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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Hunter Pressing on Fallen Game with Rifle 2, 2010 © Stan Gaz/Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

With his second solo show at the gallery, Stan Gaz presents “Ensnared.” The opening reception for “Ensnared” will be Thursday, May 17, 6–8pm at ClampArt in New York City, the exhibit will be on view until June 23rd.

“Ensnared” considers themes of loss, transformation, and memory. Throughout these images, ensnarement is allegorized by the actions and effects of the archetypes of the hunter and the hunted. Gaz finds these roles to be oddly inter-changeable, caught in a cycle in which each is incarcerated by the other—trapped by longing, manipulation, and other forms of daily violence.

Divided into three suites or chapters, “Ensnared” includes painted photographs of vintage butterfly specimens, images taken during winter hunting expeditions in the Western United States, and haunting prints of an astronaut armed with a butterfly net out to catch fleeting samples of a vanishing world. The exhibition also includes video footage of the astronaut in Central Park, along with a massive, twenty-foot, stainless steel sculpture representing his net.

—Text courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

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 © Patricia Lay-Dorsey.

Twenty years after being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1988, Patricia Lay-Dorsey took the first self portraits for what has become known as Falling Into Place. This ongoing project documents Patricia’s day-to-day life with an intimacy and openness that is unusual. She says, “I simply want to show that I may do things a bit differently, but, in the long run, I am pretty much the same as everyone else.” Since moving to a motorized scooter in 2000, Patricia says, “I am more apt to know the design of a person’s belt buckle than the color of their eyes,” but that just gives her photos a unique point of view.

Falling Into Place, has been featured on the New York Times Lens blog, Visura Magazine, Burn Magazine, Fototazo, Lenscratch, New Mobility Magazine and in Catherine Edelman’s The Chicago Project. The image below was included in the 2011 Beauty CULTure exhibit at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. Falling Into Place received 3rd prize in the 2010 FotoVisura Grant for Outstanding Personal Photography Project. David Drake, Director of Ffotogallery in Cardiff, Wales, UK, has begun work on publishing the book.

-courtesy Patricia Lay-Dorsey.

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All photos © Deborah Mesa-Pelly

“I’ve been working on location, setting images in overlooked and all too familiar spaces. There is a ritualistic aspect in the way I establish these photographs that traffic in both photography and sculpture to arrive at narrative. The activity of collecting and repurposing found objects transforms an inspirational poster into a backdrop for a neglected turtle’s tank while simultaneously expanding the shallow pictorial field with deep space illusion. Through restaging domestic interiors and questioning the photograph as document, perception is jarred and the knowable questioned.”

Deborah Mesa-Pelly has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her photographs are part of the public collections at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, Seattle Art Museum, The Orange County Museum in Los Angeles, The Neuberger Museum at Purchase College, The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and Centro de Photographia, Salamanca, Spain. She is a professor of photography at Purchase College. Born in 1968, she immigrated to the US from Havana, Cuba when she was 3 years old and currently resides in New York City with her husband artist Michael Wetzel and their daughter Alba Rose.

Above “Bed Cage” 2011

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