Mariana Rocha is an up and coming photographer. Her work is intimate and raw. She is all over, you can find her in tumblr,  flickr, instagram and she's got a new website coming soon apparently at www.marianaprocha.com.

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French communication and event management company Scopic has created a tumblr dedicated to humorously assembling stereotypes, clichés and "unbelievable situations" found in stock photography. It is called Dans la Vie Libre de Droits which loosely translates as In the Life Free of Royalties. Here's some examples:

In the life free of royalties, we haven't understood piggy banks were made for coins.

In the life free of royalties, one doesn't look at one's glass when pouring...

In the life free of royalties, we play the guitar unplugged.

In the life free of royalties, we run in a suit.

In the life free of royalties, we love to write backwards in a transparent board during meetings.

In the life free of royalties, there's no such thing as pain!

In the life free of royalties, doctors love to listen and treat green apples.

In the life free of royalties, we love to take a walk with a bunco of balloons and sometimes we even take flight with them!

In the life free of royalties, pickpockets know how to keep unnoticed!

In the life free of royalties, money is fertile.

A bonus for those that came this far. The video for Darwin Deez's You can't be my girl was made using stock footage only.

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An almost fiction by Fábio Cunha

When I was learning
How to ride my bike
My uncle told me:
"to learn, you will have
to fall many times"
I started falling on purpose.

So says the author, Fábio Cunha. Almost Fiction, is his limited edition, self published book made on the road, with a bicycle and a 35 mm camera passing through different countries. The words above are written in the first page and are some of the few you will find there. According to him, through physical exertion the landscape became a laboratory where he concocted an "almost fiction" from unusual situation found in reality.

12th July, near Dresden - It´s noon; I stopped to eat an apple and drink water. 5 days ago I started. The constant equilibrium and the physical exertion triggers the thought to find unusual situations. I dedicated these last days cycling and building pictures, assumptions of small narratives that make reality an almost fiction. A path that ends in a tree, a man who “cuts” the countryside running, a house that is slowly swallowed by the earth. Images that are experiences, possibilities of performative landscapes that by its inherent strangeness cause doubts and force decisions. Keep on.

Cunha is an Architect by education and a photographer by choice. You may be able to find a copy in STET bookshop, Lisbon, or by emailing the blog.

ALMOST FICTION
Fabio Cunha
21,5 x 16,5cm | 60 pág. | 25 imagens
Edição de 150 cópias
White Lemon, 2014

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Humanae is an ongoing photographic series by brazilian photographer Angelica Dass whose goal is to sort of catalogue the spectrum of human skin color, our "true colors" in the words of Cindy Lauper, if you will, a spectrum not as wide as we are led to believe.

seen first on Visual News™
see Angelica Dass' Tumblr aswel

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"Le véritable Amphitryon est l'Amphitryon où l'on dîne." 

MOLIÈRE

Understanding performance as a generator, we questioned the power of an object in a given context: what tears us apart also brings us together - an antithesis that ‘THE HOST’ [O Anfitrião - PT] manifests willingly. This device employs elements most frequently associated with separation and/or exclusion, subverting them into the creation of meeting point. ‘THE HOST’ hopes to accommodate and contaminate unexpected everyday performances or elaborate theatrical creations, offering generously its stage to an uninvited but welcomed crowd.

‘THE HOST’ is a device which blurs the gap between stage and audience, promoting an unusual proximity between "spectators" and "actors". It imposes the necessary circumstance to the performance, conditioning the action and thus valuing the importance of the object itself as catalytic element for diverse interactions.

The project was conceived and built by Nuno Pimenta and Ricardo Leal in close collaboration with Miguel C. Tavares (construction, documentation e logistics), still under the umbrella of DOSE collective.

After making its debut at this year's MANOBRAS NO PORTO, hosting every activity (cultural, natural, legal and illegal) of the Miradouro da Sé, ‘THE HOST’ will soon be part of the pieces exhibited at  CAAPP - Circuito Aberto de Arte Pública de Paredes.

-edited- added images, reviewed text

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Light graffiti? If Picasso was alive he would be like "I did it before it was cool!". And he would be right!

When LIFE magazine’s Gjon Mili, a technical prodigy and lighting innovator, visited Pablo Picasso in the South of France in 1949, it was clear that the meeting of these two artists and craftsmen was bound to result in something extraordinary. Mili showed Picasso some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, jumping in the dark — and the Spanish genius’s lively, ever-stirring mind began to race. “Picasso” LIFE magazine reported at the time, “gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space.” 

Read more: LIFE

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"This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal."

"TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.

The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.

Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.

And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had.

“This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa.

The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.

Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.

But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.)

Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer, with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues. His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking."

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THE NEW YOUR TIMES

The Capa Cache

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: January 27, 2008

After seven decades, lost work by a celebrated photographer makes a dramatic reappearance.

See also:
The Mexican Suitcase in ICP
The Mexican Suitcase Oficial Website

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Marc Philbert is a photographer... Read More