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Stunning unseen Slim Aarons photographs celebrating the luxe lives of of the elite are released in new book

• Unseen Slim Aarons’ photographs have been memorialized in a new book 
• George ‘Slim’ Aarons worked between 1916 and 2006 and featured in Life
• The book follows his earlier work and time in Hollywood among the glitterati  

By Aneeta Bhole For Dailymail.Com

Published: 07:44 EDT, 7 October 2023 | Updated: 07:54 EDT, 7 October 2023

• The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards highlight hilarious photos of animals in the wild.
• Judges chose this year’s 41 finalists, and the contest is now open for voting.
• The photos feature bears, monkeys, penguins, owls, and other wildlife in comical poses.

A kangaroo playing air guitar. A penguin asking for directions. An otter showing off its ballet moves.

The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards highlight hilarious photos of animals striking comical poses and pulling funny facial expressions in the wild. The competition does more than just provide laughs — it also raises money for wildlife-conservation organizations.

A panel of judges will select the winning images, and members of the public can also vote for their favorite to win the Affinity Photo People’s Choice Award on the contest’s official website. All of the winners will be announced on November 23.

Take a look at the 41 finalists in this year’s competition. Photographers’ captions have been condensed and edited for clarity.

There is a framed notice in the hallway of 10 Downing Street. It carries the message: “Please remember. You may be photographed. Please cover any documents you may be holding.”

It is not a warning always heeded – as many prime ministers have come to rue. The latest victim was Rishi Sunak, whose government was left scrabbling after a secret document suggesting phase 2 of HS2 was in danger of being scrapped was photographed under the arm of a government official.

The man who took it, Steve Back – aka Political Pictures – has form. For more than a decade he has broken numerous stories, thanks to patience, journalistic nous, and a decent camera lens.

“It’s just old-fashioned journalism,” he says, between puffs on his cigarette in a conversation with the Guardian. “I’ve told them umpteen times to tell people to cover up documents. But no one seems to take any notice.”

Back has no shortage of scalps. The 69-year-old forced the resignation of Britain’s most senior counterterrorism officer after picturing him with top secret documents; exposed that David Cameron’s government was considering selling off Channel 4 ; and revealed that the Theresa May’s government’s model for leaving the EU was: “Have cake and eat it.”

The secret is having a nose for a story, he says. “If you see a piece of paper flapping around in the wind being carried with someone who’s the head civil servant at the Treasury, you know it’s not the time to buy a cup of tea. Especially if you get a document that says ‘Confidential’. That always gets me going.”

The picture that has left the government on the ropes in recent weeks was actually taken after Back had knocked off for the day, but on his way to the tube he spotted officials leaving the back of No 10. Sunak can hardly complain, however, having been caught by Back himself back in 2020, when as chancellor he inadvertently revealed his tax plans.

Back’s love affair with photography started when his parent’s bought him a camera for his 13th birthday. As a child with dyslexia he was treated as “thick” at school, and the camera changed his life. “It was something I was good at and people liked the results,” he says. “I was not used to praise.” In 1970 he started work as an assistant and bag carrier for photographers in London’s Covent Garden, before getting a staff job at the Daily Mail, which among other adventures involved a short stint in a Ugandan jail.

“It was a huge drug,” he says. “You get a phone call in the middle of the night and next thing you’d be at Heathrow covering a war or following Diana to the Virgin Islands … In the first Gulf war, they said I’d be away for a week. I was away for six-and-a-half months.”

After a helicopter accident in Iran in 2001, he was badly injured. He says the Mail were “brilliant”, but after several stints in hospital he could no longer do the job he loved. He went to art college, and slowly started doing freelance jobs. “Then I hit on the idea of politics as no one was really covering it much at the time, and I wanted to be my own boss.”

A favourite moment was when he captured Peter Mandelson, then Gordon Brown’s business secretary, who thought he had outwitted the photographer. “He had these papers deliberately showing me what he was doing [but] as he was getting in his car smiling, going: ‘Ha ha, I got you on this one’, the wind blew through all the stuff that he didn’t want me to see.” The next days headline? “Lord Mandelson gives tantalising glimpse of Tory attack plans”.

Other stories simply come from unguarded moments, such as when a picture of the prime minister’s wife, Akshata Murty, revealed that she had worn a £570 pair of slippers for the school run. “People go mad over that,” he says.

Back now has nearly 30,000 followers on X, where he posts as @PoliticalPics, most of whom, he thinks, come for updates about Larry the Cat. But although his stories have often dominated the news, standing in the press pen outside Downing Street day after day is not a lucrative career, says the photographer. “There is no money in it, there really isn’t,” he says, adding that he was paid a grand total of £50 for uncovering the scrapping of HS2.

