Nader Rahmani's caricatures

Nader Rahmani is an Iranian 2D illustrator and caricaturist with a very unique style. His drawings of world leaders and celebrities have been published in a number of Iranian newspapers and magazines. Rahmani has done two caricatures of Madiba, so I thought it would be fitting to feature his work after South Africa's most beloved president was buried yesterday.

Nelson Mandela

Che Guevara

Benjamin Netanyahu

Hugo Chavez

John F. Kennedy

John Kerry

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

 Vladimir Putin

Yasser Arafat

Julia Geiser's surreal collages

Swiss artist Julia Geiser creates surreal collages with modern and vintage motifs. Sourcing the pictures she uses on the internet, Geiser's work is purely digital and on her website she warns that it is not made for print as it will lose its quality. Geiser also explains that her work oscillates between legal and aesthetic boundaries and that this "online voyeurism is an inspiration."

Mana Morimoto's paper embroidery

Mana Morimoto's self-portrait. 

Mana Morimoto is a Japanese artist who combines black and white photographs with colourful thread embroideries. In an interview with Artchipel, Morimoto, who is also known as MNMRMT, spoke about her creative process and how she developed her aesthetic:

"I like the idea of using both digital and analog tool in my work; it can be a vintage photo, an image that I found on Google or a profile picture that I steal from my friend’s Facebook. I used to embroider on colour images at first but realise that the embroidered threads go better on a black and white image. The colour compositions become more three-dimension and vivid. So I decide to systematically change the colour picture into black and white. I print it out on a thick paper and make a bunch of holes using a needle before stitching. I complete the process by scanning and uploading the final work on my Tumblr."

Morimoto also says that the stitching and weaving process is therapeutic for her and always makes her feel better about things in her life.

Living in the hottest place on earth

The Afar people are the perfect example of how human beings have the tremendous ability to adapt to extraordinary circumstances. They live in the Danakil Desert, which extends into Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. The deepest part of the desert lies 100m below sea level in what is known as the Danakil Depression. It is considered the hottest place on earth and receives almost no rain. The Afar people are nomads who raise goats, sheep and sometimes cattle in the desert. For them, the salt deposits that cover large parts of the desert are like a currency. They mine salt slabs and transport them using camels to markets in Ethiopia and the Sudan. 

Virginia Morell, who travelled to the Danakil Desert on an assignment for National Geographic, got the opportunity to join a salt-trading caravan that was making its way through the desert. She says she was able to gain some insight into the Afar way of life.

"Already, following our week in Hamed Ela, a dust-and-fly-stricken hamlet, I'd formed some opinions. One was that people can and will live anywhere—even in the Danakil, a place of dry sands and even drier gravel beds, rocky lava flows, active volcanoes, burning salt flats, temperatures that often top 120°F, winds that choke you with dust, and suffocating days of no wind at all. Even worse, this place where rain falls sparingly at the best of times was now in the grip of a bad drought, and the half-mummified carcasses of camels and goats lay strewn across the sands." 

Italian photographer Anthony Pappone specialises in festival, ceremony and tribe photography. He travelled to the Danakil Desert where he took photos of the Afar people. His photos capture the harshness of the region spectacularly.