Bastienne Schmidt uses self-portraits to explore female gender identity in popular culture. She photographs herself in the role of a “housewife,” challenging our visions of a domestic utopia by re-staging many disconcertingly familiar scenarios and circumstances. Working in her own home environment of Long Island, Schmidt explores suburban fragmentation and loneliness with the presentation of her housewife character as a wandering, rootless protagonist.

This exhibition was on display at the Southeast Museum of Photography in the fall of 2010 and is currently available as a traveling exhibition organized by SMP.  Her book “Home Stills” was recently released by Jovis Press. -courtesy Southeast Museum.

Related Stories in PDN: Bastienne Schmidt’s Home Stills

West Fayette Street, #5, 2012

Syracuse-based photographer and teacher Willson Cummer’s new project “Available” explores buildings and vacant lots in Central New York that are for sale or lease. “In the current economy, there are hundreds of such properties,” Cummer says. “The state of availability is a poignant one. When a person says they’re available, it means they are looking for a new romantic relationship. These vacant buildings and sites are also looking for new life. They are in limbo states between one purpose and another. I am attracted to the humble paint jobs that cover up graffiti, as well as the buildings that sport graffiti. Often these structures appear to have been made without much concern for architecture. A certain amount of square footage was needed, and a building was thrown up to suit. The vernacular architecture is visually intriguing.”

Cummer, whose work plumbs the intersection of the built and natural worlds, recently exhibited another of his projects, a series of images of parking garages, at OK Harris gallery in New York City.

Bowman Road, 2012.

East Jefferson Street, 2011.

West Fayette Street #1, 2011.

Solar Street, 2012.

West Fayette Street, #2.

Wyoming Street, 2012.

West Fayette Street #3, 2012.

Walton Street, 2012.

West Fayette Street #4, 2012.

Skyward  is Kevin Cooley’s new video installation project portraying Los Angeles’ manufactured landscape and its relationship to the natural world. Presented as a projection on the ceiling, the work is a metaphysical gaze skyward – past the gridlock of street-level to the pristine blue sky promising freedom and limitless possibility.

Shot entirely in L.A. County, the work is comprised of hundreds of individual shots, presented in one continuous sequence. Cooley explains the visual narrative: ”We begin downtown near Bunker Hill and make stops through various parts of the city. Flurries of overlapping flight paths, of birds, helicopters and more, are punctuated by the brief appearance of iconic southern California structural elements such as freeway interchanges and rows of palm trees and we discover interdependent ecosystems largely overlooked in everyday life.” Cooley’s installation is on view  at YOUNGPROJECTS, a contemporary gallery for moving images, until March 9, 2012.

The actual installation at YOUNGPROJECTS

KLOMPCHING GALLERY has brought to New York, The Architecture of Space, originally curated for and enthusiastically received at the inaugural Flash Forward Festival in Toronto (October, 2010). This is an exhibition of contemporary photography exploring the perception and representation of space—the collapse between public and private, it’s abstract form and its role as metaphor. Artists’ reception is on February 2, 6pm—9pm and the exhibition continues through to March 2, 2012.

In her latest project, called Mothers and Daughters, Julia Fullerton-Batten portrays the complex and sometimes challenging relationship between mothers and their daughters. Both documentary and biographical, these images illustrate the artist’s memories of her two sisters’ and her relationships with their mother and in turn, their mother’s relationship with their grandmother.

Choosing to work with real mother and daughter pairs in their own environments, the subjects create their own world together while at the same time revive the artist’s personal memories through staging. Over the course of their lives the dependence switches from the child’s need for security and nurturing to the mother’s dependence on the daughter to satisfy emotional needs. In the adult relationship, the intimacy of the bond is established by the love, struggle and acceptance of each other.

-courtesy Randall Scott Projects.

Teenage Reflection

Changing Bodies

Custody Battle

Intimate Moments

The Rehearsal

The Party Is Over

Pretty New Thing

Forgiveness

Alone Again

"Daddy Tattoo, Philadelphia," 2004 © Zoe Strauss/Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art

Photographer Zoe Strauss, who from 2001 to 2010 installed her work on pillars below an I-95 overpass in South Philadelphia and hosted an annual day-long exhibition, is getting a mid-career retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The survey includes 150 images and extends beyond the museum with the Billboard Project, a series of 54 billboards throughout the Philadelphia area that will each display one of Strauss’s photos, blown up to 12 x 25 feet, without any text, logos, etc. A self-taught photographer who focuses on the “the beauty and struggle of everyday life,” Strauss is a true testament to DIY ingenuity. The exhibit runs through April 22, 2012.

"South Philly (Mattress Flip Front)," 2001 © Zoe Strauss/Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Vanessa, Philadelphia," 2006 © Zoe Strauss/Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art

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

Photographer Ellen Susan makes portraits of active-duty soldiers in the US Army using the wet plate collodion process, the primary photographic method used during the Civil War. Her portraits are included in “surFACE: Contemporary Wet Plate Collodion Portraiture,” now on view at Photo Center NW in Seattle. The show features tintypes and ambrotypes by five contemporary photographers who use the nineteenth-century wet plate technique:  Ellen Susan, Daniel Carrillo, Robb Kendrick, Jenny Sampson and Joni Sternbach.

Susan, who lives near two major Army installations, uses the deliberative, careful process to show members of the military in a way that invites a second look. The slow process requires her subjects to remain still for up to 60 seconds, gazing intently at the camera. Each detailed, grainless ambrotype she produces,  PCNW notes, “engages viewers in a manner that is distinct from the casually made, ephemeral images that have become so familiar.”

The exhibition is on view at PCNW through February 12.