Despite that, Downing Street shouldn’t start looking forward to the day when he might hang up his Nikon. “I’ve been in photography for 53 years, and I love it,” he says. “As long as I wake up every morning and still know who I am, I’ll keep going.”

Richard Prince’s subversion of mainstream motifs explored hidden facets in an all-American identity. Turning his lens to an eclectic range of subjects, from cowboys as a homogeneous idealisation of the Wild West, to his photographs of luxury watches and pens, Prince was above all interested in the sociological slant photography imbued on a subject. 

‘Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87’

Now, the beginnings of Prince’s career are explored in an exhibition at the Gagosian London’s Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street galleries, marking the beginning of Frieze London 2023, as the art fair celebrates 20 years. Taking the years 1977 – 1987 as a focus, more than 80 photographs unite work from Prince’s productive decade.

The Entertainers series (1982-3) is explored in the Davies Street Gallery; recasting the glamour of fame, Prince strips the subjects back to a grid-like uniformity. In Grosvenor Hill, photographs from different series are united, from his self-portraits to a dissecting of accepted masculinity motifs.  

As a symbol of idealised heroism, cowboys fascinated Prince. In Untitled (Cowboy) (1980–84), the cowboy is almost interchangeable with the landscape. The photographer continues to play with perceptions in his black and white Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1980); photographed in a suit, tie, eye make-up and lipstick, he expresses an alienation also seen in Untitled (Couple) (1977) and Untitled (Man Looking to the Left) (1978), where rephotographed images of models dressed in suits became a symbol of representation themselves. Also recontextualised are his photographed advertisements for luxury goods, once again setting Prince apart, this time from the photographers who took the original images.

Images take a sideways look at stock photography, something the subjects of Criminals and Celebrities (1986) try to escape, while Untitled (Fainted) (1980) considers the stills of unconscious women in a questioning of the realist narrative. ‘When you put an already existing image in front of a camera,’ Prince has said, ‘you know what you’re going to get. You’ve taken out the decisive moment.’ In his 1983 essay on cowboys he added: ‘Some people would like to try to change places, just for a day, with maybe someone they admired or even envied, to see what it would be like, to see if it would be what they’d always heard it would be.’

‘Richard Prince: Early Photography’, 5 October – 22 December 2023, Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill and 17–19 Davies Street, London 

gagosian.com

The Deichtorhallen Hamburg is pleased to announce the appointment of Nadine Isabelle Henrich as the new Curator of the House of Photography, beginning February 1, 2024. The 33-year-old photography expert has previously worked at institutions such as the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, and the Museum Folkwang in Essen. Henrich will succeed Ingo Taubhorn, who has significantly shaped the exhibition program at the House of Photography since 2003 and is retiring.

Dirk Luckow, General Director of Deichtorhallen Hamburg, stated, “I’m pleased to welcome Nadine Isabelle Henrich as our new curator. She is an innovative and internationally well-connected photography expert. Her forward-thinking exhibition concepts impressed us immediately. As a connoisseur of both the German and the international art scenes, Nadine Isabelle Henrich will continue the success story of the House of Photography, founded by F.C. Gundlach in 2003.”

Bert Antonius Kaufmann, Managing Director of Deichtorhallen Hamburg, added, “In addition to Nadine Isabelle Henrich’s continued development of the exhibition program at the exhibition space PHOXXI, I look forward to working with her, and Collection Curator Sabine Schnakenberg, to shape the new House of Photography as an open space for the local as well as global photography community.”

Nadine Isabelle Henrich shared her vision, saying, “My program will delve into the politics of photographic visibility. It will focus on artists shaping photographic futures, on the overlooked legacies of photo collectives, and on the dynamics of image ecologies online. Recognizing photography’s entanglements with new technologies and global economies, the exhibitions will gravitate toward essential societal and sociotechnical issues of the present and explore photography’s capacity to translate imagination into alternative presents. As an open space for the local and global photo community, we will increase our impact as a platform for aspiring photographers, beginning at PHOXXI, our temporary exhibition space, and then at the freshly renovated House of Photography. Together with the exceptional Deichtorhallen team, I look forward to hosting encounters with emerging tendencies in photography and its digital remediations.”

