All Photos © Rania Matar.

Rania Matar captures the interior lives of teenage girls in intimate portraits shot within the personal spaces of their bedrooms. From stark and paint-chipped to clothing-cluttered and graffitied, the rooms offer an insiders’ peek into the girls values, desires, fears. Photographing girls from both the United States and Lebanon, Matar’s unbiased documentary questions what it means to grow from girl to woman, and how our identities spill over into our material worlds. With essays by Susan Minot and Anne Tucker, A Girl and Her Room is a captivating study of teenage self-expression. – courtesy Umbrage Editions.

Above: Lubna,  Beirut, Lebanon 2010

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All photos © Ed Panar.

While exploring the streets and back roads of North America, Pittsburgh based photographer Ed Panar has sometimes found himself unexpectedly confronted by other beings. For a moment, eye contact is made and a kind of mutual recognition is felt. Animals That Saw Me, published by The Ice Plant, is a quiet and often hilarious series of photographs pulled from his archive spanning 17 years recording some of his most unexpected encounters with the nonhuman world. A meditation on the uncanny moment of acknowledgement between species, the photographs in Animals That Saw Me reminds us that we must appear at least as strange to them as they do to us. – courtesy The Ice Plant.

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All photos © Stacy Kranitz.

Over the last six years, Los Angeles-based photographer Stacy Kranitz has been working on a personal project about the Native American community living on the disappearing Isle de Jean Charles in the Louisiana bayous. Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians first bought land here in 1876. Because of its close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and the disruption of the Mississippi River levees (built in the Sixties) the island has been slowly eaten away by the Gulf’s saltwater. The land is a fourth the size it was when its oldest residents were children. Oil pipelines began unearthing the land in the early-Nineties and erosion of the island has since accelerated due to the gulf oil spill coating nearby vegetation with crude and chemical dispersants. Less than 60 water-damaged houses remain on the island and more than half of them are empty. The road that leads to the island disappears underwater during storms.

Kranitz explains, “Some of the residents I have photographed have left. There have been four major hurricanes that have devastated the gulf coast during the last six years (Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike). The population has dwindled substantially during this period. I have seen houses blown away, abandoned and deteriorated into uninhabitable dwellings.”

Kranitz is currently working on an installation that includes a model she built of the island along with sound, video and drawings. She hopes to show the work first in Louisiana. The project is a work in progress as long as the Island is inhabited, for a projected  15 to 50 years.

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All photos © Jonathan Alpeyrie

Jonathan Alpeyrie‘s exhibition World War II Veterans is currently on view at Anastasia Photo. His documentation spans 62 nations and features a powerful selection of diptychs of veterans from opposing sides in the war. He hopes to publish a book as one way to possibly reunite veterans from these different nationalities. Anastasia-Photo specializes documentary photography and photojournalism, and connects its exhibitions to philanthropic organizations that are in some way related to each show. For Alpeyrie’s exhibition, the gallery has selected to support  Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Above: Thomas was photographed during a WWII veteran rally in Scotland. He fought as a courier in North Africa and later in Burma with the Chindits.
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Sputnik Documentary, 2011 © Sasha Rudensky

Brooklyn-based photographer Sasha Rudensky will present four photographs from her recent series “Novij Mir,” in the upcoming mixed media group exhibit “Generation One and A Half ” curated by Yulia Tikhonova. The show features Alisa Baremboym, Alina and Jeff Bliumis, Maria Byondo, Shura Chernozatonskaya, Asya Reznikov, Sasha Rudensky and Marina Zamalin, whose work is defined by their culturally dual position as children of recent ex-Soviet immigrants that have come of age in United States. “Generation One and A Half ” will be on view from May 9th–23rd at Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center in New York City, the opening reception is Friday, May 11th, 6–9pm.