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When he was a teenager, Fan Ho grabbed his father’s camera and started documenting street scenes in Hong Kong. From there, he built up a documentary body of work that puts him among the great practitioners of street photography.

Dubbed the “Cartier-Bresson of the East”, Fan Ho patiently waited for ‘the decisive moment’; very often a collision of the unexpected, framed against a very clever composed background of geometrical construction, patterns and texture. He often created drama and atmosphere with backlit effects or through the combination of smoke and light. His favorite locations were the streets, alleys and markets around dusk or life on the sea.

What made his work so intensely human is his love for the common Hong Kong people: Coolies, vendors, hawkers selling fruits and vegetables, kids playing in the street or doing their homework, people crossing the street… He never intended to create a historic record of the city’s buildings and monuments; rather he aimed to capture the soul of Hong Kong, the hardship and resilience of its citizens.

Before his death a few years ago, Ho selected some images from his archives that have become the basis of a new show at the Blue Lotus Gallery.

The photographic selection expressed in this new body of work feels more natural, indeed closer to documentary and pure street photography compared to his previously highly stylised approach. In his own manifesto ‘Thoughts on Street Photography’ which he wrote at the age of 28, and of which carefully selected quotes can be found throughout the book, he explains, “my realistic street photos are rarely selected. Pictorial aesthetics and images with a sense of humour are still the key for salon photos but I expect changes to happen soon. In the meantime, I will just keep trying.”

(via moss & fog)

Netherlands-based artist Redmer Hoekstra (previously) presents surreal depictions of animals merged with architectural exteriors and everyday objects. The illustrator combines hawks and bell towers, giraffes and toothbrushes, and imagines a goose composed of saxophones rather than feathers. The playful drawings are both literal and abstract: one sad wiener dog is tied in the middle  like an edible frank, and pair of swans’ soft tufted feathers fly off like dandelion seeds. Soon Hoekstra will begin a large-scale drawing titled “Noah’s Ark II,” a reimagining of the famous boat occupied by the animals “that didn’t make it,” he explains to Colossal. You can see more of the artist’s work on Behance and Instagram, and view works for sale in his shop.

“Stairwell” – Images courtesy of Jenna Barton

Utah-based illustrator Jenna Barton (previously) creates shadowy portraits of animals inspired by her dreams, travels, experiences, and the aesthetic and emotions of the rural environments where she grew up. While she does integrate watercolor into some of her illustrations, Barton’s work is primarily digital. The style she refers to as “magical-realism-animal-gothic” came about around 2017, after she completed her BFA in Illustration and decided to take some time to escape the constraints of school and to focus on art that she cared about.

I hark back a lot to my childhood in Idaho, as well as looking to my current environment in Utah, to inform my work. I’d like to capture the strange emotions that I always felt in rural and empty places, and the daydreams I’ve had there. It’s those liminal spaces that I like best, and I’m interested in the structures that bring the human world into nature—radio towers, houses, power lines—especially in the absence of humans themselves.

Barton tells Colossal that many of her subjects are mammals because they share traits with humans, “while at the same time existing in a very different world from them.” Lurking big cats and silhouetted dogs and deer stare blankly with white eyes and stoic postures against relatively simple backgrounds—a window, a staircase, clouds—which give the illustrations a sense of mystery. “Animals with elegant silhouettes, like canines and deer, are special favorites for their graceful looks and sense of motion,” Barton explains. “I give most of my subjects glowing white eyes to indicate the presence of a supernatural element and to suggest that the figures pictured are something between animals and spirits, or gods.”

Barton’s otherworldly works are available as prints via her webstore, and you can also check out more of her animal portraits on Instagram.

“Tracers”

“Gone Cold”

“Grease and Smoke”

“Sentinels”

“Black Lamb”

“Shiver”

Samer Dabra uses a drawing machine called the AxiDraw and a custom program to generate Impressionistic line drawings of people. The machine builds the portraits using four single lines drawn in the four CMYK colors, one on top of another, with minimal tweaking from Dabra. Rion Nakaya of The Kid Should See This edited together a video of the machine creating drawings.

There is something more than a little Vincent van Gogh & Georges Seurat about these. You can see the results on Instagram.

Polish artist and graphic designer Dawid Planeta summons large beasts in his series of mystical grayscale illustrations set deep in the jungle. The series, Mini People in the Jungle, presents animals in profile, with glistening eyes that illuminate the darkness surrounds them. A small child is also present in each work, bravely facing the towering creatures with a torch or outstretched arms.

Planeta works his own experiences into the mysterious work, channeling his history with depression into a source for creative energy. “Depression – it’s not easy to deal with, but when you try, you can stop thinking about it as a weakness and turn it into something brilliant,” said Planeta. “That’s what I aim to accomplish with my art. [The] things I’m trying to depict are dark, mysterious and frightening, but if you look closely, you will find excitement, passion and joy.”

