Category: Light

Soulful Stargazing: Photography by Nadia Maria

Nadia Maria is a photographer based in Bauru, Sao Paulo, who creates dark, figurative images that capture stories of emotional pain, awakening, and transformation. Featured here is a series of her images depicting nude men and women enmeshed in constellation-like patterns, looking skyward, or curled up and charted out like geometric equations. Contrasting light with […]

Patterns of Sorrow in the Photography of Misha Gordin

Misha Gordin is a conceptual photographer born in Latvia during the Soviet occupation. Over the course of several decades, Gordin has produced stunning images using shadows, shapes, and crowds, distilling the gamut of human experience into a single, piercing moment. Recurring themes include fear and alienation, resistance and collapse, the struggle for identity in a […]

The Baroque Dreamers: Photography by Aitor Frías & Cecilia Jiménez

Elegant chiaroscuro hands are depicted in Aitor Frías & Cecilia Jiménez’s photograph, “The Clay and the Potter”—a Baroque study that was published in Vogue Italia. Other series like “Dreamers” and “The Waiting” hint their recurring inspiration in 17th-century art, the latter playing with light and shadows in a manner that resembles the work of 20th-century master […]

Tales of Love and Despair: Photography by Elena Helfrecht

Note: Contains nudity. The work of German photographer Elena Helfrecht is like emotional alchemy, combining dark symbols to unearth visions of beauty and despair. Inspired by the folklore and forest landscapes of Bavaria, her photos often include sylvan imagery, the moon, nude bodies, shadowed rooms, and the co-relation between life and death, dreams and awakening. […]

10 Visually Stunning Movies with Neon Lighting

Neon lighting was invented in the early 1900s and was used throughout the century, mostly for advertising purposes. One immediately pictures New York’s Time Square lit up at night. In the movies, it often feels like cinematographers and directors discovered neon lighting in the 1980s. But that’s not quite true. There was a resurgence in […]

Takashi Kitajima’s Dazzling Bokeh Photography of Tokyo

Having spoken with Takashi Kitajima about his beautiful pictures of Tokyo in 2013, it is now a good time to follow-up and see what else he is photographing at night. This computer software engineer says he “hardly goes out. Strikes keyboards every morning to midnight,” but apparently when he is outdoors, it’s the right hour […]

Electrifying Body Paintings Viewed Under Black Light

Note: Contains nudity. These bright-colored visuals could have been projection mappings on bodies, but that would be too simple a task for photographer John Poppleton. Instead, he uses UV paints to illustrate auroras, nebulae, and Californian dreamin’ sunsets on various female models. His work is striking for its cosmic color palette and high-contrast images which […]

21 Artists Share Their Vision of the Near Future

Note: Contains nudity. Inside the Gulbenkian museum you start off viewing a round meteorite hanging from the ceiling (titled “Teoria“/Theory by Eduardo T. Basualdo). You can almost touch it, but probably decide not to stay under the heavy rock in case it breaks loose over you. The artwork’s label states it is made from aluminum foil, […]

The Last Dance of Midsummer

“If it only could be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruits always ripe…” Beautiful words from Evelyn Waugh’s classic text, “Brideshead Revisited,” which perfectly captures the fleeting joys of a short, Northern summer. This is a concept that photographer Yume Cyan understands fully. In her midsummer-style images, circles of golden light dance across the […]