© Steve Fitch. Above: Drive-in Theater, Sharon, Pennsylvania, 1975  (from his series Diesels and Dinosaurs)

Steve Fitch is a photographer and educator who has been making photographs of the American West for more then four decades.  As a boy, the scenes that he observed out of the window of his father’s 1951 Buick fascinated him.  In the introduction of Fitch’s first book Diesels and Dinosaurs, he re-accounts memories of observing small towns, glowing neon signs and 18-wheelers roaming the highway. Fitch was also witness to the rise and fall of the drive in theater.  All were experiences that molded his interests as an adult – leading to his visual studies of the highway culture of the American West and man’s encroachment upon it. Highway Culture, an exhibition of Fitch’s work made between 1971 through the present, will open at the photo-eye Gallery on February 25, 2012.

-courtesy Photo-Eye

William Wegman. All images © John Loengard/Courtesy Monroe Gallery.

A new exhibition of the work of LIFE magazine staff photographer and editor John Loengard’s black-and-white photographs is currently showing through the end of January at the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Among the prints in the exhibition are several photographs of legendary photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstadt, Annie Leibovitz and Richard Avedon. These photographs are also part of Loengard’s new book, Age of Silver: Encounters With Great Photographers (powerHouse), which celebrates, through Loengard’s portraits, some of the most notable photographers in the history of the medium. (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.

(more…)

All photos © Rafal Milach. ABove: Pervouralsk

7 Rooms, Rafal Milach’s newest book, published by Kehrer Verlag, is the culmination of a long term and intimate view of modern-day Russia. Over the course of six years, Milach photographed seven young Russians through Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk, and became drawn to the “people, food, drunkenness, taxi music and landscape.” Curator Liza Faktor describes Milach’s subjects as “in their 30s, they are intermediates between the ineradicable Soviet mentality and the increasingly anxious Russian mind of today. Milach’s search is the kind which is almost impossible to visualize. And yet, what he has here, in this book, is a fascinating and subtle journey into the loss of direction, into the sad and beautiful connection with our country. You would be surprised that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government.”

(more…)

© David Maisel. Above:History’s Shadow AB3, 2010.

History’s Shadow, a new book by David Maisel (Nazraeli Press), examines art and artifacts through his photographs of museum conservation x-rays. Like spectral transmissions conveying messages across time, the images in History’s Shadow make the invisible visible – expressing the shape-shifting nature of time itself and the continuous presence of the past contained within us. “What do these works of art from past cultures have to teach us about our current point in human history or about our relationship to the past?,” writes Maisel in his essay. “The x-ray provides a filter and a means (much as perception itself is both filter and means) to read the intrinsic properties of these works, the trace elements with which these objects are imbued.” The book also includes X, Curator, a short story by Jonathan Lethem.

(more…)