On the road again with the DeadMan Street Orchestra

Recently I was skimming my "photography" feeds to find this slideshow, called The Ballad of the Hobo. It was published as a Times PhotoEssay and is made by selfmade but perfectly professional photographer James Heil. The Ballad of the Hobo is a documentary about the Deadman Street Orchestra, a band formed by street musicians, who accidently bumped into each other and started travel accross the country by hopping on trains. They usually sleep out in the open, look for food in trash cans, indulge themselves with excessive drinking and drugs and play great music.

The pictures, the lifestyle, the music, it's a form of raw poetry, a largely unknown aside and an intriguing humanised form of the Danse Macabre.

Life may be a bitch, but once and a while she is damn beautiful.
And you hate it. (Thanks James)

you ain't seen nothing yet

until you've read this and closed your eyes. Unphotographable is a nice example of how deceiving the whole idea of a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words can be.
Michael David Murphy is a semi-professional photographer who got a bit frustrated when travelling Ehtiopia (1, 2, 3 Cyber Ethiopia rules) back in 1994. He couldn't take out his camera because the people would shun away from the moment they spotted his lens. But instead of whining about the pictures he never took, he started a blog to collect them. Yes, that's right, an imaginary photoblog/book. Now it's up to you to discover whether his pictures are photoshopped or not. Check it out! (podcast)