You can see more jungle explorations from the artist on tumblr and Behance. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Adrian Wojtas‘ untitled photographic series captures a dystopian glimpse of Navan, Ireland in a deep fog. The nighttime images are devoid of human life, and are each cast in an aquamarine glow from the surrounding streetlights. The included works were shot over the course of two consecutive nights in the Irish town, however Wojtas’ goal is to expand the series to include a variety of locations which will meld to form a similar atmosphere.

“For each shot, I tried to stay away from including objects that would give away the location, as well as minimized the inclusion of identifiable subjects such as cars or people,” Wojtas tells Colossal. “I didn’t want the images to seem familiar to anyone looking at them.”

The multidisciplinary creative also works in design and film, and currently splits his time between Dublin and Meath, Ireland. You can see more of Wojtas’ images, including this series of transit-based photographs, on his Instagram. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

What do different colors symbolize in different countries? I’ve been staring at this for twenty minutes straight.

#

28-year-old photographer Craig Burrows photographs plants and flowers using a type a photography called UVIVF or “ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence.” If you haven’t heard of it, that’s not a surprise, as it is a relatively unknown process which brings out the glowing fluoresce in plant matter through the use of high-intensity UV lights.

Typically UV is removed through a camera’s lens, however Burrows photographs with a 365nm LED light which is passed through a filter to transmit only UV and infrared light. The dazzling plant life Burrows’ photographs absorbs this UV light and releases visible light at different wavelengths, which allows him to capture colors far more vivid than those seen in a typical viewing condition.

Although Burrows has limited his photography to singular flowers and small arrangements, his next step is aimed at illuminating entire scenes, like gardens, glades, and greenhouses, with 100-watt floodlights. You can see more of the Southern California-based photographer’s glowing plant portraits on his Flickr and portfolio site. (via Colossal Submissions)

The tire tracks in this parking lot make a tree pattern in the snow, a self-producing infographic of the cars’ collective pathway to their parking spaces. It’s fun to trace individual tracks — I’m fascinated by the one that comes in, starts right, turns back to the left, then heads back down before turning toward the left again into a space.

The photo was taken in a Shell Centre parking lot near Waterloo Station in 1963. Photographer unknown. (via @robnitm)

Update: Nicholas Felton shared an annotated single-car version of a car’s tracks in the snow.

Update: A reader randomly picked up a copy of a book recently called The World From Above, “a pretty brilliant collection of aerial photographs, mostly black and white, published in the mid 60’s” and the parking lot photo was in it. No photographer listed, but the photo is credited to dpa, the German Press Agency. (thx, david)

All photos by Sasha Bogojev

Barcelona-based artist Pejac (previously) was recently in Rijeka, Croatia where he completed a number of new artworks as part of a residency with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. His most impressive new intervention appeared in the windows of an abandoned power plant where the artist utilized the cracked glass in old windows to form a flock of birds escaping the aim of a boy in silhouette holding a slingshot. Titled Camouflage, Pejac says the work is in tribute to artist René Magritte who famously depicted birds in many of his paintings as silhouettes filled with clouds. You can see more of his work in Croatia on Arrested Motion.

Bea Johnson wants to limit the waste produced in her household. And she seems to be doing a pretty good job of it. Last year, her family produced just one quart of trash. I generate more than that in navel lint alone.

1. Shop in bulk and bring cloth bags, mesh bags, glass jars and bottles to the store. They can hold different types of foods -- such as grains, fruit, meat and olive oil. Bring totes, too, to carry all of your groceries home in.

2. Many beauty and bath products, including liquid soap and lotions, can also be purchased without packaging and some can be homemade. In Johnson's case, she makes her own tooth powder (instead of toothpaste) and bronzer; the recipes are included in her book.

3. When it comes to housekeeping, again, Johnson goes the homemade route. She uses a vinegar mixture in lieu of a range of other cleaning products.

Johnson's got a blog and a book as well.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is becoming more of a Medium Red Spot. The gas giant's signature beauty mark was recently measured by the Hubble as spanning 10,250 miles across its widest point, down from a high of 25,500 miles across.

Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s [2] gauged this turbulent spot to span about 41 000 kilometres at its widest point -- wide enough to fit three Earths comfortably side by side. In 1979 and 1980 the NASA Voyager fly-bys measured the spot at a shrunken 23 335 kilometres across. Now, Hubble has spied this feature to be smaller than ever before.

"Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the spot is now just under 16 500 kilometres across, the smallest diameter we've ever measured," said Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA.

Amateur observations starting in 2012 revealed a noticeable increase in the spot's shrinkage rate. The spot's "waistline" is getting smaller by just under 1000 kilometres per year. The cause of this shrinkage is not yet known.

Last year I featured a number of amazing gifs from Istanbul-based artist Erdal Inci (previously) who clones sections of video to create hypnotic animated loops. His work has since popped up all over the web and will soon find its way into a gallery space. Above are some of his latest clips depicting numerous copies of Inci himself parading through the frame like a cloned robot army, though he also flashlights to create even more complex effects. If you happen to be in Italy you can catch his work firsthand at Action Gallery in Milano on May 25 and in Naples on May 30.