“A great deal of things inspire my work. History, for the most part, sums it up rather well. What has happened, within and without, universally, and what has yet to happen but will be documented by time. That being said, I have never experienced this history firsthand, so the visual aesthetic of my work is due to my lucid dreams and vivid nightmares. I feel as though I need to document them in some way that others may experience what I have seen. [....]That aside, women influence my photos. Women are sexy. Women are seductive, powerful from the core in a wild way that’s virtually inexplicable. I like to document that sexuality.” (via Ben Trovato)

Although I am not in love with every single image (some seem stuck between going over the top and appearing natural ), Sofia Ajram does take an excitingly dreamy photograph. View more of her work on Flickr.

posted by: Tricia Rock

From: Oil Rich Niger Delta 2003-2007

George Osodi was born in Lagos, Nigeria and is now a freelance photographer based in London.

Follow the links below to learn more about each individual series photographed by George Osodi. The links will take you to the first photo in the series, to read the artist’s statement for the series click the link above the image.

Oil Rich Niger Delta
Lagos Uncelebrated

From: Oil Rich Niger Delta 2003-2007

From: Oil Rich Niger Delta 2003-2007

From: Lagos Uncelebrated

From: Ghana Gold Prospecting

posted by: Brent Carter

“Little Girl”

Daniela Edburg was born in Houston, TX in 1975. She grew up in San Miguel Allende and studied Visual Arts at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City.

“The Atomics”

See more of Edburg’s work here

posted by: Harold Johns III

Featured here is the polaroid work of Minneapolis-based artist Lauren Treece. To see more of her polaroid, illustration, mixed/diorama and photo/print work check out her:

Website
Blog
Flickr

posted by: Tricia Rock

Camilla Åkrans is a fashion photographer from Sweden currently working in New York. Click on the photos to learn more about where they were originally published and check out more of Camilla Åkrans’ work

on Models.com
on LUNDLUND
on The Fashion Spot

I also became a little obsessed with her editorial for the June-July issue of Harper’s Bazaar US, I literally tore out every page for my wall. See the images here.

posted by: Tricia Rock

According to Donny Mahoney, The Fader Magazine, issue No. 57:

Roam just four miles north of the Liffey and the frenetic buzzing of boomtown Dublin gives way to the hollowed-out urban desert that is Ballymun. Known affectionately as The Mun, Ballymun flats is the most flagrant example of Irish social planning gone awry. In the late 1960s, seven fifteen-story towers, each named for an Irish revolutionary, were built on farmland near Dublin Airport. The government’s plan was to clear out inner city Dublin’s tawdry, teeming slums, but it provided the area with no infrastructure–no jobs, no stores. Ballymun’s decline was swift and dramatic.

Dublin burns on Halloween night. Each year, as the Irish pagan celebration of the dead is revisited with firecrackers and gasoline-stoked bonfires, the lurking menace of the city is uncorked. In 2006, Ross McDonnell was photographing one such blaze when he was approached by a kid in a tracksuit drinking a bottle of Budweiser.

“Here mister, you want to see something mental?” the kid asked. McDonnell was escorted to a derelict building known as The Block that local teenagers had transformed into a “mix of Mad Max and New Jack City.” From that night, McDonnell began documenting the lives of the youths who grew up in shadows of Ballymun’s towers, inside crumbling buildings and the surrounding wasteland, where cheap thrills and illicit rituals turn boys into men. “These pictures document the transition from anti-social behavior to criminality, from childhood to adulthood without a ‘youth’ in between,” says McDonnell.

Nothing quite typifies this abandon like the nightly pursuit that gives this piece its name. In practice, joyriding involves robbing a car from one of Ballymun’s housing estates, racing it down residential roads while dodging stoplights and Garda cars, before finally burning it beyond recognition. There is no material gain in joyriding, only the sheer, fleeting pleasure of speed and destruction. McDonnell envisions joyriding as a philosophical response to life lived in the cracks of Irish society. The subjects of these photos are “kids who are willing to dive into a world of drugs and guns, kids without any fear of prison, of fatherhood, of violence,” McDonnell says. “It’s a short life, a joyride all the way.”

See more of McDonnell’s photography here

posted by: Harold Johns III