Background
Prior to joining the House of Photography at Deichtorhallen, Henrich (*1990) was a Curatorial Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2022/2023) and worked in the curatorial teams of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Museum Folkwang, and Münchner Stadtmuseum (2021-2023), within the framework of the international program Museum Curators of Photography, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation. Her recent shows include, among others, Poetics of Search at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022/2023), Visions of Ukraine at Museum Folkwang, Essen (2022), and Rüzgâr Buşki: Wayward at Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2022). Based in Berlin, she has worked as a Curator and Doctoral Researcher at Daimler Contemporary Berlin (2017–2020), where she curated, among others, the group show Evoking Reality (2018/19), featuring artists such as Mustafah Abdulaziz, Clément Cogitore, Tacita Dean, Alia Farid, Cao Fei, Pieter Hugo, Richard Mosse, Viviane Sassen, Berni Searle, Guy Tillim, Sharif Waked, Maya Zack. Prior to that, Henrich worked as a Research Associate at Heiner Bastian Fine Arts, Berlin/London (2015/16), and early on assisted the team of the German Pavilion at the 55th La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Susanne Gaensheimer (2013). After studies and grants in Florence, Rome, and Frankfurt, Henrich completed her Master’s in Art and Image History at Humboldt University Berlin (2016) and is currently finalizing her Ph.D. research at the Department of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, supervised by Prof. Peter Geimer.

For additional information
Press images: deichtorhallen.de/presse       
Contact: Angelika Leu-Barthel, Deichtorhallen Press Office, T +49-(0)40-32 103 250 / =(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);});return false”>presse [​at​] deichtorhallen.de

Over the last four years, the latest incarnation of the iPhone Pro Max has become my favorite camera companion, while my Canon DSLR has sat patiently on the shelf waiting for me to rekindle our long-term relationship. A newly acquired iPhone 15 Pro Max has just hammered another nail into the coffin of my Canon DSLR. Here’s why. 

When shooting with my DSLR I needed to cart around a kit bag full of lenses, so I could whip out a telephoto to capture candid street photography pictures. I’d then have to swap to a wide-angle lens to fit architectural landmarks into the frame. The iPhone 15 Pro Max packs 7 cameras into its palm-sized frame, with focal lengths ranging from an ultra-wide 13mm to a periscopic zoom-enabled 120mm lens. It’s this new 5x optical zoom that makes me the most excited about the iPhone 15 Pro Max. 

• What is a periscope lens on a phone – and do you need one?

The 15 Pro Max is only 8.25mm deep, but it bounces light off multiple mirrors to get the lens far enough away from the sensor to achieve a focal length of 120mm (hence the term periscopic). I find that this extra reach over iPhone 14 Pro Max’s 77mm zoom enables me to remain a ‘fly on the wall’ while I capture candid close-ups of people from a distance. 

This freedom to remain less conspicuous than I was with a DSLR and a long lens motivates me to snap far more street photography-style images than I’d normally do. I feel like I’ve developed a superpower!

What is even more exciting is the fact that I can use the 5x (120mm) zoom camera while shooting in the Camera app’s Portrait mode. This enables me to add a DSLR-style background bokeh that makes distant people stand out sharply against blurred backgrounds. This combination of software-added bokeh to a powerful zoom enables me to mimic a classic DSLR telephoto look more effectively than I could using previous iPhone models.

When shooting telephoto images with my DSLR I’d set the camera to shutter priority, and choose a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the subject and avoid the shake-induced motion blur that zoom lenses are prone to. This could lead to a sharp but under-exposed shot that I’d need to brighten up in post. 

The iPhone 15 Pro Max captures pin-sharp and well-exposed telephoto shots instantly, due to advances in its sensor-shift image stabilization. As well as moving the sensor horizontally (x) and vertically (y) to counteract camera shake, the 15 Pro Max also vibrates the sensor along the depth (z) axis. This physical three-dimensional movement ensures a telephoto shot that’s free from shake-induced blur. 

As a result, every telephoto shot is sharp, well exposed, and ready to share there and then – which is great if you want to satisfy your social media feed’s need for ‘as it happens’ photo content.

Having enjoyed a day shooting street photography I was keen to see how the 15 Pro Max got on with a professional model. I met Eli at London’s Barbican Centre, which has a great range of Brutalist architecture backdrops. 

Normally I shoot in Apple’s ProRAW format so I can have full control over colors and tones in the editing stage. Thanks to the main 24mm camera’s wide f/1.78 aperture, I can get a strong and natural bokeh while shooting RAW portraits. 

However, thanks to iOS 17, if you shoot a JPEG of a person then a depth map is generated as well (even if you haven’t shot in Portrait mode). This gives you the freedom to add an adjustable bokeh to a wider range of JPEG-format shots in Apple’s Photos app.  

