© Ziyah Gafic

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the conflict in Bosnia that eventually became the worst genocide Europe since World War II. While journalists who covered the conflict and historians are now reexamining the bloody conflict and its lessons, the events of 20 years ago are not yet relegated to history. “How could they be, when there hasn’t been catharsis or absolution?” says Ziyah Gafic, a Bosnian photographer.

Gafic, who was 12 years old when Serbs attacked Bosnia in a grab for power in the former Soviet satellite, has been working with the International Commission on Missing Persons to photograph the eyeglasses, snapshots, keys and other personal belongings of victims of ethnic cleansing. The items have been collected from mass graves and are being used as tools to identify some of the 30,000 missing Bosnians. Gafic’s goal is not only to help reunite these objects with the victims’ families, but to document and remember the genocide.

“We so desperately hoped lessons learned in Bosnia will help prevent or solve faster other conflicts, but how foolish was that?” Gafic says. “Just looking at Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya, makes ‘never again’ quite a cynical statement.”

Related Article: Ziyah Gafic: A Forensic Documentary of Genocide

All photos © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York. Above: Capoeira, 1974, 2012.

Fine art photographer Stan Douglas assumes the character of a fictitious photojournalist for his latest body of work, called Disco Angola, now on display at the David Zwirner gallery.  The exhibition presents eight works from the project, which explores the transformative foreign influences of New York City’s 1970s disco culture and the liberation in 1975 of Angola from Portuguese rule. Researching archival photographs, period costumes, and decor, Douglas meticulously recreated historical moments from the two locations that tie them together, and in the process, he probes questions about the veracity of photojournalism and the “decisive moment”.  This year Douglas will receive the ICP Infinity Award for Art.

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All photos © Jordan Matter. Above: Summer in Harlem.

To create this body of work, Jordan Matter traveled the US photographing top professional dancers in everyday situations. Most of the locations and poses are discovered through a spontaneous collaboration with the dancers. Matter relies heavily on serendipity. He chooses a general area to meet, and asks the dancers to bring several clothing options. They walk around until something catches his eye and then improvise a scenario together. This project, titled “Dancers Among Us”, has been viewed tens of millions of times online, and featured in newspapers, blogs, magazines and television segments around the world. The book will be released nationally by Workman Publishing in the fall of 2012. See the full gallery, along with behind-the-scenes videos and press coverage here.

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© Lauren Hermele

The image above is part of Lauren Hermele’s series, “On Different Ground”. It was taken on ‘The Cobble’ overlooking Mettawee Valley in Pawlet, Vermont. Hermele says, ” When I got up there I thought, what a great classroom! It was spring after a long winter, and I remember sitting at the desk for a long time after I made the photo. The inside of the desk was full of pine needles and leaves.”

“On Different Ground” follows a family’s transition from New York city, post 9-11, to Pawlet,Vermont. Hermele describes how this series “deals with the idea of home and a sense of being in the right place,” concepts that are hard to define, let alone convey visually. “Over the years, as both this project and this family’s life have  evolved, these photos continue to move beyond the boundaries of their initial post-9-11 framework onto contemplating a transplanted life and the idea of home in rural America,” says Hermele, who was recently named one of PDN’s 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch.

All photos © Adam Bartos. Mombasa, Kenya (park), 1980.

Adam Bartos’s current exhibition at the Gitterman Gallery includes never before exhibited color photographs that were made in North and East Africa and Mexico in the early Eighties, and recent images made in Long Island, New York, between 2007 and 2010.

Bartos’s interest in the 19th century travel work of Samuel Bourne, Robert MacPherson and others, led him to Egypt, Kenya and Mexico with a large-format camera and color film. None of the photographs are constructed wholly from incident or narrative. As Geoff Dyer notes in the introduction to Bartos’s book Boulevard: “His pictures are like self-portraits of the things in them.”

The same impulse is present in his recent work, although the subject matter is found much closer to home in Long Island. These images have been printed using a four-color carbon transfer process that, with its tonal range and description of fine detail, emphasizes Bartos’s subtle color palette and formal compositions. Bartos’s exhibition is currently on view through May 5, 2012.

- Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery

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