All Photos @Thomas Hoeffgen/212 Artists.

Thomas Hoeffgen braved the waters off Santander, Spain, to capture the insatiable drive of the Pre-Olympic Spanish Sailing Team. The three-day shoot for Timberland, the 2012 London Olympic Games official technical supplier of footwear and apparel, combined equal parts grace and determination. Hoeffgen’s prowess as a photographer matches the athletes’ dreams. The future looks bright as Olympic gold. Cue the “La Marcha Real.”

—Courtesy 212 Artists.

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© Finn O'Hara

Photographer and director Finn O’Hara is based in Toronto. O’Hara says, “Smokers just can’t seem to catch a break anymore. Over the past ten years, Toronto smokers have gone from smoking at the bar, to being forced into city alleyways. This cover shot, for Toronto’s The Grid, accompanied a confessional tale of the stigmas faced by smokers every day in Toronto, and what it takes to finally kick the habit. To illustrate the commitment of a winter smoker, we enlisted a hardened smoker and slapped them with a fictitious sub-zero blizzard.”

See a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot.

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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