All photos © Grayson Schaffer.

“There’s a gang of guys from Alaska that get together each fall at the same hunting camp in North Dakota. Most of them have dogs from the same kennel—Wildrose—in Oxford, Mississippi,” says photographer Grayson Schaffer, a senior editor at Outside magazine. With more than a dozen dogs in the field, they’ve got to be well trained, otherwise you’ll end up with a scrum fighting over each pheasant that goes down. Ideally, when a pheasant flushes, a dog should sit and wait for the handler to send him out for the retrieve. That way you’ve only got one or two dogs searching for each bird. For everyone in camp, hunting is more about watching the dogs work than it is about shooting birds—though that’s definitely part of it. According to the North Dakota tourism department, more than 900,000 wild pheasants are taken each year in the state.

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All photos © Misha Friedman

Misha Friedman has been photographing humanitarian crises around the world, with a recent focus on documenting the tuberculosis epidemic in the former Soviet Union. The number of patients with non-treatable forms–called XDR or extensively drug-resistant TB–is growing steadily in that part of the world because of lack of treatment and education. “[Those] who become sick are stigmatized, relatives turn away, neighbors stop speaking,” Friedman explains. “They spend months in prison-like clinics, where equipment is outdated and medical and nursing staff are just as poor as their patients. Many leave without finishing their treatment only to return over and over again.” These images were taken during several trips to hospitals in Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Russia.  Friedman says it was emotionally draining to witness the suffering and inadequate treatment, then leave the hospitals and see how governments spend so lavishly on other things, such as a sports stadium or a new limousine for the local public health official. Friedman has collaborated on the project with NGOs including Doctors Without Borders, World Health Organization, and the Institute of Modern Russia. His goal is to draw attention to the TB epidemic, which is now killing thousands of people–and not just in the  developing world.

Above: A 37-year old patient outside the palliative ward for terminally ill showing his lunch – that’s the only food he can afford on his pension.

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All photos © Ben Roberts. Tent Interiors from the Occupy LSX camp, St. Paul’s Square, London.

British photographer, Ben Roberts’s latest series “Occupied Spaces” shows an intimate look at the private spaces of occupiers at the protest camp outside of St Paul’s Cathedral in central London. The project began in response to stories Roberts heard in the mainstream media claiming that “thermal imaging” proved only 10 percent of the 250 tents in St. Paul’s Square were being inhabited overnight. Skeptical of these claims, Roberts set out to record the daily life of an occupier without, as he says, “resorting to the standard photographic language of ‘protest photography.’ The traces of activity and inhabitance in these photographs serve as a document of the intense utilisation of a limited space by a large number of both permanent and temporary residents.” Roberts’s series was recently featured on the BBC. (more…)

All photos © Cecil Beaton: The New York Years. Above: Truman Capote in Morocco, 1949.

From the 1930s, when he helped revolutionize fashion journalism, through the 1960s, when he launched headlong into the Pop art era, London-based photographer Cecil Beaton brought to New York City his own perspective—aristocratic, sexually ambiguous, and theatrical. At the same time, New York offered Beaton innumerable opportunities to reinvent himself and his career. Cecil Beaton: The New York Years, published by Skira Rizzoli,  features sketches, costumes, set designs, previously unpublished letters, and over 200 photographs and drawings, many in color and never seen before. The book documents Beaton’s most influential relationships with quintessential figures of the New York art scene, including Greta Garbo, his female confidant and muse, and Andy Warhol, who passed the torch of documenting the New York art scene.  Cecil Beaton: The New York Years is also currently on view in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York until February 20, 2012. (more…)

All photos © Betsy Pinover Schiff.

Photographer Betsy Pinover Schiff offers a new perspective on America’s greatest urban park –exclusively from windows and terraces of more than 100 private apartments and offices on all four sides of the 840-acre Park. She captures both the dramatic and lyric moods evoked by the grand vistas of the Park’s natural beauty in its changing seasons. “As a photographer of gardens and landscape architecture” she said, “my interest was the landscape of Central Park rather than the city skyline behind or the activity within it.” Her focus was the colors, textures shadows and architectural elements in the Park as they appear from above, from early morning to night. The five-year project resulted in the acclaimed book Windows on Central Park: the Landscape Revealed (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd, October, 2011), which followed on the heels of her book New York City Gardens (Hirmer Verlag, 2010). Read about Schiff’s encounters with the private residents surrounding Central Park in the NY Times City Room blog.

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