New York: when the city sleeps.

The Wall Street Journal sent several photographers out overnight to shoot New York City during the hours when most of its citizens are sleeping.

Here are photos of those awake when most of the city is not.

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Delivery man Rich Lopes carries a stack of newspapers to a vendor on Wall Street at 5:57 a.m. (Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal)

A food vendor walks up 11th Avenue near 47th Street. (Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal)

Material World: A global family portrait.

I’m longtime fans of photojournalist Peter Menzel, whose visual anthropology captures the striking span of humanity’s socioeconomic and cultural spectrum. His Hungry Planet portrayed the world’s sustenance with remarkable graphic eloquence, and today I’m turning to some of his earliest work, doing the same for the world’s shelter: Material World: A Global Family Portrait — a beautiful visual time-capsule of life in 30 countries, captured by 16 of the world’s leading photographers.

In each of the 30 countries, Menzel found a statistically average family and photographed them outside their home, with all of their belongings. The result is an incredible cross-cultural quilt of possessions, from the utilitarian to the sentimental, revealing the faceted and varied ways in which we use “stuff” to make sense of the world and our place in it.

Though the book is now 17 years old, it is still relevant and it’s still a curious meta-evidence for the material world we live in. Some of these families may have more today, but the disparity is probably the same in most cases. It still circulates. And for another excellent companion read, see Menzel’s 1998 follow-up, Women in the Material World — a fascinating look at an even more intimate aspect of the human family.

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Mali: The Natomo Family

It’s common for men in this West African country to have two wives, as 39-year-old Soumana Natomo does, which increases their progeny and in turn their chance to be supported in old age. Soumana now has eight children, and his wives, Pama Kondo (28) and Fatouma Niangani Toure (26), will likely have more. How many of these children will survive, though, is uncertain: Mali’s infant mortality rate ranks among the ten highest in the world. Possessions not included in this photo: Another mortar and pestle for pounding grain, two wooden mattress platforms, 30 mango trees, and old radio batteries that the children use as toys.

Hungry Planet: what the world eats.

Well known for his eye-opening book Material World: A Global Family Portrait where he asked an average family in 30 locations to empty out their homes to show their possessions, Peter Menzel came up with another brilliant book idea. He teamed up with his wife, Faith D’Aluision, and together traveled the world exploring how the eating habits differ from country to country. Then the duo presented their results in a photo album, called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

Apart from being interesting and educative, the project brings up some social issues. The exposed weekly grocery list provides information not only about dietary habits, but also about health, economy, lifestyle, etc. It also clearly shows the division between the first world and the developing countries. Interestingly, less affluent families eat more nutritious food than those who could actually afford it. On the contrary, more economically stable families eat more processed food, while fresh products constitute just a small part of their diet.

The wife and husband’s team visited 24 different countries and 30 families to photograph them at home, at the market, and surrounded by their weekly food supplies.

Website: Peter Menzel, Book: What the World Eats

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Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp

Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Favorite foods: soup with fresh sheep meat

Toy Stories: photos of children from around the world with their most prized possessions.

What was your favorite toy as a child? In Gabriele Galimberti’s wonderful series Toy Stories, which I recently spotted over at Feature Shoot, the Italian photographer traveled the world to photograph children with their most prized possessions, be they pink or blue, new or old, plentiful or scarce. The resulting photo series is in turns haunting and funny, but Galimberti’s reports from the field are equally interesting. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” Galimberti says. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”

Toy Stories doesn’t just appeal in its cheerful demeanor, but it really becomes quite the anthropological study. And, ultimately, these photos give poignant insight into poverty on a very basic level – children’s toys.

Page through a few of our favorites from the series after the jump, and then be sure to head over to Galimberti’s website to see many more.

Tangawizi – Keekorok, Kenya

Where children sleep: a round-the-world tour of bedrooms.

Out of sight, out of mind, the phrase continues to plague my perspective. I suppose that’s why traveling’s so important. And that’s exactly what Kenyan-born, English-raised, Venice-based documentary photographer James Mollison explores in Where Children Sleep – a remarkable collaborative project between him and American journalist Chris Booth capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms. The project began on a brief to engage with children’s rights and morphed into a thoughtful meditation on poverty and privilege, its 56 images spanning from the stone quarries of Nepal to the farming provinces of China to the silver spoons of Fifth Avenue.

Perhaps most interestingly, this project was designed as an empathy tool for nine- to 13-year-olds to better understand the lives of other children around the world, but it is also very much a poignant photographic essay on human rights for the adult reader.

One of the more meaningful photo series I’ve come across in a while, these photographs paint a reality that is difficult to depict through words, revealing shocking differences across countries, going from girls with thousand dollar dresses in their private mansions to shepherd boys sleeping with goats.

