Have you ever imagined yourself living in Ikea? Well, Photographer Christian Gideon and his friends decided to make belief for one day. They went and took shots of them doing normal life shores & activities in Ikea, from sleeping on beds to cooking and dishwashing. Take a look below, really funny:
JR as he would like to be known is a Parisian Photographer who found his camera in Paris Subway and from there decided to make the world his gallery. He exhibits his colossal Prints of human faces on buildings, buses, monuments. Each work has a statement, a message that would contribute as a step to turn the world around, or rather inside out.
“I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we’ll turn the world…INSIDE OUT.” JR
His identity, for security reasons, is unknown. Another Banksy that proved through graffiti we can send large messages that all people can see and read. Today he is a winner of the TED Prize 2011, and his work proves to be worthy of the award.
One of his famous projects is “Women Are Heroes” 2008 a project underlining the dignity of women who are the target of conflict. Several Monumental Photo of women were plastered on houses and buildings in Africa, Brazil, India & Cambodia.
Another interesting Project is “Face 2 Face” 2007. In this project JR posted HUGE portraits of both Israelis & Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on both sides of the security fence/separation barrier.
As he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter.
This is what JR is working on. Raising questions...
James Morrison created several windows into different children’s bedroom in his book “Where Children Sleep”. The Difference between the rooms is striking, each tells a story of its occupant and reflects the economical status of the family and the country. An interesting and eye-opening project, that shows the lavishness and poverty kids live in. A lot can be told about the story of each kid when looking at their rooms.
Lamine (above), 12, lives in Senegal. He is a pupil at the village Koranic school, where no girls are allowed. He shares a room with several other boys. The beds are basic, some supported by bricks for legs. At six every morning, the boys begin work on the school farm where they learn how to dig, harvest maize, and plow the fields using donkeys. In the afternoon, they study the Koran. In his free time, Lamine likes to play football with his friends.
Tzvika, nine, lives in an apartment block in Beitar Illit, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. It is a gated community of 36,000 Haredi (Orthodox) Jews. Televisions and newspapers are banned from the settlement. The average family has nine children, but Tzvika has only one sister and two brothers, with whom he shares his room. He is taken by car to school, a two-minute drive. Sport is banned from the curriculum. Tzvika goes to the library every day and enjoys reading the holy scriptures. He also likes to play religious games on his computer. He wants to become a rabbi, and his favorite food is schnitzel and chips.
Jamie, nine, lives with his parents and younger twin brother and sister in a penthouse on 5th Avenue, New York. Jamie goes to a prestigious school and is a good student. In his spare time, he takes judo and goes swimming. He loves to study finance. When he grows up, he wants to become a lawyer like his father.
Indira, seven, lives with her parents, brother, and sister near Kathmandu in Nepal. Her house has only one room, with one bed, and one mattress. At bedtime, the children share the mattress on the floor. Indira has worked at the local granite quarry since she was three. The family is very poor so everyone has to work. There are 150 other children working at the quarry. Indira works six hours a day and then helps her mother with household chores. She also attends school, a 30-minute walk away. Her favorite food is noodles. She would like to be a dancer when she grows up.
Kaya, four, lives with her parents in a small apartment in Tokyo, Japan. Her bedroom is lined from floor to ceiling with clothes and dolls. Kaya’s mother makes all her dresses – Kaya has 30 dresses and coats, 30 pairs of shoes, and numerous wigs. When she goes to school, she has to wear a school uniform. Her favorite foods are meat, potatoes, strawberries, and peaches. She wants to be a cartoonist when she grows up.
Douha, 10, lives with her parents and 11 siblings in a Palestinian refugee camp in Hebron, in the West Bank. She shares a room with her five sisters. Douha attends a school, a 10-minute walk away, and wants to be a paediatrician. Her brother, Mohammed, killed himself and 23 civilians in a suicide attack against the Israelis in 1996. Afterwards, the Israeli military destroyed the family home. Douha has a poster of Mohammed on her wall.
Dong, nine, lives in Yunnan province in south-west China with his parents, sister, and grandfather. He shares a room with his sister and parents. The family own just enough land to grow their own rice and sugarcane. Dong’s school is a 20-minute walk away. He enjoys writing and singing. Most evenings, he spends one hour doing his homework and one hour watching television. When he is older, Dong would like to be a policeman.
