In the world of fine art there’s always someone trying to radically change the game with their artwork. While this can lead to some  innovative and interesting pieces, it can also occasionally turn things into one big mess, and forced innovation sometimes causes artists to lose sight of how important traditionalism can be to maintaining artistic integrity.

Enter Barry X Ball, a sculptor who’s decided to take it back to the old school by sculpting portraits and figures out of marble. He crafts these incredible works of art while paying attention to fine details, such as the natural flow of the veins in the marble and the retention of natural edges and form whenever possible.

You can check out a selection of Barry’s marble works at the link below, works which somehow manage to be traditionally beautiful and utterly surreal at the same time.

Link  –via Beautiful Decay

National Geographic magazine photographer Joel Sartore is taking a working tour of the American zoos in order to take portraits of the world’s animals. It’s all part of the the Biodiversity Project. Learn more about the Biodiversity Project and see some of those awesome portraits up close at the Neatorama Spotlight Blog. Link

The old timey photos in this series all have one eerie quality in common-the mother’s identity has been concealed. Whether with shroud, or by simply scraping the face away, erasing their identity seems like an odd thing to do when they’re posed for a picture with their children.

Maybe they were having a bad hair day, or woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but isn’t wearing a shroud over your head at a photo shoot an extreme reaction to not looking your best? If anybody has any insight into this strange trend in portraiture, please share! Otherwise, enjoy taking a look back at when people were really weird about having their picture taken.

Link –via Flavorwire

These mosaic portraits of geek gods, such as Bill Gates and the creator of Space Invaders Tomohiro Nishikado, are cleverly constructed by Charis Tsevis using thousands of tiny images that directly relate to each subject’s claim to fame.

In other words, Nishikado’s portrait is made up of little Space Invaders, Gates’ portrait is made up of Windows related iconography, and so on. They’re really cool looking, and I think they would make awesome desktop backgrounds!

Link –via Flavorwire

Remember when celebrity portraits weren’t photoshopped, and the stars were allowed to relax and be themselves, rather than posing on ridiculously overdone sets in the latest couture ensemble?

This series by Norman Seeff finds celebs relaxing, goofing around, and occasionally just hangin’ out in full outfit and makeup (I’m looking at you KISS). Take a stroll through the rest of the images at the link below, and reminisce about a time before John Travolta found Scientology, the Jackson 5 sported afros, and the Rolling Stones still had their edge.

Link –image credit: Norman Seeff

Photographer Dennis Ziliotto is a great artist and these surreal shots featured on BuzzFeed, inspired by Alice In Wonderland, are simply stunning.

Link Via BuzzFeed

These amazingly realistic portraits were rendered in chalk and graphite by Scottish artist Paul Cadden. Apparently, he specializes in faces with lots of wrinkles personality. Shades of gray never looked so good!

Link –via BuzzFeed

Photographer Senen Llanos took portraits of cosplayers attending New York’s Comic-Con this weekend. He highlighted the subject by separating the character from the “busy background” that you’re familiar with in convention photos. See 39 cosplay portraits at his site. Link

Craftster member ChainCrafts made armor for his family because his wife wanted a “Post-Apocalypse/Zombie Slaying family photo shoot” for her birthday. She got her wish. The awesome photographs are shared at the Craftster forum. Link -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Bakan Photography)

I was surprised when I learned just how well Bill Murray could pull off the look of an 1800′s Russian general. But he’s not the only celebrity that looks right in the role. Replaceface features an array of modern celebrities in this classic portrait style.

Link Via BuzzFeed

This collage of 200 street portraits, taken by photographer Brandon Stanton, is combined with the song  “Empire State of Mind” to create a love note to the city.

The Humans of New York Project is an effort to create a photographic census of New York City. The project seeks to collect 10,000 street portraits, and plot them geographically on an interactive map.

Stanton has taken over 2,000 portraits so far. Find out more about the project, and read some of the stories of the people behind the portraits, at the Humans of New York website. Link -via Everlasting Blort

How to Be a Retronaut has a collection of portraits of married couples a hundred years back or more. Some look strangely alike, and they all look fairly uncomfortable posing for the photographer. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Photographer William Carrick and his partner John MacGregor traveled throughout Russia between 1857 and 1878 taking portraits of Russians of all stations and occupations. These pictures form an ethnographic overview of Russia in the 19th century, and are a historical treasure. This picture shows a young vendor with his hand-carved wooden abacuses for sale. See a varied collection of Carrick’s photographs at Environmental Graffiti. Link

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Artist Bashir Sultani makes amazing art using nothing but table salt. You can see his process in the video above and check out more of his artworks at the link.

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Check out these textural delights by artist Daniel Kornrumpf, who has resurrected the antiquated art of embroidery and brought it into a spectacular new light. His painterly approach to embroidery adds a fresh, modern style and energy to the medium, and the fact that so much detail is worked into these relatively small pieces makes them even more remarkable.

