Photography

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Photography

Brendon Burton Captures Moments of Nostalgia and Wonder in North America’s Most Isolated Places

Growing up in an isolated community, photographer Brendon Burton developed an eye for the way decaying buildings nestle into the landscape or punctuate vast expanses. Now based primarily in Portland, Oregon, he travels around the U.S. in search of rural places that are culturally worlds apart from major urban centers, seemingly existing on their own timelines. Like his series Thin Places, his recent body of work titled Interstices—to which some of these images belong—emphasizes the notion of liminality, advancing time, and spaces for passing through.

Utilizing drones to achieve dramatic aerial views in addition to intimate perspectives shot from ground level, Burton highlights the relationships between the built environment and wilderness, ancestry and life cycles, and presence and local traditions. “I recently visited the Deep South for the first time and documented Courir de Mardi Gras in a rural Cajun community in Louisiana,” he says. “It was truly an insane event, and the people I met were so kind and welcoming. I definitely will be visiting the South again soon.”

Burton is currently working on a second photo book focusing on the effects of the climate crisis and cultural isolation in rural communities throughout North America. As for future trips, he is headed to Saskatchewan and Manitoba this summer, then rural Appalachia in the autumn. Prints are available on his website, and you can find more on Instagram.

 

Photography

Through Lush Aerial Photos, Pham Huy Trung Documents the Rich Textures and Colors of Vietnam’s Agriculture

Photographer Pham Huy Trung (previously) continues to spotlight the agricultural rituals of his native Vietnam through aerial images captured in vivid detail. Interested in annual harvests of grass, water hyacinths, and other crops tended to around the country, Pham often documents farmers working in the Mekong Delta, a wet coastal region that fosters a robust aquaculture.

Some of his most recent photos center on those gathering lush vegetation in the fields, while others take viewers to the next step in the production cycle, glimpsing the vibrant buckets and neatly packed rows of fish at the markets. Each photo is rich with organic pattern and texture and celebrates the beauty of the landscape alongside the people who harvest its goods.

Find prints of Pham’s striking works in his shop, and explore a larger archive on Instagram.

 

Photography Science

Explore the Extraordinary Eons-Old Details of the Moon’s Surface in an Astounding 1.3-Gigapixel Composite

For his latest celestial undertaking, Arizona-based astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy turned his lens toward the moon, documenting the Earth’s satellite in astounding detail. As he’s wont to do, McCarthy stitched together a staggering number of images to create a composite so large that it reveals the craggy, pocked surface in extraordinary detail.

“GigaMoon” is, as its name suggests, a 1.3-gigapixel image comprised of 280,000 individual photos captured on two telescopes, one for detail and one for color. Taken on the unusually clear night of April 29 during its waxing gibbous phase, the work reveals a surface rich with history. “Zoom in and see the irregular shapes of sinuous lava tubes, the catastrophic scars from impact craters, monstrous canyons, and towering mountains,” McCarthy says, alluding to the interactive version that allows viewers to magnify different areas. The photographer’s largest image to date, “GigaMoon” offers a rare glimpse into the nighttime orb and the current state of its form after eons in existence.

There are currently a few prints of the work available in his shop, and PetaPixel has all the details on McCarthy’s equipment and process. You can follow his adventures in astronomy on Instagram.

 

Photography

Through Gripping Photos, Ryan Newburn Captures the Depths of Iceland’s Ancient Glacial Caves

“When you look into the walls of an ice cave, you are looking into the past as if you were suddenly inside of a time capsule that had been buried for 500 to 1,000 years,” says Ryan Newburn. “Every air bubble that you see is oxygen from a different time period. Every speckle of ash is from a different volcanic eruption.”

Raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and now based in Reykjavik, Newburn is closely acquainted with the ice caves that surround his adopted home. He first came to Iceland in 2018, training on the enormous Vatnajokull Glacier before working as an expedition guide and eventually launching his own tour company, Ice Pic Journeys, with his fellow American business partner Mike Reid.

