This year, Cédric Gerbehaye spent December and January photographing in Sète, France, the sixth photographer to do so as part of an artist-in-residency program. As part of the residency, Gerbahaye’s photographs will be featured in the festival ImageSingulières, held in Sète from May 8th to 26th. The work will also be published in May by Le Bec en l’Air, in a book titled “Sète #13,” which will include an essay by Christian Caujolle, the founder and artistic director of Agence VU.Click here for a look.: http://nyr.kr/17tIvL6

(Source: newyorker.com)

Nobody knows how old the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen was when she died, in 1995. Judging from her obituary, information about Leen is scarce. She lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the U.S., where she became one of Life magazine’s first female photographers, in the nineteen-forties. She shot countless assignments for the magazine, including more than fifty cover stories, and produced fifteen photo books. Her most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Though many of Leen’s assignments were quite pedestrian—her photos have titles like “A Couple Looking for a House to Buy,” “Children Attending a Birthday Party,” and “American Women Playing Bridge”—her images are packed with as much violence, sexual tension, and mystery as any David Lynch film. Her photos wouldn’t look out of place next to Cindy Sherman’s on a gallery wall. But, unlike Lynch or Sherman, Leen found tension in the real world, and her subjects weren’t actors—they were just everyday people living out their lives. And while a quick search on the Internet will turn up photo captions, why bother? After all, sometimes knowing less is much more interesting.

—James Pomerantz on the photography of Nina Leen. Click here to view additional photos: http://nyr.kr/NWEGWY

Nearly two years ago, Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar shells in Libya while he was photographing the civil war there. Hetherington, who is known for his work in West Africa and with U.S. Army soldiers in Korengal Valley, in Afghanistan, worked in both still and moving images, and, as Whitney Johnson wrote in her 2010 post, explored “the boundaries… between photojournalism and conceptual work.”

This week, Yossi Milo Gallery presents “Inner Light: Portraits of the Blind,” an exhibition of the black-and-white photographs Hetherington took between 1999 and 2003 at the Milton Margai School for the Blind in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he was fondly known as Uncle Tim. About the conflict in Sierra Leone, Hetherington said, “As a result of the civil war, many people were left with serious medical conditions. As well as the more common abuses of amputation, the fighters of the Revolutionary Front (R.U.F.) also terrorized people blind by cutting their eyes out. Others lost their eyes to shrapnel or as a result of being caught up in combat. Many simply lost their eyesight because they did not have access to a doctor and therefore a simple medical condition developed went untreated.”

The Yossi Milo show opens on April 11th, and the HBO documentary “Which Way Is The Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington,” directed by Hetherington’s friend and filmmaking partner Sebastian Junger, premières on April 10th.

—Richa Sinha. Here’s a selection of photos from the exhibition: http://nyr.kr/16K1ter 

Mariana Cook’s portrait photography seems to corroborate the old myth of the camera as a soul-stealing machine. Her eye is warmly enveloping, yet also sharp and efficient—like an emotional pickpocket, she removes crucial human essences and stores them on film. One can only imagine the deft charm she must employ to get these photographs, which are marked by gestures and gazes and oddities that the viewer immediately knows to be characteristic of their subjects. In her many books of portraiture—among them, “Coupes,” “Generations of Women,” “Mothers and Sons,” “Fathers and Daughters”—Cook presents images alongside text, distilled from interviews she conducts with the people in the photos. The interplay between the photographer’s vision of her subject and the subject’s account of herself produces a simultaneous sense of precision and of mystery: How much can we really see of a person? How much can they really see of themselves? Cook seeks, with a kind of patient force, to know as much as she can.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In March of last year, Diana Matar joined her husband, Hisham, when he returned to his homeland of Libya. This was Hisham’s first time in Libya since his family left, in 1979, when he was eight years old, and he writes about the trip in his piece in the magazine this week. “What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?” he asks at the beginning of the article.

