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

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.

Ryan McGinley’s premier retrospective monograph, You and I recently released by Twin Palms Publishers creates a portrait of a generation that is savvy about visual culture and acutely aware of how identity can be communicated through photography.

-courtesy Twin Palms Publishers.

BMX, 2000

Ann (Slingshot), 2007

Tim (Black Eye), 2005

Jake (Shining Rock), 2008

Brandee (Driftwood), 2011

Nick (Blood Falls), 2009

Jake (Fall Foliage), 2011

Coco’s Cliff, 2008

The reception will feature a film screening and slide-show with a discussion moderated by Erika and Sarah Leen, senior photo editor at National Geographic Magazine. The exhibit will run until March 13th. To see a more intimate glimpse of Larsen’s project, watch this short video.

-courtesy Redux.

Los Angeles-based fine-art photographer Eleonora Ghioldi learned about photography through printing the work of renowned photographers, including Helmut Newton, Graciela Iturbide, Lauren Greenfield, Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders. In her current series, Ghioldi aims to challenge the concept of female identity. “Women are identified primarily through their physical appearance in our society; their bodies are tools to express moods, desires, feelings and ideas,” she explains. By stripping away traditional elements that often define women in our contemporary society, Ghioldi presents the female form in its most bare state.

These images were captured with a 35 mm and a medium-format camera, and printed on 16 x 20 silver gelatin prints.

People have always grown food in urban spaces—on windowsills and sidewalks, and in backyards and neighborhood parks—but today, urban farmers are leading an environmental and social movement with intent to transform our national food system. To explore this agricultural renaissance, brothers David and Michael Hanson and urban farmer Edwin Marty document twelve successful urban farm programs, from an alternative school for girls in Detroit, to a backyard food swap in New Orleans, to a restaurant supply garden on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Each essay offers practical advice for budding farmers, such as composting and keeping livestock in the city, decontaminating toxic soil, even changing zoning laws.

For seven weeks, David, Michael, and videographer, Charlie Hoxie, traveled the country in a short school bus powered by veggie grease (and a minivan after too many breakdowns delayed the production). The trio slept in empty lots overlooking the Pacific Ocean, mall parking lots, and alongside the very farms they were documenting.The images and stories to come out of these farms show that America’s urban landscape is rich with opportunity for fresh local food. Hanson’s book, Breaking Through Concrete : Building an Urban Farm Revival, published by University of California Press, was recently released.

-courtesy Michael Hanson.

Father Luke Nguyen and the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church were the catalyst for the development of backyard gardens that helped resurrect the predominately Vietnamese Versailles community of East New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Mary Seton Corboy, the director of the Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia, tends to her bees. Initially, Mary kept bees to deter intruders from entering the farm. Now she has hundreds of CSA members throughout the Philadelphia area and provides produce for restaurants, community members and the farmer’s market.

Children eat mango at the Garden at Westerly Creek Park in Denver, CO. Refugees from countries including Bhoutan, Somolia, and Sudan gather at this community farm where they now grow a city block’s worth of produce.

Annie Novak at Eagle Street rooftop garden in Brooklyn, NY. Her farm provides produce for a CSA, local restaurants, and a farmer’s market.

NASA says that its twin probes are scheduled to arrive on the moon New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The data they collect may solve some of the mystery that remains about the lunar surface. The mission’s chief scientist, Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the AP: ”We actually know more about Mars … than we do about our own moon.”

For her series Moon Studies and Star Scratches,  Sharon Harper photographed the moon over a period of days, weeks and months on a single sheet of film.  Harper says the camera is “a metaphor for the pervasive presence of technology within the landscape, a presence that often interrupts our experience of the natural world. The camera here, however, creates possibilities for re-interpreting contemporary experience as it mediates and records, generating images that cannot be seen without it. In the images from the series…the moon links our understanding of time in terms of a monthly calendar with a celestial realm where time is measured in light years.” Moon Studies and Star Scratches is featured in Daylight Magazine’s current issue, Cosmos. Harper’s newer series, Sun/Moon (Trying to See through a Telescope), is currently on view at Galerie Roepke in Cologne through January 21st.

Wishing you all new perspectives for 2012.

Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No. 12. April 1 – May 30, 2006. Rincón, Puerto Rico; Spy Pond, Massachusetts. 1.25, 2.25 hour exposures; 20, 15, 5 minute exposures; 2, 3, 2 second exposures

Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No. 14. July 1-7, 2006. Middlesex, Vermont, 4 hour exposure; 35, 10, 1 minute exposures; 20, 15, 20 second exposures.

Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No. 6. June – September 2004. Saratoga Springs, New York; Middlesex, Vermont; Johnson, Vermont; Eden Mills, Vermont; Greensboro, North Carolina.

All photos © Ken Schles.

Ken Schles’s fourth monograph Oculus (published in the Netherlands by Noorderlicht), considers the nature of images in various guises: Images in memory and the use of the image as a construct to define our personhood or to define our world, as well as the image on the printed page. Oculus looks at the image as it functions as a metaphor in all its forms. But the investigations we see here are not idle or abstract. The root of this exploration, what gave birth to and sustained these inquiries, was a deeply personal (and somewhat troubling) set of circumstances. Inspired by the opening lines of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory (”The cradle rocks above an abyss, but common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”), Schles made these images of sleeping children and compared them to a kind of somnambulism he was experiencing. He explains, “…the world, as I once knew it, had unraveled. I still acted as if things were as they had been. I was the sleepwalker moving through the bedrooms of these still and silent children, all tucked in their beds. Eventually, I came to realize that seeing is, in many ways, only ‘believing.’”

Perhaps it is because of this inescapable truth that we hold on as best we can to our effervescent memories—memories filled with spaces of light and dark—and full of mutating images. But wherever our fortunes reside we must ultimately negotiate our lives between ignorance and knowledge, between incoherence and significance, between, as Nabokov wrote, our “two eternities of darkness.” Schles will be signing books at the International Center of Photography in New York City on Thursday, December 15th from 6:30 to 7:30.