© Carlo Van De Roer. Yoko Okutsu, 2003. courtesy of M+B Gallery.

“This project explores the idea that a camera can reveal an otherwise unseen insight into a subject’s character and their relationship with the photographer and viewer,” says photographer Carlo Van Der Roer in his artist statement for The Portrait Machine Project. “These portraits are made with a Polaroid aura camera developed in the 1970s by an American scientist in an attempt to record what a psychic might see.

“The subject is connected to the camera by sensors measuring electromagnetic biofeedback. It translates these readings into information about the subject and how they are seen by the photographer and others—suggesting the camera bypasses the control of the photographer and subject in making the portrait. The camera generates a printed description of these views of the subject which are also depicted aesthetically in the Polaroid. This printout is presented to the viewer along with each photograph in a similar manner to a caption.”

The Portrait Machine Project was recently exhibited at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles.

© Ryan Heffernan.

Storm clouds swirl around the Capitol building on a stormy spring afternoon in Washington, DC. Ryan Heffernan is one of the PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers for 2011. To see more of his work visit http://www.ryanheffernan.com/.

© Elizabeth Moreno

In “Close to Earth,” Elizabeth Moreno captures the culture and life of Baja California’s rancheros, focusing on the particular fusion between past and present that they experience-a fragile equilibrium that is about to be broken by the forces of globalization. Moreno won the 2010 Daylight CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize and was Vince Aletti’s Juror’s Pick for her diptychs, which “give us a sense of a person and a place, and how deeply interconnected they are-how a place can shape a person.” The deadline for this year’s Daylight CDS Photo Awards is May 15, with guest jurors Anthony Bannon, Darren Ching, Stacey Clarkson, Whitney Johnson, Joel Sternfeld, and Sasha Wolf.

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© Brian Buckley. Above: Gelatin Shadows.

Brian Buckley’s body of work, Camera less, is a series of photograms that are constructed using cameras, camera parts and film. Selections from the project are included in The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, published by Humble Arts Foundation, Spring 2011. To see more of Buckley’s work click here.

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© Jared Moossy. A young Afghan girl up on one of the major hills over looking the Kabul at night.

The exhibition Women Between Peace and War: Afghanistan is a multimedia reflection of the lives of women and girls in Afghanistan as seen through the perspectives of rule of law, economics, health, and education. The reality for women in most communities in Afghanistan is hard, as indicated by these statistics: a woman’s chance of dying while giving birth is 1 in 8; the average life expectancy for a woman is 44 years; the approximate literacy rate for women stands at 12.7 percent; 70 to 80 percent of women are forced into marriages; 57 percent of girls are married before the legal age of  sixteen. This project, art directed by Giorgio Baravalle of de.MO and curated by Leslie Thomas of ART WORKS Projects, includes work by renowned photographers Lynsey Addario, Moises Saman, Stephanie Sinclair, Abbie Traylor-Smith, Veronique de Viguerie and Farzana Wahidy, and essays by journalist Elizabeth Rubin.

The exhibition will tour internationally in both digital and poster formats with an accompanying magazine that has removable pages, so that each image can be displayed. This flexible design will allow both formal installations in major cultural venues as well as community exhibitions to be easily produced for international sites. Previews and special screenings have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Conferencias do Estoril in Portugal, and at the US Department of State.

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