All Photos © Iain McKell. Above: Hazel, 2008.

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.

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All images © Mariana Cook

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. (more…)

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.

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© Herb Ritts Foundation, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles. Above: Philip Seymour Hoffman 1, Los Angeles, 1999.

The late Herb Ritts, one of the most influential photographers of the Nineties by PDN readers, is being celebrated this fall with two retrospectives. “Herb Ritts: Twenty-Five Years,” an exhibition of his fashion photographs and portraits from the late Seventies until his death in 2002, is on view at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles until December 4. Also, Rizzoli has just published his biography, Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour, edited by friend, colleague and Vogue art director Charles Churchward.
Warning: Some of the photos below contain nudity.

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All Photos © Estate of Guy Bourdin

A new book, Guy Bourdin In Between, looks at the provocative imagery of the influential French fashion photographer in its original context: the double-page magazine spread. Published by SteidlDangin, the book includes 300 of his images, and reproduces many of the page layouts from British and French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar where the work first appeared.  Several prints of Bourdin’s work are also being exhibited through FACE (French Cultural Exchange) and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York City through December 10.

All this attention might have surprised Bourdin. As we noted in PDN’s September “End Frame,”  in his lifetime Bourdin refused all requests to sell his prints or publish a book. For Bourdin, the magazine spread was his medium. See: End Frame: Nathaniel Goldberg on Guy Bourdin.