Minutiae

4th of July 1951

After a period of overuse I barely give Flickr a glance any more. The proliferation of animated gif 'awards' for best-super-duper-gr8est-pic-ever that get handed out to anything that is posted and the intricate descriptions of what kind of strobe lights were used to take some of the world's most boring images just makes me want to run a mile. To use an analog analogy, I think you have to have a crate-digger of great skill and patience to find the good stuff on Flickr (Mrs Deane is among the best that I know of).

But once in a while Flickr does throw something pretty unexpected at you. The level of detail that goes into these photographs by Michael Paul Smith is pretty astounding. Models fascinate a number of contemporary photographers (Thomas Demand, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Honjo) and while I don't think Murphy is driven by the same motivations, there is something inherently fascinating about this kind of photographic 'illusion'. Check out the full set here, complete with mustachioed 'behind the scenes' evidence.