Have ever a political and/or financial oligarch, swimming in his thirst for uncontrolled power, consumerist creation of unnecessary needs, pursuing a divide-et-impera strategy, looked down from his throne of blood on this short film by Béla Tarr?

Every time I see it, I remember that’s impossible not to communicate, not to have a behavior. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value. We are Gods, they’re just flesh.

Japanese military photographer Yosuke Yamahata took this inedited pictures on 10 August 1945, one day after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

Telephone and telegraph services were suspended; the teams could not contact the outside world for help. It was truly a hell on earth. Those who had just barely survived the intense radiation-their eyes burned and their exposed skin scalded-wandered around aimlessly with only sticks to lean on, waiting for relief.

In 1966 photographer Yamahata died from cancer caused presumably by his exposure to radiation. The shots were extrapolated from the original negatives of his defective camera.

Extended story on The Independent.

Colourwise one of my favourite photographers, she also has resourceful symbolic well framed subjects and a film grain that doesn’t feel overlayed but coming from the topic.
More pics from Alison Scarpulla on Flickr.

For the Alien Observer rubric of this month, German photographer Juliane Eirich.

The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world.
The whole concept of enclosure as a means of con- straint and as a means of classifying doesn’t work as well in our electronic world.
The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning to our midst.

In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, “How horrible it must be to feel like that,” instead of blaming some- body for having done something horrible.
This feel- ing is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with every- body else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.

Marshall McLuhan

Character design, colours, animation and that title definitely want me to check out this video.
Directed, designed and animated by Nicolas Ménard, with Sound & Music by Rich Vreeland.

Debut screening was on the 18th of June at the Royal College of Art Graduation Show in London.

Ménard’s personal site and his Tumblr.

Goran Djurovic is a serbian painter fascinated by man and his relationships, the difficult attempt at living together, subjugation and suffering caused by dominance.

His work inspired the masks and some atmospheres of the movie La cinquième saison.