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Maleonn Ma is a Chinese photographer/creative director from Shanghai. In addition to working on some major films in China, he also creates these artsy images of naked Chinese men in alternate realities. Continue reading for some more beautiful/eerie images of men with elaborate flowerbeds and gardens of balloons.
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We've been huge fans of Richard Kadrey's writing ever since we read his seminal cyberpunk novel Metrophage, and we've been lucky enough to hear him read several times from his stories of the bizarre sex lives of mutant assassins. So we were thrilled when we found out he also creates gorgeous, disturbing fetish art under the name Kaos Beauty Klinik. His breathtaking work — including women with actual tentacles and gorgeous women who are masked and mysterious — reminds us of the freakish beauty of Joel Peter Witkin's art. Click through for a (NSFW) gallery.
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photography
If you have too many cars on the freeway, the best thing to do is go vertical and build a skyscraper road system. Here is one possible way to do that, layering roads on top of each other until the traffic thins out. Perfect for Los Angeles, where it often takes three hours to cross town on the freeways. [Core Form-ula via Next Nature]
During the Vietnam War, world-famous photographers like Marc Riboud and Eddie Adams captured iconic (and traumatic) moments on film. In 2008, most war photographs are created by embedded journalists whose images are tightly controlled. So British photographer Mike Stimpson decided to make his contribution to the repository of war photography by staging mock Vietnam-era moments using Lego. This one, based on a 1967 protest in Washington, DC, stars Stormtrooper Legos as the US Army. See, it looks just like the original image.
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The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, has just announced the winners of its 2008 imaging contest. Above is my favorite, a picture of a microscopic blood vessel that has ruptured. You can see single red blood cells slowly leaking out. This was taken by Anne Weston, with a scanning electron micrograph. She says the rupture "is due to a mutation in the ephrin-B2 gene that causes the blood vessels to be more fragile than normal leading to an increased rate of haemorrhaging . . . This kind of leaky blood vessel is frequently found in tumours and in certain other human diseases. " Below, we've got a couple more of the winners.
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Photoimagist Carl Warner depicts what the apocalypse and beyond might look like in a captivating series of food shots staged to look like scenery. In this piece, a black olive-and-watermelon ship sails through a sea of cabbage seeking revenge on vegetarians who have virtually annihilated the entire fruit and vegetable population. More vegetable landscapes below.
photography
This strange photo is of a real place, but it looks like it was photoshopped it like crazy. In fact, it wasn't. By combining strips from 100 photographs of the same thing into a particular kind of pattern, photographer Alan Grinberg has invented an entirely new photographic technique he calls Intervalography. Find out how the trippy, stuttering effect was achieved after the jump.
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No, we haven't obtained early concept art from the sequel to Cloverfield. This structure is the home of an actually-existing seaside dweller on Earth. What kind of creature builds such a facehugger-esque structure?
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space porn
space porn
Extranoise creates what he calls "enhanced reality" photographs, shots of real-life places that he turns into strange, CGI-looking hyperreality. How does he make an abandoned factory look like one of the glowing set pieces from video game Portal? He uses tone mapping to make their colors pop and glow surrealistically. Want to see more of his reality-based dreamscapes?
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Every science fiction lover starts out by taking the world around them apart: unscrewing the cover from the cable box, putting shit in the microwave to watch it explode, asking their teachers and parents WHY the dog can't talk, or WHY we have to work for money instead of donuts. That's why this image delights me. Aaron Messing took a foam peanut, sliced it thinly, and put it under the microscope. The result? Beautiful deconstructed foam. [Aaron Messing Microscopy Gallery]
microscopy
Photographer Peter Bialobrzeski used to take bright photos of Asian mega-cities. But a few years ago, he stumbled on something more other-worldly: the ghostly look of an Asian construction site at dusk. Because Asian countries use super-fast construction techniques that aren't found in his native Western Europe, Bialobrzeski saw tons of skeletal structures in the gathering dark, with the occasional sign of nature. We've got a gallery from his Asian Neon Tigers book, and his new book of construction images, Lost In Transition.
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No, these photographs weren't taken by an astrophysicist or whipped up in a special-effects lab. Photographer Larry Alvarez takes these pictures of the sun in his backyard using a camera, a telescope, and some homemade gear. With some tips from Alvarez, you can build your own solar telescope camera, too.
photography
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