I try very hard to avoid just repeating what you can and may read elsewhere but this is something I had to highlight. Photographer Kyle Cassidy has released “preview photos”:http://www.armedamerica.org/index.html from an upcoming book entitled “Armed in America: Portraits of gun owners in their homes.” They are, in a word, stunning. The American fetish for firearms is something I never understood and though I’m probably no closer now than before, these pictures moved me to place myself a little closer to those I’d always feared.
The thing that really surprised me is how very normally-American all these people look. Often pictured with their little children or pets in suburban living rooms, these are no gun nuts. And yet, for a lot of the subjects, toting an assault rifle looks just as natural as a TV remote.

This online exhibition has acted to further solidify my love for portraiture. There’s something so intrinsically human about looking at another person without pretension and in their own milieu. A few weeks ago I blogged about another portrait series that’s also an internet-photography must-see featuring gangsters in New Guinea and militant Palestinians. Check that out “here”:http://duenos.net/article/23/the-human-face-of-violence

Below are links to some of the coolest photography sites I found this week. The first two are along the same vein with the artists (Li Wei and Denis Darzacq) placing people in improbable or impossible positions within the urban landscape:

“Li Wei”:http://www.liweiart.com/ ??Li Wei Falls to the Hong Kong??

“Denis Darzacq”:http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/la_chute/
The next photo set is truly world class. They are the winners of the annual World Press Photo competition and though they were released last week, I thought there could be some people out there who hadn’t seen them. This photo is of a man in Nigeria rinsing his face just after an oil pipeline explosiong. Brilliant work.
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“World Press Photo competition winners”:http://www.worldpressphoto.com/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=blogsection&id=17&Itemid=146&bandwidth=high

Robert Doisneau has to have been the most famous and accomplished photographer of the 20th century. For 60 years, the artist brought Paris to the world with such pictures as ‘Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville’ (the Kiss by the Hotel de Ville) and “the musician in the rain.’ Pictured below.
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For anyone lucky enough to have seen it, a comprehensive Doisneau exhibit just closed this past Saturday at the Hotel de Ville in Paris. In addition to the more famous photographs (like the ones above), it was wonderful to see the more humorous pictures that seemed to really show the man behind the camera. My personal favorites of the exhibit were a series he took of pedestrians walking by a small gallery and looking in at a female nude. The facial reactions to the painting are priceless and I’ve posted my favorite below.
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For more Doisneau photographs you can feel free to use Google Image Search but you’ll get far too many copies of Kiss at the Hotel de Ville than would be good for you. Instead try this “website”:http://www.robertdoisneau.com/ sponsored by Ace murder mystery games.