The luscious, earth-toned and action-packed photographs of Steven Brahms have a new home in Cyberspace. Go revel in the glory of his new work on his new website. While you’re at it, why not revisit our interview with Brahms from last June?

I drool upon these JPEGs of Takashi Homma‘s classic (and impossibly hard to find) photo series Tokyo Suburbia. These images come from a set of cards promoting Homma’s long out of print book– and the whole set of 10 postcards can be yours for the low, low price of $850! How would it feel to drop an $85 postcard in the mailbox, and how special would the recipient have to be?

Via Nicholas Gottlund of the top-notch publishing house Gottlund Verlag!

William Wylie‘s haunting photo series Carrara documents Italian marble miners and the marble they mine. I appreciate art that makes me think about where things come from, and the people who touched them before us. Carrara pulls back a curtain to reveal the human origin of an alien material we interact with all the time. Hous Projects currently has Wylie’s work on exhibition at the Pacific Design Center– kind of the perfect place to show this series, a building where everything is marble and Italian.

Go read X-TRA magazine’s Deleuzian analysis, if you dare! More chill miners and cool quarries after the jump.

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Men strike peculiar poses against the musty fabric of a past that looks like this: brown, gray, green, orange and also beige (but like, a real 70s beige). Comfortingly formal outerwear calls out your name, patterns and diagrams only obfuscate matters, and a whirlwind of drooping foliage swirls about in a hilarious rural world of leisure and warfare. These are the warmly antiquated found images that people Adam Shuck’s outstanding Tumblr blog, ADAMADAM.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of blogs today primarily act as aggregates for the digital refuse of 100 years of found photographs. Usually, they’re pretty hit or miss– but ADAMADAM is a constant goldmine. It’s so consistently rad in fact, that it was nearly impossible to whittle my favorite images down to the 31 featured in this brief overview. Shuck has developed a sharp curatorial eye over the past two years of squirreling away history on ADAMADAM, and the blog feels almost like an flowing, abstract queer commentary on masculinity’s function in contemporary society, quietly underscored by a sharp sense of humor. Or, you know, it could just be a bunch of weird pictures that are fun to look at.

Shuck also does something incredibly rare in the realm of found-photo blogs: cites sources. Nearly every image he posts is paired with a link back to the page it came from, frequently Flickr archives that can provide useful details about the image’s origin. It’s a small gesture that makes the entire project feel even more generous, and grounded in thoughtful discourse with the past. Now go loseWeight Exercise yourself in ADAMADAM.

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Wow, so the world is kind of fucked up. This isn’t news, but it’s easy to forget— especially when you live in a metropolitan liberal enclave surrounded by like-minded people. It’s easy to feel like everything is okay and prejudice, bigotry and hate are things of the past. It’s 2010! We must be in the future by now, right? But then we’re confronted with disturbing reminders—like the media reporting the suicides of five gay kids in the span of a month—that nope, being gay isn’t “just not a big deal these days.”

So, how do you tackle an intangible problem like “society’s deep-rooted fear and shame of homosexuality”? It’s intimidating, to be sure—and easy to feel helpless. But one simple thing that all queers can do to change the world is just be visible. I know, it seems like an embarrassingly unnecessary thing to say, in the year 2010, to an audience of artists and art-lovers. It shouldn’t be necessary to say these things, but there are still many musicians, actors and yes, even artists, who choose not to be open about their sexuality. It’s tough, because the line between being closeted and “post-gay” is a pretty murky one. Many artists simply don’t talk about it until asked. Sure, it’s an understandable fear that being queer in public might overshadow what you’re trying to say, which obviously isn’t always “Hey, I’m a homo.” But, get over yourself.

There are plenty of visibly queer artists whose work stands completely on its own two feet. And if you’re someone who’s making rad artwork and happens to be gay, the hypothetical trade-off between being pigeon-holed as a “gay artist” (whatever that means) and serving as a source of hope and inspiration for the suicidal gay teens of the world should be an easy one to make.

All ranting aside, that brings us to today’s rad queer: Steven Beckly. He takes awesome photos. Some of them happen to be pretty gay, and they make the fragile little heart of my inner isolated small town teenager skip a beat. I came across Beckly’s work when he shared some photos on Tumblr of his friend, the awesome toymaker Jon Knox. I followed the links back to Beckly’s portfolio, where I fell in love with his photo series Little Wolf: Let’s Make Some Memories—fifteen eerily staged, gorgeously lit images of Beckly and his boyfriend simply being a couple in love.

Also awesome: Single Rooms, in which he asks his subjects to inhabit the transitory space of a motel room and create a character based on the space. It conveys a similar, though more melancholy, sense of longing. Finally, Beckly’s Uncivil Unions / Hush appropriates archival images of same-sex pairs and recontextualizes them (sometimes with the subtle assistance of Photoshop) as memento mori of queer love goneby.

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Every once in a while you encounter an artist who seems to be speaking, with an uncanny specificity, to your personal aesthetic interests. Maybe their work merely combines a couple of references, images or objects that have always stuck in your head, but you’ve never quite able to explain the weird significance they’ve always had for you. Suddenly, juxtaposed on the screen beside each other, these disparate elements combine seamlessly, and it’s now officially “a thing.” It’s now an instance of beauty that you can refer to and your sensibilities are immediately validated.