Read on to let Chris Booth and James Mollison show you where children sleep.

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Lamine, 12, lives in Senegal. He is a pupil at the village Koranic school, where no girls are allowed. He shares a room with several other boys. The beds are basic, some supported by bricks for legs. At six every morning the boys begin work on the school farm, where they learn how to dig, harvest maize and plough the fields using donkeys. In the afternoon they study the Koran. In his free time Lamine likes to play football with his friends.

#FollowMeTo: Russian photographer travels the world with girlfriend in cute Instagram photo series.

Russian photographer Murad Osmann creatively documents his travels around the world with his girlfriend, Nataly Zakharova, always leading the way in his ongoing series known as Follow Me To.

With her back turned, never revealing her face to the camera, Osmann’s girlfriend guides us all on a journey across the globe to some of the most beautiful, exotic, and radiant environments. There are also comforting and familiar settings mixed in for good measure.

Whether the couple is spending a romantic night in Moscow, having an exotic adventure in Asia, wandering the streets of Tokyo, or simply going to Disneyland, Osmann keeps a visual record of their escapades as he trails behind his beloved.

He shoots the photos either on his iPhone or digital SLR camera and processes them using multiple filters in the Camera+ app before posting on Instagram.

Enjoy this exciting series and get inspired.

Stairs and unfinished stories.

“There is no such thing as a dull product. Only dull approaches to interesting products.” ~ David Ogilvy
The wit and wisdom of Mr. Ogilvy can be extremely valuable to marketers and advertisers because pretty much sums up everything. Nevertheless, the same is true if you replace “product” with “photo”.

Let’s take the example of photos depicting stairs. What could one say about stairs? They come in various sizes and widths, they’re made of cement, wood, or maybe skateboards and salt, if you leave it to your imagination. That’s pretty much all there is to it, right? Stairs. Elevators are better, anyway. Stairs. Pretty boring, eh? Well, not quite. Stairs are pretty awesome, actually. You don’t have to believe me. You just have to scroll down a bit.

Casual photographers, here is your wake-up call.

I’m sure you’ve all read or heard about it, the Lytro camera has had already tech geeks buzzing about its futuristic technology. But, just in case you’ve missed it, here’s a short recap: Lytro is basically a device that acts like no other camera. Because it captures the entire light field in its view (not just the color and intensity of light rays but also their direction) Lytro can do tricks other cameras can’t do. The main one: being able to change the focus of your photo after you took the photo, or what its creators call a “living picture”. That signature feature it’s not just a hi-tech convenience, it allows you to tell stories in a completely different way with your photos. Changing the subject in focus, by its nature, almost always alters the story in the image. Focus on the diver in the foreground, for example, and it’s a light moment. Zero in on the man in the background looking at him, and you’ve got creepy. Of course, the photo needs the viewer to refocus and get hooked, so sharing becomes key. This social aspect is exactly where Lytro sinks or takes off. If its early users start telling stories with their cameras — and those stories are worth sharing — Lytro will transition from curious trick to superstardom. Okay, now let’s cut the blah-blah, a picture does a much better job explaining:

(How to play with these pictures: click different areas and/or subjects to refocus, double click to zoom)

The Imaginarium of Dr. Tim Walker.

Fashion editorials are usually commercially driven, often same same, and they can can get veeeeeeeery boring.

NOT is the case with Tim Walker and his fantastical worlds, dreamy images and beautiful story lines, all realized through fashion photography. Taking inspiration from his many scrap books that are filled with image cut-outs and media stories, this London based photographer is entrancing the viewer with his romantic characters and his extravagant staging. The only medium through which these kind of elaborate sets, beautiful costumes, and the world class models can be made available for photographers looking create such worlds without the help of digital medias.

Much like the dreamscapes Annie Leibovitz creates, he is one of those people who can create fairytale worlds and make them come alive. The styling and thought behind every little detail is remarkable. But it’s no surprise, he is renowned for his surreal, ethereal and all together magical portraits and shoots, and this shoot is up there with his best. You gotta love how the shoot itself, the pieces and accessories used are all brilliantly timeless and this could have been shot yesterday, or 30 years ago.

Walker was a former assistant to the legendary Richard Avedon, and he first kindled his love of photography while on work experience cataloguing the Cecil Beaton archive in the Condé Nast library. Then, working with magazines such as Vogue UK, Vogue Italia, Vanity Fair, and W to create fashion editorials, he has produced some of today’s most inspired and imaginative images. Here he takes us on a walk through his whimsical and “weird” (according to unimaginative dullards and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity assholes) wonderland.

My cool french boy.

Today’s Google Doodle is celebrating the 100th birthday of my cool French guy, photographer R. Doisneau.

“The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” ~ Monsieur Robert Doisneau