Face Of The Day

Chris Bartlett took the portraits of former Iraqi detainees:

There were close to forty former detainees who did not want their pictures taken, for those who agreed, Barttlet took the portrait in daylight on high quality film, with a deep black background and warm hued lights; an intentional difference from the small digital camera–which intensified the acidic yellows and electric greens of Abu Grahib– used to capture images detainees in crouching, cuffed, and hooded. “I wanted to put these people back in front of the camera and use photography as a humanizing force,” Bartlett says. …

When confronted with images of torture, Bartlett says, even the greatest liberal or humanist among us has the tendency to flinch and look away. “It’s such a disturbing and disgusting issue that people want to turn off from it.” Bartlett, who often works in high fashion photography, shooting subjects like candy colored Tory Burch handbags, said he wanted to take “very kind, respectful, beautiful, portraits to draw people into the subject and learn more about their stories.”

See more of Bartlett’s work here. His exhibition, “Iraqi Detainees: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Ordeals,” runs through this weekend in New York.

About 500 Shiite volunteers from Tal Afar attend a combat training session at a military camp in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala in central Iraq to join the fight against jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group, which led a sweeping offensive in June that overran much of the country’s Sunni Arab heartland. The militant organisation has taken control of important cities including Mosul, Saddam Hussein’s hometown Tikrit and Tal Afar in northern Iraq, as well as Fallujah and part of Ramadi in the west. By Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty Images.

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A Syrian Kurdish woman holds her baby in her arms as she waits at the border line in the Suruc district of Sanliurfa, southeastern province of Turkey, on September 25, 2014. Syrian asylum seekers fleeing the conflict between Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the Tell Abyad district of Ar-Raqqah are coming to border line in the Suruc district of Sanliurfa, Turkey. By Ibrahim Erikan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

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An injured man looks on as he waits to be treated at a makeshift hospital in the besieged rebel bastion of Douma, northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, on September 24, 2014, following reported airstrikes by government forces. Some 191,000 people have been killed since an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule erupted in March 2011. By Abd Doumany/AFP/Getty Images.

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Newly elected New Zealand Prime Minister John Key greets Maori Party Co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell at The Beehive in Wellington, New Zealand on September 23, 2014. On Saturday evening, the National Party leader was re-elected after defeating Labour opposition leader David Cunliffe. By Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images.

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This fucking cat:

The Los Angeles Feline Film Festival at the Memorial Coliseum takes place on September 21, 2014. The annual event featuring celebrity cats and feline films raises money for local cat sanctuaries and rescue organizations. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.

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For his book The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride, Sébastien Lifshitz collected portraits of gay relationships he found at yard sales and flea markets:

Lifshitz, who also made a documentary film on this subject, raises an important point when he reminds us that all of these photos are pre-digital era: “Because to obtain these images, they had to have gone to a small neighborhood photo lab to develop the film and then go back to pick up the prints. They, therefore, had to run the risk of exposing themselves socially. The need to keep a memory of their love was certainly stronger than the disapproval of some business or any concerns about what others might say.”

Lifshitz spoke about the collection in an interview earlier this year:

Who are the individuals featured in these photos?

I don’t know these people — they are anonymous to me. I can’t really even say that each person photographed into the book is gay, except when it’s obvious. What I like is that there are different levels of reading these photos — I would say three levels to be exact. The first one is the pictures of obviously gay single people or couples, the second is the pictures of people which can be seen as “undefined” (we’re not sure) and the third level is the ones that are obviously not gay but playing with a gay attitude (cross-dresser, some “garçonnes,” etc.). I love the ambiguity and diversity of these pictures. These photographs ask questions. I didn’t caption the photos because I don’t know quite anything about each of them (no name, no location mentioned most of the time). I wanted to expose them like the way I found them: without any information, like mysterious pictures.

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Photographer Nicolas Rivals creates portraits out of spinning molten metal:

While other artists use pigments to paint, Nicolas Rivals uses light. His work isn’t exactly a painting as it is an photo captured through long exposure then flipped to create a sort of Rorschach image made of light. Nicolas has another series of light paintings featuring a bright circle of light floating in the middle of an urban setting. He said: “There is always hope that even in the depths of night a glimmer will appear. Light is never as reassuring as the anguish of the shadow. A little light, a little sense, would for a moment, make the chaos disappear”.

Rivals is a member of the Prisme Noir collective. See more of his work here.

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A young man chants as Muslims gather for Friday prayers on the street outside the Mevlana Moschee on a nation-wide action day to protest against the Islamic State (IS) on September 19, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. Muslims across cities in Germany followed a call by the country’s Central Council of Muslims to protest against the ongoing violence by IS fighters in Syria and Iraq. By Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

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Ballots are counted at the Emirates Sports Arena in Glasgow on September 18, 2014, after the polls close in the referendum on Scotland’s independence. The question for voters at Scotland’s more than 5,000 polling stations is “Should Scotland be an independent country?” and they are asked to mark either “Yes” or “No”. The result is expected in the early hours of Friday. By Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images.