Sanctuary, photographed at the Grand Canyon circa 1910 by American poet, voyager, and photo-secessionist, Anne Brigman. As seen in her 1948 book, Songs of a Pagan, p. 28.

Ended up doing another recent read of Artemy Lebedev’s 2006 trip to North Korea, which is organized into four chapters of photography and candid notes culled from his time there. I was happy to still find it online, unlike some other older gems of the evanescent internet—link rot is real, folks; archive your favorites.

North Korea. Part I. Main Details
North Korea. Part II. Defense
North Korea. Part III. Visual Culture
North Korea. Part IV. Roads and Transportation

If you are a design fogey like myself, you might know Lebedev as founder of Art. Lebedev Studio—creator of stream deck progenitor, the Optimus Maximus Keyboard, among other strong works—but he has an interesting travel journal as well. Lebedev is one of the few people to have visited all 193 member countries of the United Nations, having reached that accomplishment in 2015.

Flickr user inimini revels in nature, at least that is what I interpret from her photography collection. Her photostream is just rich with rock-laden coastlines;  fantastical, buttressing forests; primitive life that blurs the archaic lines between flora & fauna; and attentive studies of nature’s intricacies.

One such photographic study is found in her album of composite organisms: a love letter, as it were, to lichen. In these macro captures, inimini details an elegant beauty within the creature’s many complex meshes and tendrils. 

via Thinx

Australian conceptual photographer Jane Long combined elements from her own photographic stock with an early-20th-century photo of a young girl [top] to create this dreamy work.

The source of the original public domain photograph is the digital archive of Costică Acsinte, a Romanian who acted as both pilot and official war photographer in WWII. Post wartime, he opened his own studio in Slobozia, and his beautiful archive of Industrial Age portraiture is certainly worth a long, lingering visit on its own merit.

Long has been experimenting with more from Acsinte’s collection, which you can find on her Facebook timeline.

The dreamlike “hyper-collages” of American artist Jim Kazanjian are all improvised, digital patchworks of found photography. At no point in his process does Kazanjian employ his camera to capture “just the right’ element. Rather, he relies solely on the organic exercise of allowing each freshly-discovered photographic portion to inform the terminal direction of the whole.

via Dezeen

What a great photo of travelers hiking along the Mer de Glace glacier in the French Alps, 1867. BBC credits William England as photographer.

Here is another colorized photo of a different group traversing the same area thirty-five years later, in 1902.

via r/HistoryPorn

Austere human experience depicted beautifully in this arresting photograph by Swiss designer & photographer, Elena Rast.

Powerful imagery of War’s Children by Steve McCurry, a photographer who needs no introduction. The scenes above were captured in Lebanon, Cambodia, and Afganistan.

Polish artist Michał Karcz uses photography and digital effects to create breathtakingly-moody, dreamlike worlds.

You can find some of his more recent work on his Facebook page.

via Imgur

Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style, by American artist Nina Katchadourian, from her Seat Assignment series. This is the kind of impulsive play that keeps us cognitively limber: seeing the unorthodox connections between objects, people, situations, and abstractions, no matter where you are, or how dull your surroundings. 

As explained by the artist:

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. I was wearing a thin black scarf that I sometimes hung up on the wall behind me to create the deep black ground that is typical of these portraits. There is no special illumination in use other than the lavatory’s own lights and all the images are shot hand-held with the camera phone. At the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the photos were framed in faux-historical frames and hung on a deep red wall reminiscent of the painting galleries in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

via @BibliOdyssey