This depth map isn’t available if you shoot in RAW, so I found myself shooting far more JPEGs than I’d usually do. As an iOS 17 bonus, you can now change the focal point of a JPEG as well as the blur amount in Apple Photos, which gives photographers even more control in the post-production stage.

Model Eli hadn’t done a shoot with an iPhone before, but as a professional she gave it her all. Over the two-hour shoot, I enjoyed switching from capturing close-ups to wide-angle portraits with a few taps on the iPhone’s display. 

I was also able to enthuse Eli by showing her the results of a shot immediately on the iPhone’s vibrant HDR display. By shooting with a low-profile iPhone at the Barbican we weren’t interrupted by security personnel (which can happen if you’re in possession of a ‘big camera’, as policemen like to call it!).

All in all, I’ve loved my first week using the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s cameras and, in 3 separate shoots, I’ve notched up 56,000 steps, capturing a wider range of subjects than I’d normally do. The iPhone 15 Pro Max and I may be in our ‘honeymoon period’ but I am sure we’ll be exploring new photo opportunities together for a long time to come. (Just don’t tell my DSLR.) 

The best camera phones come in all shapes and sizes, from the best iPhones for photography to the best Android phones – featuring the best Samsung phones to the best Oppo phones.

One of the redesigned website’s new features is a gallery where we will present the creative work of Valley artisans.

Living Snoqualmie is tagged in or sent many local residents’ creations, but we never quite knew what to do with them. The new gallery will allow us to showcase the beautiful art we receive regularly.

You may remember our first artist, Travis Wetherbee, from his suspenseful two-part story about chasing the Aurora Borealis on Rattlesnake Ridge in 2021. Wetherbee, a well-liked regular of festivals and concerts, seemed like the obvious first choice for this new feature.

Wetherbee, a Snoqualmie Valley lifer, grew up in Fall City before moving to Duvall in 2009. He and his wife Alicia were neighbors who got together in 1998 and married in 2002 after Alicia graduated from CWU. The couple has two children, Deacon, six and Laila, 11.

In 2018, when Deacon was one, Travis started taking cloud and landscape photos. Weatherbee’s first camera was an old point-and-shoot. The Wetherbees bought it right after they got married. One of his favorite things to do when he was a kid was to look through old photo albums. Says Travis, “We would have nights where that would be our entertainment, looking through photo albums at pictures of family.” 

Travis eventually joined the Photography Enthusiasts of Duvall Facebook group. There, he met local photographer Rick Schump, who took him out for a hike and taught him how to use his camera and compose a good shot.

In 2020, Wetherbee was already an email marketer and volunteer umpire from 2006 to 2013 before he became a full-paid umpire when he decided to take a crack at making photography a career. He started sharing his photos with the photography group, eventually became a moderator and started Last Lite Photography.

Soon after, a friend of a friend was selling some camera equipment he bought to resell, but after trying the more sophisticated equipment, he decided to keep it. The equipment came with two lenses; after buying more, he learned and got even better at taking photos.

He befriended Morgan Henley, another local photographer/videographer who owns a production company specializing in producing music events and started photographing Seattle area music festivals and events. Wetherbee photographed 155 music events in 2022. His Facebook page is growing by leaps and bounds, currently at 7.3k followers.

In addition to the work he does with music and festivals, Wetherbee does senior portraits, trying to capture who the student really is in a photo (we’ve come a long way since the wicker chair at Yuen Lui).

At first, he didn’t consider photography a business but more a fulfilling hobby. However, his goal in the next two years is to fully transition to photography, start a media company, work with artists and agencies and buy his own venue.

Travis credits his wife Alicia and says she enables his ventures by doing everything at home. Between his day job and photography, he can be gone from early morning until late at night. He says he couldn’t do it without her.

Travis Wetherbee’s journey from a simple point-and-shoot camera to capturing the pulse of music festivals, the Valley’s beauty and crafting senior portraits with a touch of soul is genuinely inspiring. The Snoqualmie Valley is blessed to have such a gifted artist amidst its ranks, capturing its beauty and the life that pulses within. Travis’s dedication, both as a photographer and as a community member, showcases the essence of what makes this valley unique.

For those eager to explore the depth and breadth of Wetherbee’s captivating work, his stunning collections can be viewed and appreciated at Last Lite Photography on Picfair,  Fine Art America and Last Lite Photography on Zenfolio. Dive into these galleries to get a glimpse of the world through Travis’s lens and, perhaps, find a piece that speaks to you.

-Featured image photo credit goes to Guinevere Roper