Skip to main content

Seven decades of Walter Chandoha's feline pals

The Internet has always been a great place to find delightful and amazing pictures of cats. Pros and amateurs alike snap and post gazillion images of these furry creatures. But long before kitties ruled both Facebook and Instagran there was Walter Chandoha.

The prolific photographer, who passed away this year at the age of 98, had amassed an archive of about 230,000 photos, his daughter Fernanda estimates, of which 90,000 were of his feline friends. Now these images are gathered together in the new book Cats. Photographs 1942–2018.

As the 296-page hardback explains, Walter's career started in 1949 when he noticed a stray kitten in the snow. He took it home and turned his lens on his new pet. He really liked the results, began photographing cats from a local shelter, thereby kickstarting a remarkable career that would span 70 years.

The images here are excerpted from Walter's book, now available from Taschen. Thanks to Astrid for the tip.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Weirdly Charming

If you’re a fan of art that makes you do a double-take, you need to check out  Richard Brener . Based in the UK, Richard is an internationally collected artist who works primarily with ink, fineliners, and gouache. When you first see his pieces, they actually look pretty playful. Then you realize the entire canvas is packed with thousands of tiny, ghost-like shapes he calls "champs." They’re all squeezed together like commuters on a rush-hour train, and the level of detail is honestly mind-blowing. Richard spends hundreds of hours drawing these little guys over and over. It’s obsessive, very intentional, and a little bit wild. The cool part is that the longer you stare, the more the vibe shifts. Check out more photos below:

Enigmatic Shapes and Psychedelic Patterns

To say that I love Sanagi 's work is an understatement. Looking at her art feels sort of therapeutic, and I find her drawings refreshingly intricate. They're trippy, psychedelic, and resemble something that you might see under a microscope. Not much is Googleable about Sanagi, but that's fine. There aren't many artists these days that still pull off the whole mysterious vibe, so I commend her for that. By the way... they're all hand-drawn with pen and ink.

Want to repel mosquitoes? Use graphene-lined clothes

Health officials in the Philippines continue to seek better weapons against dengue fever as death toll from the mosquito-borne disease continues to rise in several regions in the country. Some people use insect repellents, while others use biological alternatives to kill the thirsty little bloodsuckers. Graphene also prevents mosquito bites. A team of researchers at Brown University discovered that graphene-lined clothing not only is an effective physical barrier to those pesky insects, it also blocks chemical signals in sweat that encourage them to bite. "With the graphene, the mosquitoes weren't even landing on the skin patch—they just didn't seem to care," according to Cintia Castillho, a PhD student at Brown and the study's lead author. Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been dubbed as a wonder material. It is stronger than steel, lighter than paper, conducts heat and electricity, and highly flexible.