All Photos © Paul McDonough

Paul McDonough arrived in New York City in 1967 with a 35mm camera and entrée, through childhood friend Tod Papageorge, to the photography workshops and social networks of street photographer Garry Winogrand. Emerging from an early career as a studio easel painter, McDonough found photographing on the streets of New York liberating: “It satisfied my sketching impulses… I learned to carry a camera everywhere, all the time, loaded with 400-speed film.” McDonough’s first monograph, Paul McDonough: New York Photographs 1968 – 1978, was published in November 2010 by Umbrage Editions, in conjunction with an exhibition at Sasha Wolf Gallery. – Umbrage.

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© Courtesy Philip-Lorca diCorcia/David Zwirner, New York.  Above: W, September 1997, #3, 1997.

On view, for the first time in New York at the David Zwirner gallery, is an exhibition of fashion photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The exhibition, Eleven, opens tonight and runs through March 5, 2011. All of the photographs were selected from a series of eleven editorial projects diCorcia created for W magazine between 1997 and 2008.

“The tableaux-like, monumental quality, which envelops diCorcia’s broader oeuvre provides an intimate match with the contrived, theatrical nature of the fashion shoot. Together with W magazine’s long-time creative director Dennis Freedman (now the creative director of Barneys New York), diCorcia traveled to distinct locations around the world to produce his photographic essays,” David Zwirner gallery says. “Employing his own models as well as people cast on the spot, his images weave together richly loaded narratives with a stylist’s selection of designer-brand clothes. These narratives sometimes appear far removed from the fashion industry’s traditional emphasis on formulaic beauty and harmony, and instead involve a delicate balance between glamour and grit, imagination and irony.” To see more of diCorcia’s work click here.

Warning: This post contains partial nudity.

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All Photos © Alexander Richter. Above: 50 Cent

In his career Alexander Richter has photographed some of the biggest personalities in hip-hop—from 50-Cent to the Clipse to EL-P and KRS One—for magazines and record labels. Several of Richter’s portraits are included in a new book, Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey (ARIA, 2011), a history of the music and culture that has captivated young people from cities to the suburbs all over the globe. To coincide with the release of the book, The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles is currently hosting an exhibition of the same name, which runs through May 4, 2011.

See more of Richter’s work here.

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© Harley Weir / TEST Magazine

Harley Victoria Weir is a 22-year-old fine art graduate of Central Saint Martins, and a regular contributor to Vice Magazine and Citizen K.

This shoot aptly named “Cat Power” is an editorial spread for TEST Magazine. Harley explains, “we ended up using two of the neighbor’s cats who were lovely but very shy and spent the entire shoot hidden under the sofa. So we ended up with very little presence of cats in the shoot but I suppose too much of a good thing is bad anyway.” See more of Weir’s work here and check our more of the spread at TEST Magazine.

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© Jean-Baptiste Mondino / T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Florence Welch, of the band Florence and the Machine, stands alone in this portrait by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. More images from his series, “Batty Brits,” can be seen in the PDN Photo Annual 2010 online gallery. The 2011 Contest is currently open for entries until February 21.