“Libya was the place Hisham had to leave as a boy,” writes Diana, “it was the country that had kidnapped his father and incarcerated many family members. Personally and viscerally, it was a place that inspired fear in me, renewed every time Hisham wrote about his past or criticized the dictatorship.” Diana had never been to Libya, and in the course of the four weeks they spent together there, Diana “met Hisham’s extended family, saw the landscape he grew up in, and dipped my toes in the sea he loved as a boy. I was moved the country’s natural beauty and the tenderness and vibrancy of its people.”

—Elissa Curtis. Here is a selection of Diana’s photographs of the journey: http://nyr.kr/10C5pug

“Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” is a three-part exhibition of photographs from the Walther Collection, curated by the South African scholar Tamar Garb, with works that range from late-nineteenth-century photographs from southern Africa to pictures by present-day African and African-American artists. The final installment of the series, “Poetics and Politics,” is currently on view at the Walther Project Space, in Chelsea.

Click-through for a slide show of photographs from “Distance and Desire,” with captions abbreviated from the catalogue, followed by a Q. & A. with Garb: http://nyr.kr/10VCuoK

(Source: newyorker.com)

Bob (Bengie) Powers, who grew up in Brooklyn in the nineteen-fifties, had his first drink at eight years old, stabbed someone at twelve, was out of school by sixteen, and was taking drugs at eighteen.

Bruce Davidson, the iconic photographer known for his pictures of the New York City subway, The Dwarf, East 100th Street, and the Brooklyn Gang, also photographed the street gang called the Jokers, of which Bengie was the leader. Nearly forty years later, Bob Powers got in touch with the Davidsons.

Emily Haas Davidson, Bruce’s wife, has spent over ten years talking to Bobby, and, in “Bobby’s Book,” they recount his tumultuous young years of violence, drug addiction, crime, love, and loss.

“I think back about how the alcohol and drugs got me to be so mean. It’s like I don’t even think it was me that I’m talking about. I’m a totally different and changed person. It’s like the guy I’m talking about is a guy that I once knew. He doesn’t really exist anymore. This guy is dead, and I can tell you all about him because I hung out with him, I was very close to him. But I’m not that guy.”

Here’s a look at Bengie and his Brooklyn gang from “Bobby’s Book,” recently published by Seven Stories Press: http://nyr.kr/X8uem7

Photographs by Bruce Davidson.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Will the Supreme Court recognize Edith Windsor?

Here, Amy Davidson writes that there is “something distinct about Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act… Windsor’s biography… isn’t so different from those of the Justices, or of those in their social and cultural circles.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Zg5iTM

Photograph: Bless Bless Productions.

In this week’s issue of the magazine (the Style Issue), Pari Dukovic’s Portfolio of the emerging punk culture in Burma follows Calvin Tomkins’s piece about the upcoming exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” As the introduction to Dukovic’s photographs explains,

Punk in nineteen-seventies New York tended to be more concerned with aesthetics than with politics. It was spare, nervy music created in reaction to the embarrassing excesses of arena rock. Often, the “establishment” it railed against was your mom, or your school principal. (The final scene of the Ramones’ movie “Rock ’n’ Roll High School” is Vince Lombardi High exploding in flames.) Decades later, a punk diaspora thrives around the world. In Myanmar, a small punk community that stayed underground through decades of military rule is beginning to emerge.

Click-through for more, plus a slideshow of Dukovic’s photos: http://nyr.kr/YNc5aT

Editors’ note: In 1902, Mary MacLane, a nineteen-year-old-girl from Butte, Montana, published a book detailing her fantasies, her outrageous philosophical ideas, and intimations of her own genius. The book was a sensation, selling a hundred thousand copies in its first month, and launching her into a short but fiery life of writing and misadventure. A template for the confessional memoirs that have become ubiquitous, “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” is being published in a new edition by Melville House this week.

Here’s an excerpt: http://nyr.kr/Ykht64

Photograph: Library of Congress.

(Source: newyorker.com)