All photos © Gina LeVay. Above: Toro, 2006.

Five years ago, Gina LaVey began documenting female matadors, or las toreras. Through documenting the women’s lifestyles in and out of the ring, LeVay examines the conflict of the female in the midst of a male dominated art and sport steeped in cultural mores. The female matador has faced much opposition in entering the ring, but LeVay brings their strengths and abilities to light. She aims to illuminate the truth of the bullfight for these women by capturing the diametrically opposed elements of brutality and sensuality, drama and harmony that are inherent in this dance of death. LeVay’s exhibition, Bull Fight, is on view at hous projects until June 25, 2011.

-courtesy hous projects’

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All images © Copyright 2011, courtesy Birthe Piontek and Charles Guice Contemporary. Above: Doyard.

The idealization of the North has been nourished by the stories of Jack London, the films about the area’s pristine tapestry, and by the Northern Lights, which to this day have lost none of their spiritual fascination or magical appeal. In 2008, Birthe Piontek drove from her home in Vancouver, Canada, more than 1,900 miles to Dawson City, Yukon Territory. Intrigued by the setting, the people, and the light, Piontek enjoyed the idea of the quiet, peaceful town “where everybody knows each other but there are so many underlying secrets and dark stories to discover.”

In an introduction for the artist’s new monograph, The Idea of North, Karen Irvine, curator for the Museum of Contemporary Photography, writes, “like David Lynch, Birthe Piontek demonstrates an aesthetic preference for portraying people in dramatic light and endowing each composition with a sense of eerie foreboding.” Piontek’s work has been exhibited internationally, and has been featured in publications including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, Wired and Die Zeit. She is represented by Charles Guice Contemporary.

- courtesy Charles Guice Contemporary.

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© Joni Sternbach.

From SurfLand, Joni Sternbach’s collection of contemporary portraits of surfers photographed on America’s coastlines. Using the historic wet-plate collodion process, Sternbach creates one-of-a-kind tintypes that feel ambiguous, timeless and mysterious. She works with a large- format camera, and because the wet process must be prepared and developed on location, she and her subjects can see the pictures immediately. The elaborate process is part theater and part craft that enables Sternbach to interact with her sitters and other beach goers alike. Working with a wet chemical outdoors also lends itself to spontaneous and unpredictable results. It is precisely this raw quality of the process that suits the subject matter, giving it a distinctive appearance and echoing important traditions of nineteenth-century anthropological photography. Sternbach’s work is on view as part of the group exhibition, Sea Creatures at the Joseph Bellows Gallery until August 13, 2011.

© Lori Nix/ClampArt Gallery, a photo showing work in progress on Nix’s photo “Beauty Shop”

“Otherworldly,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, looks at artists who painstakingly craft miniature worlds by hand. The show includes work by several photographers who, by lighting and photographing their scale models, produce images that are at once realistic and ambiguous.

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© Platon. Above: Albert II. Sovereign Prince, Monaco. Reign since April 2005.

Platon’s new book, POWER, is a comprehensive historical record of our time and a ‘yearbook’ that captures the personalities and public faces of the world’s most powerful decision makers in a tumultuous political landscape.  “Although all of these portraits are of political figures, my portrait project is not political—it’s human,” said Platon, recently speaking about the book. “You put all the pictures together and, I think, it will give us a sense of what it was like to live in these times. You get a sense of the global personality of the power system. It allows us to stand back and to start to analyze what happened, who was in control—that is what this book is about.” To hear Platon talk about POWER, published by Chronicle Books,  click here.

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