Flayed Man, Paris 2005, photographed by Richard Barnes from his Animal Logic project, which will be exhibited and published into a book later this year.

Glory Trip 197, photographed by Simon Norfolk. An unarmed Minuteman III nuclear missile with a National Nuclear Security Administration experiment on board is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, May 22, 2008. This image is from Norfolk’s project Full Spectrum Dominance: missiles, rockets, satellites in America. Norfolk’s statement about the project is below. (more…)

65#06 Beijing, Great Wall of Mutianyu, 2006, photographed by Thomas Kellner. Kellner explains his process:

My large-scale images combine photography, collage, and moving pictures.

Each photographic work since 1997 is methodically made up of horizontally placed film strips of up to 1,269 individual pictures. Every single one of these smaller images was taken with the camera from a slightly shifted perspective and subsequently combined into an overall picture, creating an entirely new image. As an artistic photomontage — originally fused as a group of film strips, then as an exposed contact print, presently prepared digitally — each large-scale color photograph reveals its creative process upon closer inspection.

To approach something like The Great Wall of China is much more complicated than it looks. Once you reach one of the accessible parts of The Wall, you have to walk, climb, and tumble up and down the path on top of the Wall and the many stairs that have been polished by the feet of thousands and thousands of soldiers, and later by millions of tourists. You have to get away from the mass tourism to find a place of silence. In the way that I work, it is not possible to photograph more than just a little piece out of the thousands of miles of this wall. It takes hours to expose 25 roles of 36-exposure film, or 900 shots, to be finished before the sunset, smog and fog enter the frame. In this image, I started with sunshine in the bottom of the image and ended with less sun towards the top.

—Thomas Kellner, January 14th, 2009

Barack Obama in South Charleston, West Virginia, May 12, 2008. Photo by Scout Tufankjian.

This photo is from the new book Yes We Can by Scout Tufankjian, published by Melcher Media/powerHouse Books. Click here for more information about the book.

Photo by Amélia Lourenço. Lourenço, a lawyer and photography student in Portugal, writes:

Last November I was visiting Chicago, which I do every two years, and went on a photographic walk looking for the faces I so much admire of those people who suffer and keep going…. This guy I met around 9am.  He and three more guys were just coming off this van, driven by a white guy and they were being dropped at a corner of a street to go and distribute the newspaper. I stopped and started talking to them, telling them that I was studying photography and would they mind my taking some pictures. They were smashing guys… They all said yes, and we had a laugh and kicked around for a few minutes…. This particular picture came about because I told the guy that I loved hands, could I photograph is hands and he was so nice that he promptly showed his hands.