The blog Cigarettes and Purity has been on a Boston kick as of late (thanks for the shout out!). Leave it to Wisconsin to point us to a new blog in our own backyard, “The Big Picture” from the Boston Globe!

When they say big pictures, they mean BIG! While most blogs resize pictures to around 450 pixels wide, these are a whopping 990 pixels - it’s great to see images at this size! Keep checking back for news and photojournalist images, there is a new one almost daily. I am sharing the above image from the Chinese earthquakes as startilingly, I haven’t seen too many of them and I think we should see more. You can explore more in this album.

From their mission:

The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, compiled semi-regularly by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm’s MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.

ABOVE IMAGE: A couple reacts immediately after an earthquake struck during their wedding photo shoot at a deserted catholic seminary in Pengzhou in southwest China’s Sichuan province Monday May 12, 2008. Five couples were having wedding photos taken when the earthquake struck, and all escaped without injury. The century-old seminary was destroyed in the quake, which left tens of thousands dead in Sichuan. (AP Photo)

The PRC’s 2008 Student Exhibition presents a dizzying array of photographs from our 18 member schools. It is proof positive of the boundless talent, energy, and creativity offered by this next generation of artists.

Two of these students have harnessed their photographic prowess to render utterly adorable images of fairly anthropomorphized animals. But, in the history of cuteness, and the ongoing dispute between cats and dogs, (and much like the HIGHLANDER) there can be only one! One species who can forever lay claim to being the cutest of them all. Let’s settle that right now with…

Student Exhibition Battle Royale (cat v dog)

Image Credits, Top to Bottom: Julie E. Brady, Natasha Brady (10 Months Old), 2007, Archival Inkjet Print, 15 x 11 inches, Boston University, College of Fine Arts, Senior; Troy Lee, Cupcake for Momo, 2007/2008, Archival Inkjet Print, 16 x 20 inches, Hallmark Institute of Photography, 1st Year

Did you see the eclipse? We hope you did! We also hope you tried your hand at photographing it. Night photography is an art unto itself. If not, the next full lunar eclipse is in 2010.

ABOVE IMAGE: Courtesy of and copyright David Karp

Over at the PRC, it’s one of our favorite times of the year when even more creativity and boundless verve adorn our walls…that’s right, it’s the PRC Student Exhibition! 18 of our institutional member schools brought us their 5 best photographs (yes, that is 90 works). Because each program juries as they see fit, we don’t see the pieces until they show up on our doorsteps! Our favorite art installer Vinnie and I had a blast playing with the works this past Saturday.

You can check out some of the student images at this audiovisual feature on BU Today. We gathered over a dozen images and students together and the nice folks there did their magic. Click here for the slideshow and here to listen to the students speak quite eloquently about their work. For local folks, there is also a smashing, full-page spread in the Weekly Dig.

Pictured above is the work of our poster child Alan Alan Arsenault, a junior at New England Istitute of Art. I was immediately smitten with this photograph and knew that it had to be on our postcard. People have been going ape over this picture and deservedly so, it’s an amazing piece and series. If you look twice, you realize that this is not an Edgerton: the “bullet” is hanging on a string and there is cotton stuffed into the apple. We also took a lot of behind-the-scenes pictures, installation shots, and portraits of the students and posted them on the PRC flickr site.

Our Daily Red (the blog of Big Red and Shiny) gave us a shout out early on. Mr. Matt Nash points out that the PRC Student Show is “a great chance to see the work of upcoming artists — and many of the artists we write about on Big RED got started at the PRC.” Thanks Matt! (He also has a interesting essay on the future of photography in the current issue of BRS.)

Join us for the dry opening Thursday, February 7 from 5:30 - 7:30pm, where we’ll have izze drinks flowing freely and way more hummus than you can shake a stick at. - Leslie

ABOVE IMAGE: Alan Arsenault, Exploding the Forbidden, from the series “Edgerton Follies,” 2006/2007, Inkjet print, Junior Photography major, New England Institute of Art