Leslie Ann O’Dell is a self-taught contemporary artist from Denver, Colorado, who uses photography and digital manipulation to produce haunting portraits. Inspired by the “subconscious, empathy for the wrong, [and] people who dream,” her imagery is both delicate and disturbing. Sensual bodies explode into floral arrangements resembling viscera and dripping blood, summoning shadowy mythologies of […]
Category: Portraits
Utopian Fairy Tale Images by Sturmideenkind
Sturmideenkind (Sina Domke) is a fine-art photographer based in Germany. The visions she composes are both mythic and poetic, featuring models garbed in ethereal robes as they interact privately with vast natural landscapes. Like utopian fairy tales, her images speak to the sensitivity and strength of the human soul, creating stories and visions of stunning […]
Flower Lines: Beautiful New Photographs by Alva Bernadine
British photographer Alva Bernadine is no stranger to our magazine. We’ve featured his “Succubus” and “Reflect Upon This” series before, both of which are provocative for the ways in which they fragment and distort the body. However, in his newest series, titled “Flower Lines,” Bernadine has highlighted the beauty and curiosity of the body in […]
Solitude and Melancholia: The World of Gabriel Isak
Gabriel Isak is a New-York-based (Sweden-born) artist known for his minimalist, introspective, and dreamlike portraits. We’ve featured his work before, but his evocative portfolio deserves a renewed examination. Using a combination of photography and digital editing, Isak distills the soul into melancholic simplicity. Solitary figures gaze out to empty horizons bathed in moonlight, or confront […]
10 Fascinating Photographers to Follow on Instagram
When Instagram launched in October 2010, it was billed as an app for photo sharing and championed pictures captured through a lens. Within a square (and only square) frame, users could share their lives with selected filters that altered the photo like a pair of rose-colored glasses. With the focus on photography, it’s no wonder that […]
The Sinking World: Magical Photomontages by Andreas Franke
Andreas Franke is an award-winning commercial photographer based in Vienna. After diving in the Caribbean, he was inspired to create art that both expressed the beauty of the ocean, and interacted directly with it. The resulting series is called “The Sinking World,” starting with composite photographs that combine underwater shots with studio images of costumed […]
Moody, Symbolic Street Art by Dan Ferrer
Dan Ferrer is a self-taught street artist and illustrator from Spain. His colorful, large-scale works are symbolic and surreal with touches of photorealism; no matter what public surface he is working on, Ferrer uses color and composition to create lifelike characters with realistic skin tones, textures, and expressions. His works carry deep meanings, often derived […]
Sorrow, Healing, and Peace: Visuals by Martin Stranka
Martin Stranka is a photographer whose atmospheric images walk the line between dreams and awakening. His journey as a photographer began 10 years ago, following the tragic loss of someone close to him. “I felt like I had to express my self somehow,” he explains. “I felt like I needed to find something like a […]
I Must Be Dead: Vibrant and Surreal Portrait Photography
I Must Be Dead (McKay Jaffe) is a Phoenix-based photographer creating mind-blowing portraits of unusual characters. Using body paint and makeup, he and the subjects construct scenes of fantasy and nightmare, invoking conflicting feelings of sensuality, intrigue, and unease. Subversive by nature—for example, Jaffe views being human as a “program,” wherein people are “designed to […]
Animals Being Human: Photography by Darren Holmes
In “Animals Being Human,” photographer Darren Holmes captures people in the liminal space between rationality and physicality—that is, between humanity and animality. The sets resemble something from a child’s room, with messily painted props and a general state of disarray, and the models—their bodies painted or cardboard-clad—embody an ambiguous playfulness that is both innocent and […]