France-based photographer Fabrice Wittner has a neat project titled “Enlightened Souls” that consists of ghostly portraits created by light-painting with stencils (which are themselves created from actual portraits). Wittner first started the project in May 2011 after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I first thought of it as an artistic and morale contribution to the 6.3 quake’s aftermath. I used stencils to paint enlightened characters to remember human losses and to show the spirit of a wouned city. It turned out to be an intersting way to share ideas and feelings about society and life. After all, this is what street art is made for.

After completing his Christchurch series, he turned his attention to creating portraits of Vietnam’s village children in the country’s capital city.

Enlightened Souls (via Neatorama)

Image credits: Photographs by Fabrice Wittner and used with permission

Dame di Cartone (“Cardboard Ladies”) is a project by Swiss-Italian photographer Christian Tagliavini in which he creates portraits of women that mimic the look of historical paintings. The styles include 17th century, fifties, and cubism.

You can find the entire series here.

Image credits: Photographs by Christian Tagliavini and used with permission

Design director Wayne Ford has written up a great piece on the career of American photographer Arnold Newman, who was in the vanguard of the “environmental portrait” movement that emerged in the early 1940s.

By this point, [Alexey] Brodovitch — the indirect teacher — was very aware of the young photographers work and his growing reputation, and began assigning him regular portrait commissions for Harper’s Bazaar. One of these assignments was to photograph the Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, which resulted in one of Newman’s most iconic images, although at the time it was rejected for publication. ‘Sometimes, as with his famous image of Stravinsky, he would have to recreate a natural habitat artificially,’ remarks Huxley-Parlour, ‘so he expressed his essence by placing him at a grand piano in an editor’s apartment,’ creating a strong, hard, linear composition, ‘very much like Stravinsky’s music.’

Arnold Newman and the development of the ‘environmental portrait’ (via A Photo Editor)

Image credit: Photograph by Arnold Newman

Photographer Lee Jeffries worked as a sports photographer before having a chance encounter one day with a young homeless girl on a London street. After stealthily photographing the girl huddled in her sleeping bag, Jeffries decided to approach and talk with her rather than disappear with the photograph. That day changed his perception about the homeless, and he then decided to make them the subject of his photography. Jeffries makes portraits of homeless people he meets in Europe and in the US, and makes it a point to get to know them before asking to create the portraits. His photographs are gritty, honest, and haunting.

You can see more of his work in this Flickr set.

(via Beautiful/Decay)

Image credits: Photographs by Lee Jeffries and used with permission

Similar to the centenarian portraits we shared earlier today, here’s a beautiful video with moving portraits (both literally and figuratively) of elderly people by photographer Simon Biswas. The piece is titled “The Light of Day”.

(via FlakPhoto via Coudal)

For his project titled Jahrhundertmensch, German photographer Karsten Thormaehlen shot portraits of elderly men and women who have reached the ripe old age of 100, also known as a “centenarian“. In 2009, the UN estimated that there are only about 455,000 centenarians in the world.

For an animal version of this same theme, check out the “Elderly Animals” series by Isa Leshko that we featured a while back.

Karsten Thormaehlen (via Retronaut)

Image credits: Photographs by Karsten Thormaehlen and used with permission

TIME magazine named “The Protester” as its “Person of the Year” last year. This behind-the-scenes video shows how photographer Peter Hapak traveled around to seven different countries to capture portraits of protestors for the story. The resulting photographs can be viewed here.

The Protester: A Portfolio by Peter Hapak (via PopPhoto)

Here’s a quick and simple tip for better portraits by Reddit user rmx_:

Everyone has a lazy eye. By that, I mean one eye is always smaller and/or more closed than the other eye. In some people, it is very easy to spot; in others, nearly impossible. The “beautiful people” have more symmetrical faces, but still, one eye will open more than the other. (Denzel Washington has one of the most I have seen [...])

[...] here is the tip: get the smaller/lazier eye slightly closer to the camera. Oh, and don’t tell the person what you’re looking at their eyes for! You’ll make them self conscious. Simply ask them to look at your finger and move their head to follow it, and then guide them left or right as necessary. Chances are, the movement needed will not be so much that you have to adjust your lights.

You can read more about how facial symmetry relates to beauty in this Wikipedia article.

(via Reddit)

Image credit: Man portrait by Yuri Samoilov

For her project titled Marked, photographer Claire Felicie shot close-up portraits of the marines in the 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps before, during, and after their deployment from 2009-2010. She then arranged the portraits into haunting triptychs that show the toll war has on a person’s eyes and face.

Marked by Claire Felicie (via lensculture)

Image credits: Photographs by Claire Felicie and used with permission

For his project Alter Ego, photographer Robbie Cooper traveled around the world to shoot portraits of online gamers. He then combined his portraits with screenshots of the gamers’ avatars in the various games they play, showing an interesting side-by-side comparison of what the people look like in the real world compared to what they choose to look like in their fantasy worlds. The project got its start back in 2003 after Cooper did a shoot with a CEO who used the game Everquest to communicate with his children after getting divorced.

The project has also been turned into a book. Check out the rest of the series over on Cooper’s website.

(via Flavorwire)

Image credits: Photographs by Robbie Cooper and used with permission