All photos © Jake Price

The six-month anniversary of the March 11 tsunami that struck northeastern Japan came and went with little attention in the Western press. But New York-based photographer Jake Price, who has spent a total of ten weeks in Tōhoku since March, believes the environmental devastation the disaster wrought will be a story for a long time to come. While the media has focused on nuclear contamination, he says, “Walking past overturned boats, cars, trucks, I realized that their oil, gas and other chemicals emptied into the soil and groundwater.” He photographed mounds made from the bulldozed debris of entire towns, which contain insulation, fiberglas and chemical contaminants.

The salt water and oil that washed into farms has made the land unusable for five years or more. ”Many elderly farmers will never see growth on their land again. Still they work diligently to hand it off to future generations, an issue that is filled with uncertainty because so many young people have left for the big cities.”

Price shot many still images, video and audio in the region, and the BBC showed some of his images in an audio slide show.

Of the limited press attention paid to the crisis, Price notes, “I think the perception … is that the Japanese have everything figured out because it is such an orderly society.  But that is simplistic at best.  People are still coping with enormous stress and loneliness after losing everything.”

Though assignments to cover the story are rare, Price is planning to return to the region soon. “The more I get to know about Tōhoku the more interested I become.” He wants to donate his images to libraries and community centers to help the region begin restoring the visual record lost in the tsunami.

All photos © Elijah Gowin/courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. Above: “Into the Sun 12,” 2009

Elijah Gowin has transgressed one of the most basic rules of photography in his latest series, “Into the Sun.” Shooting into the sun is a way of courting blindness, but it’s also a daring way to confront the source of the force and power of the center of our solar system. His exhibit “Into the Sun” is on display through October 22 at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York City.

Gowin, who received a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, is currently associate professor in the department of art and art history at University of Missouri-Kansas City.  Critic Lyle Rexer has written, “Elijah Gowin is the prophet of this longing, the diviner of such dreams. His work confronts the impenetrability of the world and the challenge of representing it.”

(more…)

© Damiano Levati/Red Bull Cliff Diving

The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series is held from March through September, in locations around the world. In July, the fifth stop in the series took place in Malcestine on Lake Garda in Italy. About 15,000 spectators watched the event, not including the many people who moored their yachts and motorboats close to the steep cliffs for a good view of the competition. Each dive is scored by five judges who award points based on execution and degree of difficulty.

Photographers Romina Amato, Dean Treml, and Damiano Levanti captured the action in Malcestine for Red Bull.

Above: The Czech Republic’s Michal Navratil dives above Lake Garda. (more…)

All photos © Laura Levine/courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery. Above: R.E.M., Walter’s Bar-B-Que, Athens, GA, 1984

Laura Levine’s portraits of the leading punk, post punk, hip hop and New Wave musicians of the Eighties and early Nineties are on view at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City until August 19. For many of us who used to eagerly await each new issue of Creem, Rolling Stone and Trouser Press, Levine’s photos offered access to the Ramones, Afrika Bambaataa, X, Blondie, the Clash and a promising band called REM (back when singer Michael Stipe still had hair).  Since 1994, when Levine stopped shooting, she has focused primarily on her painting and illustration, and also directed films and videos.

(more…)

All Photos  © Carolyn Marks Blackwood; above: “Cloud Series #64″

Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s  images are on view at the Alan Klotz Gallery in New York  in a show called “The Wind Blows Through My Heart.” The poetic title seems appropriate for her deceptively simple photos. Blackwood photographs moments when elements — ice on the Hudson River, clouds in the late afternoon – are being transformed by wind, sun, or tides.  As the gallery’s notes for the show explain, her shards of ice look like forbidding landscapes, and her clouds are “the meteorological equivalents of brushstrokes.” (more…)