Happy Hog Rot

Friend and fellow photographer John just helped me discover a great photojournalist in AFP’s prize-winning Olivier Laban-Mattei of France.

See a sample of his work at http://portfolios.afp.com/photographer/olivier-laban-mattei.html.

Also, his images from Iran following the recent election are appearing almost everywhere, including here.

This week we commemorated the 65th anniversary of D-Day in Europe. Most of us are familiar with the Omaha Beach landing photographs of Robert Capa, regarded as perhaps the greatest war photographer of the era.  One of my very favorite blogs, DesignObserver, has unearthed some rare documentation from that time by a soldier-artist named Manuel Bromberg. Go there and see more and read the fascinating back story.

Friend John sends along a link — passed to him, I gather, by a participant in the photo shoot — of Felice Arenas’ portraits, coupled with appropo Ernest Hemingway quotes, that try to go beyond Hemingway’s challenge of avoiding big words to convey emotion.

This one hit home. Literally. As a native rural Iowan and decades-long fan of Robert Frank (who wrote an introduction for this project, and whose The Americans book of mid-fifties photographs seems to be a definite spiritual predecessor), I was immediately taken away with this work by fellow Iowan Danny Wilcox Frazier. You can also see pieces from this project — and much more great photojournalism — at the New York Times’ wonderful Lens site, fast becoming one of my very favorite Web destinations.

This year’s Pultizer Prize in feature photography was won by Damon Winter of the New York TImes for his work covering the Obama campaign. Read about Winter and see a gallery of his work.

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture today is publishing the most gorgeous images I have seen yet from NASA. These document the Cassini spacecraft visit to Saturn.

Also see NASA’s Cassini pages.