Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek captured the striking dress codes of various social groups in Rotterdam’s heterogeneous, multicultural street scene. They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude:

By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

This is on my list for my next visit to Paris! Chambre avec Vues exhibits work of Ambroise Tézenas (until March 3, 2007).

French photographer Ambroise Tézenas won the Leica European Publishers Award for Photography for his project “Pekin, Le Théâtre du People,” a series of stunning color pictures capturing the changing landscape of Bejing.

There’s are some pictures of the project on his website, but I think they look far better in the book he published about it.

Federico Martinez from the State of Puebla works as a taxi driver in New York.He Sends 250 dollars a week.

This is a great project by Mexican photographer Dulcé Pinzón. “Superheroes” is a tribute to Mexican immigrant workers in New York:

This project consists of 20 color photographs of Mexican immigrants dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their work environment, and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown in Mexico, the number of years they have been working in New York, and the amount of money they send to Mexico each week.

(via Swissmiss)

Toycamera.com proves great photography doesn’t necessarily need to cost much. As the site explains:

We’re all about Plastic Cameras. Cameras called “Holga”, “Diana”, “Dories”, “Debonair”, “Lubitel”, “Banner” “Snappy” and “Yunon”. They’re cheap, maddening, fascinating plastic pieces of crap. Many people hate them, they think they’re junk, worthless, a waste of time. But we love them. We can’t stop talking about them. We just can’t shut up at all. We like the lack of sharpness, we appreciate the light leaks, we find the poor viewfinders amusing.
[…]
We hope to inspire you, dear viewer, to become a Plastic Camera devotee as well, so put down that Nikon, shelve those Canons, liquidate that Blad and join us on our quest for the “Image Sublime”. The Search for the Photograph that is more than the sum of its parts. Where photography regains a bit of its Magic and is no longer a mere technical exercise. This is a place where any and all can take photographs that have personal meaning. Whatever that might be.

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I quite liked this “Tower of Babel” project by Danish photographer Simon Høgsberg. Too bad he stopped working on it…:

One month each year for the last four years I have been working on a photo-project in New York called The Tower of Babel. Last Summer I gave up the project because I reached the conclusion that the theme the project was based on was too weak. This series of photographs is part of The Tower of Babel-project.

He has another nice project called “Faces of New York“, where 10 New Yorkers talk about their faces:

Once in a while we see a person in the street who immediately attracts our attention. We are fascinated by the appearance of the person and feel a strong urge to walk over and say hi.

I spent one month, seven hours a day, walking the streets of New York in search for people who had this effect on me. I found ten, and asked each of them the same question: What do you think about your face?

A user contributed tutorial at Stock.xchng to get retro colors in Photoshop:

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It kind of looks as if he’s drowned his pictures in Photoshop, but still a nice portfolio by Ciril Jazbec, a young Slovenian photographer.

Tim Dirven is a well-gifted Belgian photographer. He started his career as a freelancer but now works fulltime for the daily Flemish newspaper De Morgen. Check out his amazing series about China and Bangladesh at timdirven.com:

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Normally you go the other way ’round, but this tutorial shows you how to deliberately “antique” a digital image. I tried it on an image of mine (left is the original, right the “antique” version):

This is a great little place to nose around: del.icio.us/adobe. As Adobe explains:

Looking for some great new Adobe Photoshop tutorials or maybe some amazing Adobe ActionScript samples? Adobe is now tagging useful sites and tutorials using a del.icio.us account, so that we can share our favorite links with you.

I particularly like the Photoshop section. Adobe also accepts link suggestions from other delicious users so it’s a great place to look for tutorials, plugins, resources etc…

I haven’t tried it yet, but its features seem quite promising. Time.com reports:

Just when you thought online photo sharing couldn’t get any better, along came YouRep. Like popular photo community flickr, YouRep lets you upload and tag your photos or search through other people’s shots. But its interface is arguably easier to use, and special features like photos on a map are easier to find. Most importantly, it provides two gigabytes of free storage space—100 times more than flickr’s free account—and gives you a share of the revenue made from ads placed on pages with your photos. Flickr’s community aspect feel isn’t here yet, but YouRep is still new: I predict it will eventually give flickr a run for its money. (Source: Time top 10 list of websites in 2006)

Try it out at yourep.com.

Martin Santander is a photographer born in Argentina but now based in Brussels, Belgium. I got to know his work when I saw an exhibition of “Les Ferailleurs”, a fantastic portrait of a family who collects and sells used pieces of iron.

His latest work features a series of pictures he made during several trips to Island. It’s on display at I.S.E.L.P (Brussels) until January 13th 2007.

Nice little portfolio over at silmonia.com, by a young photographer named Silmonia Paris. I was even more impressed when I read that she uses a simple Canon Ixy pocket camera.

PopPhoto has an interesting interview with Joel Meyerowitz on how he prints his photographs:

Meyerowitz, who taught himself Photoshop when it was just three versions old, has experimented with many inkjet printers to see if they can deliver the depth and tonal delicacy he prefers. None satisfied him until the arrival of the HP Designjet 130, an affordable dye-based model that produces 24-inch-wide prints with HP’s Vivera six-color inkset. Meyerowitz now uses this printer and its 13-inch, nine-ink cousin, the HP Photosmart 8750, for nearly all of his printing projects. […]

“The secret to my success with the Designjet 130 is HP Premium Plus Satin inkjet printing paper. It’s an extraordinary invention. The paper has six layers, and the top layer incorporates some kind of nanotechnology that causes it to open up when a hot, wet droplet of ink hits it. The paper swallows the dye into a layer below the surface; that layer is shielded from the layer beneath it by a buffer. Beneath the buffer is a brilliant white layer that reflects light back through the ink. After the ink hits the paper’s top layer, it seals up so that it’s impermeable to atmospheric elements.

Pemium Plus Satin really looks like a traditional photographic paper in its surface properties. Among other things, it defeats bronzing, which for me has been the death knell of inkjet papers.”