Photographer Guido Mocafico (like Mark Laita, whose work we’ve featured before) likes to take pictures of snakes.
Here, in his Serpens series, he places them in black cardboard boxes, waits for them to get comfortable and then takes these beautiful, Zen-like portraits of, well, rectangularly configured serpents.
For the past year, LA-based photographer Mark Laita has been hiking around the U.S. and Central America, photographing some of the world’s deadliest snakes for a project entitled ‘Serpentine’, of which he says:
The sensual attractiveness of snakes, which coexists with their threatening, unpredictable and mysterious nature is truly unique. This dichotomy, in which their beauty seems to be heightened by their danger, and vice-versa, is what I find so fascinating. Add to these contradictions the rich symbolism of serpents and you have a wonderfully compelling subject.
Above (top to bottom): Phillipine Pit Viper, Malayan Coral Snake, Rosy Boa and Mexican Black King Snake.
See the complete collection here.
Secret Carpentry: a snake skeleton carved into the handle of an axe by Canadian sculptor Maskull Lasserre, who extracts delicate human and animal anatomical forms from common objects.
If you like this, you’ll love what he does with computer software manuals and coathangers and the branches of trees.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIMigVo1pyA
‘Hi, this is Mark at the Reptile Section. Could you have someone clean the snake poo, sloughed skin and eggs out of the cobra pit, please? Safety equipment? Good point. Well, flip-flops, certainly. Maybe a bandana.’
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VLjDjXzTiU&feature=player_embedded#!
Depending on your perspective, this is either:
(a) A Cyclopean snakebot built by robotics students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, or
(b) The work of the devil.
Either way, we need a young priest and an old priest to fight it.