Today, Newburn ventures into the frozen caverns with groups, photographing them and the landscape along the way. His images capture the immensity of the arctic masses, their smooth, ribbed surfaces, and the shapely contours of caverns and rivers carving through the ice. Explorers are often seen in the distance, at the end of a rippling, rocky tunnel or precariously posed beneath a cluster of sharp icicles to showcase the scale of the openings.

Occupying such an ancient and always evolving space is an experience that’s difficult to photograph, Newburn shares, because the constant trickle of melting water, the roar of distant rivers, or even the unique interplay of light and glacier are impossible to depict entirely. “Underneath the ice, where the sun cannot penetrate,” he says, “your eyes slowly adjust from the bright sun to the glowing deep blue crystal walls of the ice cave. The more that your eyes adjust, the more saturated the blue gets. It’s a surreal visual experience that you cannot get from any photo of an ice cave.”

 

While shades of blue dominate most of his images, much of the walls are transparent and crystalline, making it appear as if you could “gaze into it for miles.” This clarity, he explains, is because glacial ice has low oxidation, about 10 to 15 percent only, due to the extreme pressure exerted during their formation that forced much of the oxygen from the snow as it compacted.

Although exploring these spaces is dangerous—Newburn emphasizes the necessity of proper gear and a guide who knows the ins and outs of performing crevasse rescues—it’s also an experience that truly only happens once. He elaborates:

What’s even more unreal is realizing that when you discover an ice cave for the very first time, you are the only human that has ever been inside. On a planet where almost every area of land has been explored, the glacier provides you with never-ending caves and structures to discover. This is because the ice is always melting away and forming something new that didn’t exist yesterday and won’t exist next year. This creates an unending sense of wanderlust of what I am going to stumble upon next when exploring.

Newburn shares many of his glacial adventures on Instagram, and you can find more about his company’s expeditions on its site.

 

Food Photography

Tom Hegen’s Aerial Photos of Spanish Olive Groves Reveal Undulating Patterns and Deep Traditions

For millennia, Spain has been leading producer of olives thanks to the Mediterranean climate’s long, hot summers and mild winter temperatures. Harvested and cured in brine or ground up to extract the natural oils, the fruits are grown on trees planted in vast groves that stretch for miles over the undulating landscape. The region of Andalusia in particular boasts a time-honored tradition of olive cultivation, producing and exporting more than any other part of the country. For German photographer Tom Hegen, the rows and grid-like patterns of the groves presented an irresistible subject.

Known for his aerial photos of swaths of earth that have been impacted by human presence, such as salt extraction sites, Florida beaches, and solar plants, Hegen captures expansive Spanish landscapes that when viewed from above, morph into abstractions of pattern and texture. He highlights the immense monocultures that spread over nearly six million acres of Spanish countryside, documenting both large-scale agricultural production and smaller farms managed by individual families for whom producing olive oil is a centuries-old vocation.

Explore more of Hegen’s aerial photography on his website and Instagram.

 

 

Documentary Photography

In Killian Lassablière’s Short Film ‘Kukeri,’ a Centuries-Old Bulgarian Tradition Wards Off Evil Spirits

“Evil is when we don’t want to be together… This is what we do: we banish it so that we can all be together, all equal,” says one of the subjects of Killian Lassablière’s short documentary “Kukeri,” a movingly atmospheric portrait of a centuries-old Bulgarian ritual. Part of The New Yorker Documentary series, the film highlights the cultural practice from the perspective of its participants, known as Kukers, who describe the roots of faith, community, and family that draw them together each spring to ward off evil spirits.

During the annual event, dancers don elaborate animal skin garments, intimidating masks, and huge bells around their waists to appear spectral and huge. For those who participate, it is a calling with mysterious, spiritual ties. “It was innate for me, and it kept growing over the years,” one narrator says. “No one can say why they dressed up as a Kuker for the first time. It has been passed down from generation to generation.” Lassablière focuses on the custom’s ancestral and future appeal, as children dance with their parents and look forward to being able to dance with the big bells.

See the entire film on The New Yorker’s YouTube channel, and find more work by Lassablière on his website. You might also enjoy photographer Charles Freger’s portraits of Kukers and practitioners of similar Eastern European traditions.