All photos © Rod Morata.

Most photographers bring their cameras with them everywhere they go, so a unique moment or interesting discovery doesn’t go undocumented. Rod Morata, a Brooklyn-based editorial photographer, decided to take this idea one step further and commit to taking at least one photo each day of the year. Morata says, “In 2011, I started a 365/photo-a-day project for the first time in years and brought a camera with me everywhere I went to document everyday [life].  I’ve seen a lot of 365 projects in the past and thought it would be a great photo exercise to start one of my own. I was curious to see what I would come up with and what a year of my life would look like in pictures. Generally, I take portraits and photograph in a more controlled environment. This was a good opportunity to work outside of my comfort zone and record interesting things I see but usually don’t photograph.”

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All photos © Joao Canziani.

Joao Canziani, a New York City-based editorial and commercial photographer, is usually on the hunt for personal projects when not shooting assignments. He says, “I’ve always been fascinated by people who are a little different, or think differently, from the rest.” Canziani was intrigued by his friend’s mom, Duston Spear, an art teacher who started teaching classes at a female maximum security prison. He was impressed by how she was unfazed by the intensity of the setting and focused on the therapeutic knowledge she was imparting to aid in the rehabilitation of the women.

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All photos © Kirill Nikitenko. Above: Alexei Navalny: Lawyer, Public Figure, Founder of “RosPil” Anti-Corruption Project.

Opening December 1 at the 25CPW gallery, is the exhibition “Russian Visionaries. Into the Light,” featuring portraits of contemporary Russian thought leaders alongside their written reflections on the country’s future, in anticipation of the December 4 Duma elections and next year’s presidential elections.

“Russian Visionaries. Into the Light” introduces to the American public, the nascent but growing Russian opposition movement in a stark and intimate way. Austere black and white portraits taken by renowned photographer Kirill Nikitenko show the gripping gaze of prominent writers, actors, politicians and activists, brought together for this unique exhibit by Elena Khodorkovskaya, curator and former wife of political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Until she created this project, there was no single platform that united oppositional thinkers of so many different backgrounds and professions. This exhibition, on view until December 12th, is brought to the American public by Institute of Modern Russia President Pavel Khodorkovsky, Photographer Kirill Nikitenko, Curator Elena Khodorkovskaya, and 25CPW Founder and Director Bess Greenberg.

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© Julia Margaret Cameron/Courtesy Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs

A rare exhibition of more than 20 albumen prints made from 1864 to 1874 by 19th century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is on view at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, New York, through December 2. Most of the photographs were gifts from the artist to her niece, Adeline Maria Jackson; they have remained in the family ever since and have never been exhibited.

Cameron famously began her career in photography at the age of 48 when she received a camera as a gift from her daughter. Moving in the highest circles of Victorian society, Cameron counted artists, writers and scientists among her close friends. Her famous portrait subjects included the astronomer Sir John Herschel, the naturalist Charles Darwin, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle and the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She created the majority of her work at her home in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Among the highlights of the exhibition is a carbon print of “A Beautiful Vision, Julia Duckworth, 1872″.  Duckworth, Cameron’s niece and goddaughter, was a frequent sitter and provided inspiration for her aunt’s photographs. She later became the mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

Writing about Cameron in his essay for the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, photo historian Larry J. Schaaf observes, “Her photographs have always been show-stoppers in any exhibition. Big, bold, and penetrating, they are at the same time incredibly natural, indeed, comfortable to behold.”

All photos © Cecil Beaton: The New York Years. Above: Truman Capote in Morocco, 1949.

From the 1930s, when he helped revolutionize fashion journalism, through the 1960s, when he launched headlong into the Pop art era, London-based photographer Cecil Beaton brought to New York City his own perspective—aristocratic, sexually ambiguous, and theatrical. At the same time, New York offered Beaton innumerable opportunities to reinvent himself and his career. Cecil Beaton: The New York Years, published by Skira Rizzoli,  features sketches, costumes, set designs, previously unpublished letters, and over 200 photographs and drawings, many in color and never seen before. The book documents Beaton’s most influential relationships with quintessential figures of the New York art scene, including Greta Garbo, his female confidant and muse, and Andy Warhol, who passed the torch of documenting the New York art scene.  Cecil Beaton: The New York Years is also currently on view in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York until February 20, 2012. (more…)