Clash of civilizations; Hirst's £500,000 [very rare Mongolian] pencil.

A Canadian soldier. Panjwaii district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.


... a day before their circumcision ritual... Algiers.


Ramadan, Jama Masjid Mosque in New Delhi.


Eid al-Fitr, Mymensingh from Dhaka, Bangladesh.


The Montreal Canadiens’ Mathieu Darche, Quebec.


Calgary Flames Leland Irving, Alberta, Canada.


South Korea’s Na Yeon Choi, Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego.

More photojournalism. Which is truly blowing me away on a purely emotional level, lately.

Re-sequencing these offers wonderful storytelling possibilities. You wouldn't believe how easy it is to work with these in arrangement and sequence. They're so strong! They group themselves. And then converse with one another.

Breathtaking. Am I alone in finding these profoundly uplifting and inspiring?

I also feel compelled to note; I was largely under the impression that in a very broad genre categorization way, I had pretty much seen it all. Not that I was finding myself weary of any of them, by any means; one of photography's great charms is that it seems to be infinitely renewable, in terms of providing a sense of awe or wonder. But these are literally the first sports photographs that I found myself heavily drawn into and won over by. Granted, they're perhaps somewhat atypical of the genre as a whole, being, in the case of the Canadian hockey shots, very fleeting, raw, hastily-composed split-second moments of tremendous mirth, and creating in the South Korean's victorious dousing at the LPGA a moment of almost transcendent strangeness and near allegorical surrealism, but in all, to me, there's a marked restraint. No fish-eye, cusp of the slam-dunk shots, here. Perhaps they also appeal by falling slightly into the sport hierarchy margins.

Either way: sport photos. Who knew? (Aside from many, many of you.)

Random image note: Trawling through my old image archives, I came across these. I'd completely forgotten I ever collected these. Weird mechanical and romantic personal fixation on antique revolvers. Not sure why. Westerns, war, and noir, I suppose. (And probably a big dose of videogames, as well.)