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Photographer Rob MacInnis takes portraits of barnyard animals. He takes easily as much care with livestock photographs as a fashion photographer would with his subjects. The group portraits will especially bring a smile to your face. Link to portraits. Link to group panoramas. -via Metafilter

You know these two fine-looking young men, even if you’ve never seen a photograph of either one before. They are both featured at My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, a photo blog dedicated to the hotties of history, dating back to the invention of the camera. Really, who knew that Hermann Rorschach (of the ink blots) resembled Brad Pitt? The site is accepting submissions of more attractive public domain photographs. In case you are still wondering about the guys here, on the left is Almanzo Wilder, husband of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. On the right is Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. Link -via Metafilter

Through uncertain methods, San Francisco-based artist Jason Mecier convinces celebrities to donate personal trash to them. He turns the individual contributions into portraits of each celebrity:

He uses junk and discarded items donated by top stars, so yes…that Trojan condom box in the top left corner of Tina Fey‘s portrait actually came from Tina herself. Mecier has spent over 10 years creating outrageous portraits and is now so popular that stars contact him directly and pay $1,500 for a portrait, which he gladly makes from a bag of their junk that they provide.

Celebs who have asked for the portraits include Chris Rock, Pink, Tori Spelling, and Chelsea Handler, whose portrait includes empty vodka bottles, a Snuggie box, Martini glasses, bottle opener, buttons, batteries, chapstick, dice, pens, badges and movie tickets.

Link via Crackajack | Artist’s Website

Previously: Jason Mecier’s Food Art

Thorsten Schmidtkord, a photographer from Düsseldorf in Germany, has taken taken a bunch of portrait photos and then manipulated them, so that the top of the head is where the chin should have been. He has also removed the mouth, since it’s been replaced by the forehead.

Link – via Digital Bus Stop

The Liljenquist family collected thousands of photographs of Civil War soldiers over the years. Brandon Liljenquist saw a collection of war photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan and was inspired to make the Civil War photos public. This year, the family donated 400 of those pictures to the Library of Congress for a collection called The Last Full Measure.

Laying out the photographs at home for the last time, and thinking about the collection in a whole new light, I couldn’t help but notice how similar the faces of these boys were to those we’d seen in The Washington Post. Here were the young men who did most of the fighting and dying. In their eyes and the eyes of their loved ones, I could see the full range of human emotion. It was all here: the bravado, the fear, the readiness, the weariness, the pride and the anguish. The loneliness in their long, distant stares overwhelmed me.

The original photographs will be on display next year in Washington, but are available now online. Link to story. Link to photographs. -via Metafilter

Etsy artist Chet Phillips has created a set of dogs and cats as famous authors. Or are they famous authors portrayed as cats and dogs? Anyway, these Literary Pets are sold as prints or sets of trading cards. Shown are H.P. Lovecat and Spaniel Defoe. Link

In the same vein as Sketchy Santas, the new blog Easter Bunnies Will Steal Your Soul has pictures of terrifying rabbits and/or terrified children posing with that seasonal lagomorph we all know. Link -via Urlesque

Photographer Brouton Stroube hung his subjects up by their feet before taking a portrait. The result shows some weird gravity effects that you don’t expect when seeing the pictures turned upright. Link -via Buzzfeed

Photographer Susan Mullally took portraits of homeless people who are part of The Church Under the Bridge in Waco, Texas. In each picture of the collection called What I Keep, the subject is holding an object that means something to them, and tells why. In the portrait shown, Vietnam veteran Tindall Herndon keeps his hat to remind him of fallen brothers-in-arms. Link -via Metafilter

Can you get a lion to pose for a portrait? Yes… well maybe not you, but the folks at Big Cat Studio can!

Deadly big cats look more like domestic pets in a stunning new book of feline photographs. Carefully pieced together over a year ‘Big Cat Studio’ lets readers get up close to ocelots, leopards, pumas, lynx, lions and tigers. The cats were photographed in a specially constructed studio at The Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (T.I.G.E.R.S) in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We hope that you are going to like it as much as we are. So, take a look and enjoy

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by dra8ana.

A staff photographer for New Yorker magazine referred to only as Platon set up a studio in the United Nations building this past September to get portraits of as many world leaders as possible. For five days he took photographs of each member of the General Assembly that came to his temporary studio. Those portraits are now posted in slide show form. Click on any of them, and you can hear Platon’s story of how he got the picture, and his impressions of each president or prime minister. Link -via the Presurfer

The Denver Post recently uncovered a collection of photographs taken by Durango, Colorado photographers William Pennington and Lisle Updike between 1915 and 1920. They were featured in the newspaper in 1974. From that article:

These pictures, bearing the stamp of their studio, were recently discovered in a long forgotten file of the Denver Post library.

The two young photographers supported themselves with their portrait business, but satisfied their artistic urges by traveling around the Four Corners area in a wagon taking pictures such as the ones appearing on this page.

“There was no money in taking pictures of Indians,” Updike, 84, said from his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. His sons and grandsons now operate a chain of Updike studios in Utah and Arizona.

Updike died a couple of years after the original article appeared. The linked post features 16 of those prints. Link -via Cynical-C

(image credit: The Pennington Studio)

Improv Everywhere set up a portrait studio aboard a subway train and persuaded riders to have their pictures taken for the “subway yearbook”. Read the story behind this mission and see more pictures and a video at their website. Link -via Buzzfeed

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Previously at Neatorama: Matt Hoyle’s Encounters and Vintage Boxers.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by matthoyle.

This blog full of Olan Mills, Sears, and other similar portrait studio shots is just too funny. I’ve definitely seen some doozies in my parents’ album, and I have no doubt my kids will someday look back at our pictures and ruthlessly make fun of us. Until then, we can still mock these people.

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