Home for this boy and his family is a mattress in a field on the outskirts of Rome, Italy. The family came from Romania by bus, after begging for money to pay for their tickets. When they arrived in Rome, they camped on private land, but the police threw them off. They have no identity papers, so they cannot obtain legal work. The boy’s parents clean car windscreen at traffic lights. No one from his family has ever been to school.
Roathy, eight, lives on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. His home sits on a huge rubbish dump. Roathy’s mattress is made from old tires. Five thousand people live and work here. At six every morning, Roathy and hundreds of other children are given a shower at a local charity center before they start work, scavenging for cans and plastic bottles, which are sold to a recycling company. Breakfast is often the only meal of the day.
Nantio, 15, is a member of the Rendille tribe in northern Kenya. She has two brothers and two sisters. Her home is a tent-like dome made from cattle hide and plastic, with little room to stand. There is a fire in the middle, around which the family sleeps. Nantio’s chores include looking after goats, chopping firewood, and fetching water. She went to the village school for a few years but decided not to continue. Nantio is hoping a moran (warrior) will select her for marriage. She has a boyfriend now, but it is not unusual for a Rendille woman to have several boyfriends before marriage. First, she will have to undergo circumcision, as is the custom.
Photographs & Text from “Where Children Sleep” by James Morrison.
Elizabeth Taylor in Iran
In 1976, Elizabeth Taylor took her first and only trip to Iran, photographer Firooz Zahedi in tow. The captivating, exotically colorful pictures that resulted will debut this month at lacma; the untold story of Zahedi and Taylor’s artistic and personal adventure.
“It was like finding an undiscovered monument – a Machu Picchu of your own.” Frédéric Chaubin
” Frédéric Chaubin was wandering through a market in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 2003 when an old book snared his eye. Although unable to read the words, the French photographer was mesmerised by the images it contained. Chronicling 70 years of post-revolution architecture, the book featured an extraordinary collection of buildings that drew on an extraordinary collection of styles: as well as the Soviet schools of suprematism (a controlled explosion of geometric forms) and constructivism (wild projections, provocative angles), there was a strong western undercurrent, with echoes of everything from Alvar Aalto and Antoni Gaudí to Oscar Niemeyer. And running through all this was a thrilling element of Soviet over-reaching, a hint of sputniks, space rockets and flying saucers. Chaubin was hooked. And so began a seven-year odyssey to seek out and photograph some of the Soviet era’s most unusual architectural creations, many now under threat… ” [The Guardian]
“Portraiture in the past has been regarded as a documentation of a person but for me it is a documentation of the encounter between myself and the subject. It is not meant to reveal them, nor is it meant to subject them to an X-ray; it is a departure from that. I am more interested in the alchemical reaction that occurs when elements are brought together in a space.
Not so much a collaboration between photographer and subject, more a scientific experiment – the studio becomes a lab. For me the portrait is not psychological either. It is atomic. Atoms change their electrical charge continuously, and the more challenging the shoot, the greater the chance of this charge. Yes, I do begin with an idea, a series of ideas that link together logically. But logic is often superseded by events beyond my control.
Art starts as a means of control but the atoms that compose us can spin in a different direction. When you see Madonna in a series of these images, she is neither a perfected icon nor is she revealed instead she remains ambiguous. I feel the obsession with celebrities is for the most part based on a tired need to know oneself through the other, and perhaps the concept of knowing oneself is all deluded.
There is a desire to link photography with painting. My background is painting and I feel there is no connection between the two. It is as if the camera is linked to a sin, producing a bastard art form that we feel we must link to the past in order to give it credentials. I don’t want those credentials. I have no need to apologize for photography. My archives exist only for sound business reasons; otherwise my work would be disposable. And there lies the contradiction, for I am a private person not an exhibitionist, I am a person who lives for the future, not the past; I am standing behind a camera in order that I can extend myself in front of it. “
Let the photos speak of greatness…
“I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” – James Nachtwey
ARTSIE ARTSY 
