I have a constant complaint about people who publish on the internet: a lot of them want to remain anonymous. I understand this to some extent when it comes to political bloggers. And I understand it when people are writing about their struggles with drugs or pedophilia or any number of other things that would cause them to be ostracized. But I see this tendency toward anonymity related to totally benign activity. And nowhere is it more common than among graphic artists.

I ran into this a couple of month ago when I featured a photo collage by Kassandra. I posted an image called Opium Dreams, which blew me away. All of her work is outstanding. But who is she? Certainly a professional based upon her work. And I think that she is Russian. But why hide? The world wants to know about you! And in her case, I would certainly like to know more about the craft of what she does because it isn’t pure photography. I can understand the desire for privacy, but I suspect that most people remain anonymous by default. They aren’t writers or they don’t realize that people would like a little context for their work.

This is the situation with an article I discussed a couple of years ago in an article, The Beauty of Abandonment and Decay. The artist is Barry Mangham who uses the moniker Pixog. I have been able to hunt down a little information on him. Over at 500px, he wrote, “Taking photos is purely a hobby for me. I experiment quite a lot with post processing…” I like that. It goes along with my general belief that our society is overflowing with unheralded artists of great creativity.

Given that Pixog doesn’t seem to mind that people post his work as long as he is credited, let me present some of his stuff that I find really compelling. The first is Abandoned Bumper Cars Prypiat/Chernobyl. You should click over and see it at full resolution, because much of the detail is missing here. He provides the following description, “Abandoned bumper cars found in the amusement park in the city of Prypiat, Ukraine. The city is preserved in time, having been evacuated in 1986 due to the explosion of reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.”

I love back-lit photography. This is something that friend of the site Robert Langdon excels at. This one by Pixog is very much in that style, Sunset over the Slovenian Coastline. He describes it, “A shot of people on a pier, silhouetted against the setting Sun, near Ankaran, Slovenia.”

He doesn’t do much black and white work, but what he does do is really stark as you can see in some of his work at 500px — specifically USA, New York, Broadway. But I just love this one, B&W Balloons at Dawn, “Hot air balloons rising up at the same time as the Sun.”

Go check out the rest of Pixog’s work. You can purchase it for things like wall hangings. You know: buy one, take it over to Reprint Mint and have it properly mounted. A lot of them would make great Christmas gifts — much better than the worthless crap people normally buy.

But I do wish these artists would be a little more forthcoming with who they are.