Elissa Curtis: 

Taking our cue from the current Style Issue of the magazine, we’re wrapping up the week on Photo Booth with a selection of pictures from the photographer Lauren Lancaster’s first foray into New York Fashion Week, this past February. She documented models getting primped for the runway, last-minute wardrobe adjustments, and the pre-show buzz of anticipation, and also noticed a newly ubiquitous object at the shows: the iPhone. “Where waiting once might have meant boredom and daydreams, emotions now were hidden behind the familiar posture of a bowed head and nose-to-phone stony stare,” Lancaster said. 

Click-through for a slideshow of Lancaster’s photos: http://nyr.kr/YwIdx7

Last week, the photographer Matt Eich took The New Yorker’s Instagram feed with him to Sweetwater, Texas, for the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. At the roundup, held each year since 1958, thousands of wild rattlesnakes are captured, sold, displayed, and, often, killed as part of the week’s events. “The idea of being around thousands of snakes wasn’t high on my bucket list.” Eich told me. “Still, I decided it would be worth seeing and experiencing, so I marked the event on my calendar nearly a year out.”

Click-through for a slideshow of Eich’s photos, and for more from Maria Lokke on his experience: http://nyr.kr/WONILl

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Robin Schwartz photographed Lena Dunham’s dog Lamby for Dunham’s Personal History “A Box of Puppies.” Schwartz, who took her first photograph of an animal at ten years old, told me, “I am an animal person. I cannot survive without animals, this is who I have always been.” Her assistant on the shoot was her thirteen-year-old daughter, Amelia, who is also the subject of Schwartz’s body of work “Amelia’s World,” a magical portrait stretching over eleven years, which pictures Amelia with all types of animals—the largest is an elephant and the smallest is a Cotton-Top Tamarin. Schwartz is a professor of photography at William Paterson University, in New Jersey, and is represented by ClampArt.

Click-through for a selection of images from “Amelia’s World,” accompanied by Amelia’s captions and memories, and followed by a brief Q. & A. with Schwartz: http://nyr.kr/Xq4jkK

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, we’ve curated a selection of intimate portraits from photographers who have a significant body of work devoted to their husband, wife, partner, or lover. The images below explore intangible emotions, from new, lustful love to lengthy, studied intimacy to a love transformed or lost. Click-through for a slideshow, and commentary from the photographers: http://nyr.kr/VhrbY0

(Source: newyorker.com)

Ever wonder what goes into a stock photo? Jessie Wender visits DIS Image Studio, a fully functional temporary photo studio that is devoted to the production, and exploration of stock images. Click-through for a selection of photos created at the studio thus far, and for a Q&A with DIS: http://nyr.kr/YUT8lI

Over the past ten years, Russia has seen a rise in domestic cults; the Russian Orthodox church estimates that over four thousand religious movements currently exist across the country.

Click-through for a selection of David Monteleone’s photographs from his time with the Vissarionites, a religious cult that lives in a community based in the rural Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, and more on the Vissarionites by Maria Lokke: http://nyr.kr/WCv0SB

Mike Brodie says that he never really wanted to be an artist. But he’s travelled over fifty thousand miles by train, lived with an underground rock band in Philadelphia and with vegans in Portland, and photographed it all. His images—of trains with the earth flying by, of a tender sleeping embrace—are touching and terrifying, exciting and raw. This work will be released as Brodie’s first book, “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity,” by Twin Palms Publishers and TBW Books, on March 1st. He will also have two concurrent exhibits in March, one at Yossi Milo Gallery, in New York, and one at M + B, in Los Angeles, and book signings on March 8th, at Dashwood Books in New York, and March 17th, at Family Books in Los Angeles.

Click-through for a slideshow, and a Q. & A. with Brodie: http://nyr.kr/VwK7lC

Jessie Wender:

On the last day of 2012, the photographer Magda Biernat-Webster and her husband, the illustrator Ian Webster, began a journey in Chile that they’re calling North via South: from Antarctica to Alaska. After landing in Santiago, Chile, via New York City via Williamsburg, they drove fifteen hundred miles south, through Chile, to catch a cruise boat headed to Antarctica, which will be the official starting point of their voyage. Over the coming months, we’ll be following their journey and publishing dispatches from road, boat, and plane.

Click-through for a selection of Magda’s photographs from Chile, with captions from the couple: http://nyr.kr/WefYVR

(Source: newyorker.com)

Photographer Moises Saman has been covering the Arab Spring and its repercussions since the revolution’s inception in Tunisia, 2010. Of the Egyptian Revolution, Saman says, “The past two years in Egyptian politics have been like a turbulent soap opera, playing out on the streets of Cairo for all the world to see… the next act in this political theatre might be the hardest to predict.” Click-through for a slideshow of his photographs: http://nyr.kr/WTesFr

(Source: newyorker.com)

On Wednesday evening, the Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael accepted the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant for Humanistic Photography in a ceremony at the School of Visual Arts. The grant is awarded to support and encourage a photographer working in the spirit of the legendary photojournlaist, and van Agtmael plans to use the thirty-thousand-dollar grant to build on “Disco Night September 11,” his ongoing project on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences in the United States. “As an American of the generation shouldering these wars, I feel a strong responsibility to document their cost,” van Agtmael said.

Click-through for more from Elissa Curtis on van Agtmael, and a slide show of van Agtmael’s images, along with those of Massimo Berruti, who won the W. Eugene Smith fellowship to continue his work on Pakistan. “The Dusty Path,” Berruti said, is a project “about a nation trapped between violence and political corruption. A trembling giant on the brink of a deep abyss.” Also included is work by Michael Christopher Brown, Bharat Choudhary, Jon Lowenstein, Justin Maxon, Ami Vitale, Farzana Wahidy, and Robert Yager, who were all finalists for these grants. See the slideshow.