Korean photographer JoengMee Yoon’s Pink & Blue Project was prompted by his own five-year-old daughter, whose obsession with pink was so strong that she refused to wear any other color, and insisted on playing with only pink toys. It wasn’t long before Yoon discovered other children (and parents) with the same spellbound affliction, building identities around the single color that corresponds to their gender. Crossing boundaries of nationality and socio-economic status, Yoon’s project starkly examines the state of childhood under globalization, where prefabricated ideals and desires are marketed to children from birth.

Via Beautiful/Decay.

Former child model and current renowned photographer Cara Phillips is behind an eerily alluring series of portraits called Ultraviolet Beauties. Shot using the same invisible skin damage-revealing technique that cosmetics corporations have employed in recent years to scare consumers about the long-term effects of sun exposure, the subjects in Phillips’ portraits (chosen at random on the streets of Manhattan) appear to be caught in pious moments of tranquility. These everyday people seem momentarily unaware of the invisible scars that overwhelm their own faces, while the viewer is treated to a voyeuristic sneak peek into an array of seemingly malignant prognoses. From her project statement:

As an artist, I am fascinated by a technology that allows me to see inside of my subject, to see deeper than what a normal camera lens can record. To me it is in the subject’s vulnerability, where I find a beauty that transcends the flawed and damaged surface.

One of 2008’s greatest, most under-appreciated cinematic marvels comes out on DVD today. Wendy and Lucy is the simple tale of a woman and her dog trying to make it through an unforgiving world. Beautifully directed by maverick filmmaker Kelly Reichardt and gracefully carried by Michelle Williams’ nuanced performance, Wendy and Lucy is both poetic and raw in its understated examination of society’s subtle injustices and the ways in which its systems can fail us. A grim cautionary tale for our economically unstable times and a memorial to quiet moments of untold personal struggle, check out the DVD and be thankful for what you’ve got.

Might this forsaken estate, with its vacant tiger cages, be foreshadowing the inevitable decline of American indulgence? Could scenes like these become common in the wake of our current financial woes? Is this a harbinger of doom for excessively extravagant cribs? Probably not– there’d be a full-on civil war before the upper upper crust ditches their cribs– but it’s still a stunning, humbling experience to set eyes upon photographs of such massive, tangible loss.