Medicine - A Dance Film

Dancer and choreographer  Zack Benitez approached creative agency Carlos et Marcos with the idea of telling a story through dance. It is a love story tangled in addiction. It tells of a lover struggling with her partner’s disease and the person he once was, only to succumb to his demons and dive head first into his addiction. Tamara Marthe joined Benitez to tell this powerful story, shot in an abandoned warehouse in Paris.

1910s America in Color

In this color photograph you can see a group of children who have dressed up to back the war effort, one proudly bearing the US flag. Is this from the Vietnam War? The Second World War?  Neither – the picture was taken about 1918 and it is the troops sent to fight in what became known as the First World War that they are supporting. This extraordinary photograph is almost a hundred years old: it is highly unlikely that even the longest lived of these children is still alive.

We often perceive the past in black and white – after all, the vast majority of photographs from the 1910s through in to the 1930s and 40s are monochrome.  Yet a color photography process called the Autochrome Lumière was patented in 1903.  It remained the foremost color process until the second half of the 1930s. The pictures you are about to see are mostly dated about 1915-18 with some earlier and a few from the 1920s.

If You Have Never Wanted to Visit Lake Baikal, You Will After You Watch This

Stas Tolstnev is a Russian photographer who recently visited Lake Baikal in southern Siberia.  Baikal is the deepest and purest lake in the world and it is under ice for over four months each year.

Tolstnev captures both its immensity and incredible beauty in this painstakingly made film. You have to wonder how he managed to get some of the shots but not for long: you will find yourself adrift with the elements on the shores of Baikal for a few minutes without a care in the world.

Las Lajas Sanctuary: The South American Church that Looks Like a European Castle

If you take the immediate exterior of the Las Lajas Sanctuary in Colombia it doesn’t look too much like an atypical South American Catholic church. Yet it retains many of their qualities: it is ornate, richly elaborate and, to many eyes, beautiful.  Just another minor basilica church in a country dotted with them, you might think.  Yet take a few steps back from the door of the church and look down. You are in for a surprise.

Image Credit Flickr User Onourownpath

The Assassin Bug – Malaysia’s Macabre Miniscule Murderer

I do hope you have had your lunch, in which case you might be ready for a short afternoon horror story. This is a member of the assassin bug family found in Malaysia. It has a particularly cunning plan when it comes to avoid being eaten.  Once it’s had its own lunch (by sucking out the liquefied insides of its victims) it hoists their empty exoskeletons on its back – tens of them all held together by a sticky secretion. The Ark in Space tells the rest of this macabre tale!

Image Credit