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We've got a skeleton crew here this week, so we're choosing quality over quantity for our favorite photo stories. We've got a lady disrobing on the Empire State Building, Grand Theft Auto getting an in-game photojournalist and amazing new photos released from WWII. Just the right photo breakfast to start your day off right.
Above:
Telling the Story of Water With Paper
With the recent onset of severe drought conditions across the US, it's as important as ever that we consider the life cycle of the substance most critical to our own lives. Revolution is a charming meditation on the life cycle of water, told with the amazing pop-up papercraft of "paper engineer" Helen Friel, animated by Jess Deacon and shot by photographer Chris Turner.
The film begins in the midst of a forest fire that threatens a small home. A sense of fragility permeates the whole piece as a single water droplet works its way through the pipes, waterways, rivers and lakes that lead it back into the atmosphere, only to return to where we started as rain to douse the fire.
Each element in the video is hand crafted, and animated with mechanical rigs hidden behind the scene.The film took a year to create, and a making-of video gives a hint as to how much work went into creating the lovely pop-up book (its creators claim the video was made in one continuous shot, but upon watching that seems doubtful). It shouldn't take a film like this to remind us that water is precious, but when raising awareness of our most valuable resources, every drop counts.
A Cellphone Photo of a Topless Model at the Empire State Building Brings a Million-Dollar Lawsuit
We've all been there. One day, you're taking cell phone pictures of your topless model friend on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. The next, you're getting sued for over a million dollars. Commercial photographer Allen Henson fell victim to this old chestnut on Monday, when he was sued by the ESB for an impromptu shoot on top of the tallest building in NYC August 9th of last year, a shoot the building's owners called "objectionable and inappropriate."
Classifying the shoot as "forbidden behavior," ESB management claims it compromised the building's intent to remain an appropriate place for families and their kids (the bystanders in the photos appear to be too busy staring at Manhattan to notice the model's exposed breasts). In their filing, they also described it as a commercial shoot, which Henson disputes, aptly pointing out that it's highly unusual for a commercial grade photo shoot to be conducted on a cell phone. And anyway, the photos in question aren't exactly magazine quality. The building says it has since beefed up security.
Henson has made clear that he thinks the entire affair is ridiculous, and is having trouble taking it seriously. In any case, he says, he doesn't have the money. It's widely known that New York is a place where women are permitted to walk around topless, so it will be interesting to see how the lawsuit plays out in a city where the prevailing mindset is less squeamish about the human body than owners of the building that was once called "the ultimate sign of American phallic power."
LIFE Releases Unpublished Photos From a Key Battle in WWII
The opening weeks of 1944 saw the invasion by Allied forces of Axis-held Anzio in western Italy, kicking off what would be four months of some of the most ferocious fighting in World War II. About 7,000 soldiers were killed on the Allied side, with 36,000 wounded or missing in action. The Germans lost 5,000 men, with a total of 40,000 overall casualties. American, British, French, and Canadian soldiers would fight until May to break the lines, finally entering Rome that June. Traveling with them was TIME Magazine photographer George Silk.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the battle, TIME has released a collection of Silk's unpublished photographs from the scene. The photos depict everything from the mundane and tedious (including an inventory of Allied soldiers' least favorite provisions - Barbasol shaving cream, cheap cigarettes, processed American cheese, etc.) to somber and brutal. Some of the pictures are downright surreal, a sign warning drivers to share the road with tanks, or shrapnel holes in canvas casting what look like stars and galaxies across the inside of an attacked medical tent.
Silk himself had an interesting time of the war, eventually falling into the captivity of the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel, only to escape ten days later. Many of the photos and potentially negative comments were withheld at the time in order to keep news of our boys overseas consistent with the effusive tone that prevailed across the nation, in an effort to keep morale high.
GTA Gets Its Own In-Game Photojournalist
According to a recent article posted at Polygon.com, Christopher Murrie is not only a single father and a senior film editor for features like Coraline and ParaNorman, he’s also Grand Theft Auto Online’s unofficial photographer.
GTA Online provides an in-game camera-phone that players can use to take pictures of whatever they want, and while most people use it to take selfies, Murrie turned his digital lens on the people within the game itself.
To go about his work uninterrupted, Murrie began photographing scenes in passive mode, an in-game function that allows players to explore GTA’s online world without fear of being killed by other players. Not unlike real-life conflict photographers, passive mode preserves Murrie’s role as a non-combatant, allowing him to get as close as he wants to the action without having to choose sides. He’s not just photographing a video game, he’s photographing real people interacting in a virtual environment.
Murrie’s take on the game’s photography mechanic is not only reminiscent of real-world photojournalism, but opens up a whole new potential for creative gameplay.
