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

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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson sketching in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 1987.

Alfred Eisenstaedt holds the negative with his famous WWII photograph of a sailor and nurse kissing on VJ-day, New York City, 1992.

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.

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.”

Saha and Nastya: The only way to die is together.

Gala: I like Russia because it’s unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen when you wake up in the morning.

Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg

Pregnant Gala posing for portrait in her room.

Lera Stas’ wife / Krasnoyarsk

Stas: What I like best about Russia is myself

Vasya: Nowadays it’s different from in the Soyuz. I remember how my aunt, who worked at the Soviet Ministry of Culture, used to organize balls in Sverdlovsk. A neckline lower than the seventh vertebra was regarded as pornography, but now even if you ran about the stage with your tits bare, no one would say a word. These days people feel freer. The difference is that once upon a time people knew what they had to say, but they couldn’t say it. Now you can say anything, but no one knows what to say.

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.

In his book The New Gypsies (Prestel), photographer Iain McKell presents his portraits of a real group of present-day nomads whose culture is built around ideals of freedom, nature, and simplicity. The movement that gave rise to this culture began in 1986, when a group of post-punk anti-Thatcher protesters headed out of London into the English countryside. McKell followed them to the West Country and watched them over the years as they became a hybrid tribe—what he calls the “new gypsies.”  Also known as “horse-drawn,” they are present-day rural anarchists, living a subversive lifestyle in elaborately decorated horse-drawn caravans. These new gypsies share a desire for sustainability, a love of self-reliance and a disdain for the trappings of contemporary life.

The work featured in The New Gypsies will be on display in an exhibition at the Clic Gallery, 255 Centre Street, New York, New York. The exhibition will run from August 29 through October 2, 2011, with an opening reception on September 15 from 6 to 8pm.

The Delany Family.

Del, 2003.

Stonehenge, Summer Solstice, 2006.

Pete, 2006.

Wickerman Festival, Scotland.

Stonehenge, Winter Solstice, 2007.

The big green gathering, 2006.

Somewhere near Bristol, 2008.

Mariana Cook’s new book Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries examines one of mankind’s earliest and most enduring methods of defining territories – the stone wall. Sculptural and practical, majestic and humble, the dry stone walls showcased in the book capture a fundamental relationship between human beings and the landscape. The book was conceived by Cook, the last protégé of Ansel Adams, at her home on Martha’s Vineyard on the day before Thanksgiving in 2002. After 56 cows strayed through a crumbling section of the stone wall she shares with her neighbor, Cook studied the tumbled wall and was struck by its beauty. With that inspiration, she spent eight years traveling to farms, towns, and temples in Peru, Great Britain, Ireland, the Mediterranean, New England, and Kentucky in pursuit of dry stone walls. The photographs portray the wall in landscape, the wall in abstract form, and the return of rocks to nature. Cook is fascinated with the juxtaposition of stones and geometric composition, as well as with the resonance among walls of different cultures. The walls were photographed by Cook between 2002 and 2010 and were built as early as 3600 B.C.

All Photos © Deborah Luster.

With a homicide rate nearly eight times the national average, New Orleans stands today, as it did as far back as the 1850s, as the homicide capital of the United States. Today it is the third most deadly city on the globe. Tooth For An Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish is a series of tondo photographs documenting contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans. This collection of images was recently published by Twin Palms. Too see more of Luster’s work click here.