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 © 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 © 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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All photos © Jocelyn Bain Hogg/VII.

In The Firm, published in 2001, photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg told the story of London underworld gangsters like Reggie Kray, Freddie Foreman and Joey Pyle. In his new book The Family, he’s continued the story, this time spending years photographing Pyle’s son, Joe Pyle, Jr. and the three close friends he appointed to take over his enterprise. This extended family move in a new world of constant surveillance and increased competition.

“Now fathers themselves, they are far more circumspect about their activities than the retired villains who populate The Firm. The game has changed, and the Pyles are astute enough to recognize this.”

“The Family” is on exhibit at the VII Gallery in Brooklyn until March 2. Tonight at 7pm there will be an artist’s reception with Bain Hogg in conversation with Jamie Wellford, senior photo editor at Newsweek, starting at 7pm.

Above: Teddy Bambam and Alan Pyle celebrate Alan’s first night out after his release from prison with female companions at a bar in Knightsbridge, London. Below: Dave Thirston is seen at Dave Courtney’s Sunday party.

All photos © Julia Fullerton-Batten. Above: The Departure.

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.

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