Photographer Joshua Langlais spends his days asking random people: “Would you be interested in being today’s stranger?” His project, I ♥ Strangers, documents his daily encounters with people he’s never met. He snaps a photo and gives details on the stranger’s name, age, location, and how the interaction went. Initially the project was just slated for a year, but Langlais enjoyed it so much, he’s kept it up ever since September 2008. He remembers his first rejection, his first willing participant, and has made countless friends along the way. Amy Sly at Slice interviewed the Langlais about the process and the revelations he’s had since starting it. Here are some excerpts:

What are people’s most common response to your asking to photograph them?

If they want to be part of it they usually ask how long it will take. Or where I want to take the picture. Or what I am going to do with the photos. It is rare that a person I photograph engages in a real conversation with me. It is usually later, after they have seen the website, looked at their photos, and read the accompanying story, that they realize I am not the disgusting Internet marauder that they assumed I was.

Finding and photographing a new person each and every day must be challenging and there must be days you’d rather stay at home; when those days strike, what keeps you going?

Those days have become more difficult since I did not stop at the one year anniversary. Doing this for one year was my goal. I met that goal, but I couldn’t stop. I am afraid to stop….I have the “golden ticket” that allows me to go up to anyone on the street any time I feel inspired and ask them to talk to me. I can’t help but think that the day I stop will be the day I was supposed to meet a patron, or a cool Brooklyn magazine art director or the guy that cries as he shares his story with me.

What do you hope people take away from seeing this series of portraits?

This is the million dollar question. I think that people and our relationships with each other are the only thing that matters….I’d like to think that if everyone in the world slowed down and didn’t work themselves to the bone (for riches or survival) and spent some of that time building relationships, then we would start seeing the elimination of many problems. I’d like people to see these portraits and take with them the desire to learn more about the strangers around them.

Source: Slice(interview not available online)

According to the GeniusTown blog, the English are up to their old tricks again. Except this time, instead of expanding their empire across the globe to establish everlasting colonial dominion, the citizens of Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset, England have stuffed 100 books into a tiny phone booth. It’s a community library! But will imperialism ever end? (The BBC has a few more details.)

Source: Genius Town, BBC

Image by Chris Denbow, licensed under Creative Commons.

If you love Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, it’s just possible that you'll love What Was Bugging Ol’ Pharaoh?—or even the also-forgotten Young Pillars. These cartoons seem to be more obviously religious than Schulz’s other work. He also seems to love abbreviating the word “old” as “ol.” The fine folks over at Drawn! have a little sampling of this recently dusted-off work.

Source: Drawn!

Image by ComiCrazys.

I finally sat down with the latest edition of the McSweeney's DVD magazine Wolphin. It's stellar as always, and the film I can't get out of my head is Ramin Bahrani's Plastic Bag, featuring the voice of filmmaker Werner Herzog and starring a very lonely plastic bag blowing across desolate American landscapes. It's kind of funny at first, but soon Herzog's deadpan portrayal of the sad plastic bag will have you in something of a trance--or at least a deep funk.

Source: Wolphin

Baltimore’s Urbanite first hipped us to a unique set of hand-crafted crime-scene dioramas known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, which are used to teach police detectives and investigators about solving murders with forensic science. Now the mini-murder scenes are the star of filmmaker Susan Marks’ forthcoming documentary Of Dolls and Murder. The project gets a hand from cult filmmaker John Waters, who is a fan of the miniatures and narrates Marks’ film. Marks told Baltimore City Paper, “We never even considered anyone else.” Here’s a little more history on the Nutshells and the trailer for the film:

Frances Glessner Lee, a crotchety Chicago heiress and self-trained forensics expert, painstakingly crafted the Nutshells in the 1930s and ’40s. A pioneer in the then-emerging field of legal medicine, Lee created the Nutshells as training tools for police detectives and other death-scene investigators, who would hone their observational skills as they attempted to determine the dolls’ likely cause of death: homicide, suicide, accident, or natural causes. Lee was nothing if not thorough; she based the dioramas on crime scenes she visited or read about and sat in on autopsies to make sure she got the details right. Each death scene is a composite of real cases, often tweaked to make the cause of death more puzzling, the clues more enigmatic. “[As] teaching tools, these [are] wonderful dolls that were made so well that they’re still being used” in the biannual seminars of the Harvard Associates in Police Science, Marks points out.

For Marks and her filmmaking team (co-producer/editor/composer John Kurtis Dehn and cinematographer Matt Ehling), the Nutshells are not only valuable because they’re frankly creepy, but also because of what they have to offer about the pursuit of justice both in the ’30s and today. Crime television juggernauts such as CSI and its spin-offs have made fiber analysis and DNA-typing part of common parlance, but the Nutshells encourage a return to investigational fundamentals: hyper-acute observation in which nothing can be taken at face value.

Sources: Urbanite,Baltimore City Paper

Canadian puppet master Ronnie Burkett is helping to revive the lost art form of puppeteering through his emotionally charged one-man shows. Alex Hutchinson profiles the skilled string-master in a recent issue of The Walrus, unraveling how a handful of mentors shaped Burkett’s career and how he’s now found his own protégé to mentor.

Hutchinson writes, “In the pantheon of Canadian pride, the fact that one of the world’s greatest puppeteers hails from a small city in southern Alberta is somewhat akin to our propensity for winning Olympic medals in trampoline: our satisfaction is tempered by doubts about whether anyone else participates past the age of eight. But Burkett’s lack of peers demonstrates that he has essentially invented, or at least reinvented, the genre of serious puppetry.”

Although Burkett’s work really begs to be seen live, The Gazette has a great clip of Burkett performing a scene from his recent show: Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy.

Source: The Walrus,The Gazette

Image by Trudie Lee, courtesy of John Lambert & Assoc. Inc.

This short film is incredible. Skateboarders in Fresno County skate the pools of foreclosed homes and offer a running commentary on the housing crisis. Patrick James at Good captured it: "a poignant meditation on greed, materialism, and an enduring kind of joy."

Source: Good

Activists demanding federal intervention to defend immigrant rights in Arizona have launched an art campaign, encouraging artists looking to channel their outrage to submit poster designs. A gallery is up at the Alto Arizona website. Here are a few samples:

By Melanie Cervantes

By Joel Garcia

By Jon Garza

(Thanks, Eyeteeth.)

Source: Just Seeds