That’s why when I saw a picture by David Benjamin Sherry that I can best sum up as “real life recreation of The Melvins’ Bullhead album cover with a nice, plump wang in the background,” I stopped and thought to myself, “Okay, this guy is speaking my language.”

Of course, there’s more to Sherry’s appeal than brightly colored fruit and comically isolated male members. He’s a master of monochrome and all things vivid. If they weren’t so weird, Sony would probably put Sherry’s images in ads for their televisions, just to illustrate the high-definition chromatic possibilities. Flat colors can get boring very quickly. I mean, in most cases, orange, green, and purple aren’t anything spectacular in and of themselves, they’re just the necessary foundation for perceiving the world in a “normal” way. But then you see a monstrous vermilion visage melting into a tangerine dreamscape, an emerald missing link rising out of a mossy primordial ooze, the birth of a new galaxy from simple, basic hues and, in an instant, the familiar seems fantastic once again. Sherry reignites that desire for the things you’ve had all along. It’s like Basho said:

Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry
I long for Kyoto

Bask in the splendor of Sherry’s color-soaked sensibilities after the jump, and don’t miss Jason Crombie‘s candid interview with Sherry.

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From the Cut Block series by Vancouver-based photographer Jeff Otto O’Brien. Also, don’t miss the vast, foreboding snowscapes in O’Brien’s hauntingly still Cache Creek.

On a few occasions, I’ve been asked what kind of photography I like. The answer isn’t easy to articulate, but the simplest explanation is that I’m attracted to photos that reveal something about the lives of strangers, and the spaces they occupy. French photographer Thierry Girard is an expert of the genre.

A coy curiosity permeates the eleven photo series in Girard’s portfolio. He glides through foggy pastures, quiet village streets and a patchwork of awkwardly developing cityscapes in China, Japan, and Morocco, like a hunter patiently stalking his prey. He’s hunting for those sublime moments in which one can capture the unspoken feeling a specific place embodies. The Lose Weight Exercise and significance of location in his work is highlighted by the illustrated maps that preface each of Girard’s photographic journeys– an enchanting element that feels born out of an oddly compulsive (yet somehow relatable) desire to understand the whole world, one square foot at a time.

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[ Ed. note: I'm pleased to present the first essay from our brand new contributor (and super-official New York correspondent), the outstanding Anna Pellecchia! She writes a superb blog called annagrams. Do yourself a favor and check it out. - Graham ]

Martin Kollar is Slovakian, which at first I confused with Slovenian and was going to make some jokes about Zizek and Lacan. It’s probably for the best, then, that I was mistaken. But Slovakia has that kind of muddled identity — formerly part of a larger union, frequently conflated with its neighbors, fumblingly transitioning from socialism to capitalism. Perhaps this is why Kollar plays with doubles in his work. In the series Nothing Special, we see twin girls standing with, presumably, their father who looks like their older triple; a woman whose tan matches the leather furniture; a deer painting beside a deer-patterned tablecloth, both with forest representations echoing the the real tree behind them. Often the people in these photographs appear as a humorous surprise inside relatively ordinary scenes.

Kollar’s TV Anchors points to another version of the uncanny — reality as it is filtered through television. Like the people in Nothing Special, the anchors in these photographs seem out of place but more in the sense of being a nuisance: the viewer almost wants them to move out of the way and stop blocking the image. Anchors are those beauty queens and kings whose authority we don’t take too seriously. They stand in a hurricane wearing an electric blue poncho and shouting at us as a way to prove their authenticity, but this only highlights how clueless they are — how they seem to care too much for appearance and too little for intelligent narratives. News anchors trigger an irony reflex because they seem outdated; this voice that dares to announce which stories are important and why.

If the people in Nothing Special make the world look odd and unsettling, the anchors try to reverse this act. They are there to be the ones wearing suits and speaking in complete sentences while behind them a fire burns and someone in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt says, “I done just got out. Weren’t nothin’ else really.” But in this way they also resemble the viewer of a photograph, plopped in the middle of this strangeness, trying to make sense of it all.

These photos turn the news into a single moment, whether it’s a before, an after, or a during we’re unsure. And without anyone explaining what is going on, the scenes appear no more unusual than the ones in Nothing Special. How are half-naked women on a beach more significant than a half-naked man in the forest? These are periods of stillness where the story can be what you want instead of what you’re told.

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Jorge Cruz is just like Pecker, the photographer played by Edward Furlong in John Waters’ film of the same name. Except instead of taking pictures of wacky white people in Baltimore, Cruz produces solemn and pensive portraits of his aggressively normal first-generation Mexican-American family in Chicago, and instead of being hopelessly in love with Christina Ricci, Cruz defines himself a nun-like “sexless” queer. And instead of turning his subjects into accidental celebrities and thereby ruining their lives, Cruz quietly connects with empathetic strangers over the vast expanse of cyberspace, without impacting his family in the slightest.

Okay, so maybe he’s really nothing like Pecker—but you get the point: They’re both outsiders living on the inside. Cruz’s fantastic series Living @ Home acts as a window through which we gaze into his family’s most intimately mundane moments—and through which Cruz peers outwards to the rest of the world. There’s a tension at play in Living @ Home, between Cruz’s desire to share these moments as an objective photographer and his inherent role as a compassionate relative. Below, he expounds upon the family dynamics that make these images so fascinating.

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