an artist. 

In a poor city in a poor country on a poor continent, there is a group of people with a singular purpose: to look rich.

Or, rather, to look good — and to fully embody the suave, elegant style that a wardrobe of three-piece suits, silk socks, fedoras and canes might suggest.

They are called sapeurs or members of the Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes (the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People). And when they go out, they turn the streets of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, into a fashion runway.

The Surprising Sartorial Culture Of Congolese ‘Sapeurs’

Photo Credit: Hector Mediavilla/Picturetank

she-works:

Advice from Nina Totenberg, NPR

We want to hear from women: What’s your note to self – a piece of advice that’s helped you at work? Share your advice at http://she-works.tumblr.com

This is part of a special series from NPR on the Changing Lives of Women. Make your own digital sampler here. 

tballardbrown:

Beginning in 1996, Radio Diaries gave tape recorders to teenagers around the country to create audio diaries about their lives. NPR’s All Things Considered aired intimate portraits of five of these teens: Amanda, Juan, Frankie, Josh and Melissa. They’re now in their 30s. Over this past year, the same group has been recording new stories about where life has led them for our series, Teenage Diaries Revisited.

Here’s our first installment: Amanda Brand is gay. Her family is conservative Catholic, and when she was a teenager, her parents were convinced she was only going through a phase. Recently, Amanda sat down with her mother and father in Queens, N.Y., in the same house she grew up in, to revisit her tumultuous teen years.

Teenage Diaries Revisited: A Gay Teen’s Family, ‘Evolved’

Photo: Radio Diaries (left), David Gilkey/NPR

Be sure to spend time with the whole interactive page for this series. -Emily

audiovision:

Bites from a black mamba snake are almost always fatal, but photographer Mark Laita wasn’t phased when a deadly serpent attacked his leg.

See more photos from Laita and listen to an interview with him over at AudioVision.

Introducing AudioVision, KPCC’s photo blog. They’re doing some pretty great visual things in collaboration with radio, plus they’re on tumblr. Check ‘em out! -Emily

Diana Zlatanovski is a perfectionist — in the wonderful way that an anthropologist, photographer and museologist should be. She works with cultural artifacts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and has immersed herself in the significance of collections for a decade.

That time spent studying the intricacy of groups has inspired her photo series, The Typology: beautiful, highly detailed photographs of various collections — both the individual objects and the collections as a whole. (And she has appropriately dubbed herself The Typologist.)

“There are many so fascinating objects in the world, some things we see everyday and might not even notice,” she says. “However, if you bring enough of them together, they start to tell a story and grab your attention.”

One Of These Shells Is Not Like The Others

Photo Credit: Diana Zlatanovski 

Todd McLellan must have a lot of fun at his job.

How else to explain someone who meticulously dismantles, then painstakingly rearranges hundreds of tiny parts of machinery. And that’s before he throws everything into the air.

The Toronto-based commercial photographer was the kind of kid who always took things apart, including an entire 1985 Hyundai Pony in secondary school. He said that if an object interested him, it would soon be in pieces.

“I’ve always had a technical grounding trying to figure out how things work,” he said in a phone interview.

That fascination followed him into adulthood, when he decided to disassemble 50 design classics for his book Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. The objects range from modern “smart” technology to older things that he collected on the street and at thrift shops. He looked for objects that were outdated but still functioned.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, all this technology still works,’ ” he said.

To photograph the objects, he first tried conventional portraits but found the results “boring and stuffy.” Eventually he decided to take the objects completely apart and lay out all of the pieces on a white backdrop.

Things Come (Very, Very) Apart

Photo Credit: Todd McLellan/Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Before the age of computers and vinyl printers, sign painters worked by hand to illustrate storefronts, billboards and banners. Local craftsmen often developed a signature style that could distinguish a neighborhood, or even a city.

But technology made creating signs less expensive — and less expressive. Sign Painters, a new book and documentary written and directed by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon, focuses on dozens of artists who are keeping the art alive.

Before Macon began working on the film, he said never thought much about sign painting.

“I had never really given any thought to the fact that this is someone’s job, and the fact that individuals across America were painting signs regionally that defined the way the United States looked,” Macon told NPR’s Neal Conan.

Once word got out about the project in the sign-painting community, they were flooded with personal stories. “We were totally inundated in the best way, and we ended up having more content than we could track down,” Macon said.

‘Sign Painters’: A Close-Up Focus On An Endangered Art

Video Credit: Faythe Levine & Sam Macon

Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand moved to Lima, Peru, in 2010, and every time they flew in or out, they noticed a large farmland by the airport. The husband and wife photojournalists began to wonder why there was so much land in the middle of an urban area, and who lived there, and why.

One night they saw a story about it on the news. The government was taking back the neighborhood called “El Ayllu,” and relocating 350 families in order to expand the airport.

In Incan times “ayllus” were small, self-sufficient communities known for their collective labor and kinship. Gardner and Durand learned that this particular piece of land was once home to the grand Hacienda San Agustin that belonged to one of Lima’s most powerful and rich families. Some of the buildings dated back to the 16^th century.

The two decided to make portraits of the residents and their homes to document a small piece of Lima’s history before it was permanently destroyed.

A Historic Community Dismantled In Peru

Photo Credit: Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand

When Harry Gamboa Jr. saw Chicanos in the mainstream media, he didn’t see himself, or the people he knew. And he wanted to change that.

Growing up during the 1960s Chicano movement, the Los Angeles-based artist resented how Chicanos were often portrayed, he says. His photo series Chicano Male Unbonded was his response.

“What was used in the media was this idea of creating inferiority or guiltiness,” he says. “But these [Chicano] men had contributed to and saved my life.”

Chicano Males Stare Down Stereotypes

Photo Credit: Harry Gamboa, Jr.