TEDx Photo Spotlight: 5 great shots from TEDx performances around the world.
(Top: TEDxSydney, Australia; Clockwise: TEDxReset, Turkey; TEDxAmsterdam, The Netherlands, TEDxDunkerque, France; TEDxTokyo, Japan)
Bryant Austin is a photographer who snaps images of giant whales from hardly 10 feet away. In a quest to prevent the extinction of these gentle giants, he puts together life-sized portraits of these creatures — one which took over 200 hours to make and weighed a whopping 1,200 pounds — to help the public realize just what a whale really looks like.
At the top, a selection of his photographs — and above — his talk from TEDxSanJoseCA, during which he speaks on his process and the wonder of seeing a living, breathing whale up-close.
(Photos: Top, AP/Koji Sasahara. All others, Bryant Austin)
Happy Valentine’s Day! 6 TEDx Talks on modern love (and sex)
Valentine’s Day is here and we’re all about love on the TEDx blog this week. If you aren’t yet fulfilled by Jocob Berkson’s exploration into the philosophy of love, Helen Fisher’s studies into the biological underpinning of “the one”, or David Page’s genetic revelation into the health implications of gender differences, these 6 should quell your desire:
How I gamed online data to meet my match: Amy Webb
Amy Webb shirks her relatives dating advice, quantifies her desires, and manipulates the online-dating experience to successfully find love.
Make your bed is the ultimate treehouse: Debby Herbenick
Psychologist Debby Herbenick shares the results of some of her studies investigating the value of focused, exclusive and, of course, fun sex.
The sex lives of sea slugs: Muljadi Pinneng
With beautiful underwater photography, Muljadi Pinneng explores the coral reefs of Indonesia to show you some of the strangest sexual practices in the wild world.
When it comes to love, nature doesn’t matter: Ronald de Sousa
In a profound and impeccably reasoned talk, Ronald de Sousa challenges the notion that there’s such a thing as “natural” love.
Beyond the orgasm: Nicole Daedone
Nicole Daedone prescribes mindful sex — a possible cure for relationships that have lost their spark.
Find your erotic creature: Sheila Kelly
Television actress and pole dancer Sheila Kelly describes how she found her “erotic creature” within and encourages everyone to do the same.
Four, almost five years ago, Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate, was raising a lot of dust around this country. And, at the time, getting married wasn’t really something I’d spent a lot of time thinking about, but I was struck by the fact that America, a country with such a tarnished civil rights record, could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly…
And this powerful awareness rolled in over me that I was a minority, and in my own home country, based on one facet of my character. I was legally and indisputably, a second-class citizen.
I was not an activist. I waved no flags in my own life. But I was plagued by this question: How could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that I knew, based on one element of their character? How could they say that we as a group were not as deserving of equal rights as somebody else?
Were we even a group? What group? And had these people even ever consciously met a victim of the discrimination? Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was?
And then it occurred to me. Perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship, it might make it harder for them to do. It might give them pause.
Obviously, I couldn’t get 20 million people to the same dinner party, so I I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically — without any artifice, without any lighting, or any manipulation of any kind on my part. Because in a photograph, you can examine a lion’s whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off.
For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it’s about exposing the viewer. To something new; a place they haven’t gone before; but — most importantly — to people they might be afraid of.
