All photos © Giulio Di Sturco.

Despite being home to the world’s largest breakwater, the port city of Kamaishi, Japan, was partially destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami last March 11. This former capital of Samurai steel production was bombarded by the US navy during WWII, and has survived several tsunamis in the past.  Now, the surviving residents are attempting to pick up the pieces, and start life again.  Yumi Goto, a curator, discovered Giulio Di Sturco’s images of the city when he contributed to the  “3/11 Tsunami Photo Project,” an iPad/iPhone photography book app that Goto edited. “When he attempted to photograph certain areas, he was told that there was no need as there was nothing newsworthy to be found,” Goto says. “Believing that he would find people stranded there, he ignored the advice [and] reached places beyond where other photographers stopped. The enormous challenges that he faced are apparent in the photographs.” Giulio Di Sturco’s Tsunami project will be on view in the exhibition, “11-3″  at Galleria Openmind in Milano, Italy, from Nov. 24 – Jan. 20, 2012.

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All photos © Betsy Pinover Schiff.

Photographer Betsy Pinover Schiff offers a new perspective on America’s greatest urban park –exclusively from windows and terraces of more than 100 private apartments and offices on all four sides of the 840-acre Park. She captures both the dramatic and lyric moods evoked by the grand vistas of the Park’s natural beauty in its changing seasons. “As a photographer of gardens and landscape architecture” she said, “my interest was the landscape of Central Park rather than the city skyline behind or the activity within it.” Her focus was the colors, textures shadows and architectural elements in the Park as they appear from above, from early morning to night. The five-year project resulted in the acclaimed book Windows on Central Park: the Landscape Revealed (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd, October, 2011), which followed on the heels of her book New York City Gardens (Hirmer Verlag, 2010). Read about Schiff’s encounters with the private residents surrounding Central Park in the NY Times City Room blog.

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All photos © Ahae

“Through My Window”, an exhibition of photographs by the Korean artist, environmentalist, entrepreneur, poet, and septuagenarian Ahae, is on view from October 13 – 22, 2011, in New York City at Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall. The exhibition features more than 50 images of landscape and wildlife (selected from more than one million) taken in the years 2008-2010 from one window of his home and studio overlooking a nature preserve in the countryside outside Seoul. Through his photography, Ahae seeks to call attention the extent to which nature — delicate and magnificent, modest and courageous — can thrive when left alone to flourish.

“Ahae’s tribute to the world outside his window is direct and uncomplicated; one might say normal. This normal, everyday world contains a great deal of magic, which we can discover though careful observation. And Ahae is this careful observer,” wrote Milan Knížák, General Director of Prague’s National Gallery, which has exhibited the work. The exhibit has also been to London and Moscow, and will travel to the Alinari National Museum of Photography in Florence, Italy, from December  1 through 31, 2011; and to the Magazzini del Sale in Venice, Italy,  from March 20 through April 27, 2012.

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© Wilma Hurskainen. Invisible (from the series No Name), 2011.

The Christophe Guye Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland will mount an exhibition of various “Helsinki School” works beginning on July 7. The concept of the “Helsinki School” is not defined specifically by discipline, nationality or style, but rather an approach that has evolved out of a process of teaching at the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki. Its members are conceptual artists who express their artistic vision through the use of the photography with film cameras or just light sensitive materials. The Helsinki School is influenced by Finnish lighting conditions, ranging from almost complete darkness to nearly endless days that result in a distinctive social culture. The show will include 21 works by 11 artists that emphasize a common thread through distinctly original and individual styles.

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All Photos  © Carolyn Marks Blackwood; above: “Cloud Series #64″

Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s  images are on view at the Alan Klotz Gallery in New York  in a show called “The Wind Blows Through My Heart.” The poetic title seems appropriate for her deceptively simple photos. Blackwood photographs moments when elements — ice on the Hudson River, clouds in the late afternoon – are being transformed by wind, sun, or tides.  As the gallery’s notes for the show explain, her shards of ice look like forbidding landscapes, and her clouds are “the meteorological equivalents of brushstrokes.” (more…)