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Historic Photographer of the Year, 2020

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Ghost world, Austin Granger

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data over dogma

If you come to me with a problem, I can tell you how to solve it and show you why, while another “expert” can show you something completely opposite and present you with “evidence.” So, who is right, and what should you believe? Today, it’s increasingly harder to answer those questions because the other guy is saying the same thing. It seems we have arrived in a world where there are no real…

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Lush, Al Mefer

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No way home, Alberto Ortega

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Cityscapes, James Gilleard

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Nightcrawler, Matthieu Bühler

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Flourishing Indigo

Germany-based photographer Marina Weishaupt shares artistically structures of pollen on the surface of a lake in Bavaria, photographed with a drone from above during spring 2018.

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“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”

- Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

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Consciousness is a variable, not a constant, and its fluctuation are indispensable to our survival. We fall into sleep in obedience to a primordial circadian rhythm; we nightly inhabit the virtual worlds of dreams; nearly all our daily doings go on without conscious awareness; our deepest motivations are shut away from conscious scrutiny; nearly all of our mental life takes place unknown to us; the most creative acts in the life of the mind come to pass unawares. Very little that is of consequence in our lives requires consciousness. Much that is vitally important comes about only in its absence.

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Evolution

Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as natural as a spider’s web. As Margulis and Sagan the written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival: “We are a part of an intricate network that comes form the original bacterial takeover of Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.” Thinking of our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial give too much importance to the accident of our origins. If we are replaced by machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors. 

#evolution technology machine man life sagan singularity

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We are finite creatures. Our lives are small and can only scientifically consider a small part of reality. What's common for us is just a sliver of what's available. We can only see so much of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can only delve so deep into extensions of space. Common sense applies to that which we can access. But common sense is just that. Common. If total sense is what we want, we should be prepared to accept that we shouldn't call infinity weird or strange. The results we've arrived at by accepting it are valid, true within the system we use to understand, measure, predict and order the universe. Perhaps the system still needs perfecting, but at the end of day, history continues to show us that the universe isn't strange. We are.

Michael Stevens

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Art of Nature

Iceland-based photographer Ben Simon Rehn shares sceneries from a flight this summer above glacial streams, in Iceland. Water and sediments washed out of the country create the most stunning forms and hues.   

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N A T U . R A E VIII

Italy-based photographer Gustav Willeit shares a series of stark landscape shots that provoke the sense of awe that man feels when faced with the greatness of nature.