Editorial

Quick Honey, call 911, my pancake stack is coming back!

Bill Sullivan Turnstile Photos

Photographer Bill Sullivan wanted to remove himself from the process of taking a photograph--other than setting up the circumstances under which they'd be taken.  He traps his subjects--apparently big city commuters--in a moment of temporary imprisonment in a metro turnstile.  They don't know they're being photographed and wear the blank, bored expressions the world is full of (yet so rarely seen in any media, perhaps because no one looks that way when they know it's being recorded).  His description:

At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet. I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.

See the rest of Bill's work at his site.

100 lives in 100 rooms

Link: MICHAEL WOLF | PHOTOGRAPHY | HONGKONG .

There is something bizarrely compelling about this photo essay of Hong Kong's oldest public housing complex:  one hundred residents each live in rooms ten feet long by ten feet wide.  Michael Wolf photographed every one of them. 

Although we all know we live in an enormous world of billions of souls, we cannot possibly conceive of all those lives happening simultaneously.  But this essay helps us try.  For here in this one building, in one city, one hundred lives are lived, each with their own cook pot, shoes, bed. 

The photo essay also calls into question our ideas about material wealth.  Whether you believe you have a lot or a little depends so much on how your define those terms.  Many of the residents here seem proud to show off their rooms, and not at all ashamed of what Americans would consider woeful poverty. 

Thanks to David Pogue for the heads up.