Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Kent Street) Summer, 2007 (Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New
York) is one of more than 100 paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, and works on paper by 30 contemporary artists currently on show at the galleries of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on New York City’s historic Audubon Terrace (Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets) through Sunday, April 5, 2009. Exhibiting artists were chosen from a pool of more than 170 nominees submitted by the 250 members of the Academy, America’s most prestigious honorary society of architects, artists, writers, and composers.

Kate and Emily in Yellow Hallway, 2006, photographed by Blake Fitch from her series Expectations of Adolescence, a ten-year project documenting the lives of Fitch’s cousin and half-sister as they’ve grown from adolescent girls into young women.

Expectations of Adolescence will be exhibited in New York City at ClampArt in the Project Room, March 19th–April 25th. Opening reception is on March 19th, 6:00–8:00 pm.

Ad credits:

Photographer: Tom Cwenar
Client: Zippo Manufacturing Co., Bradford, Pa.
Agency: BRUNNER, Pittsburgh
Executive Creative Director: Jay Giesen
Creative Director/Art Director: Dave Vissat
Copywriter: Eric Schlauch
Retouching: Dwight Pritchett, Pittsburgh

Marlon Brando, 2006, photographed by Jessica Backhaus from her What Still Remains project, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2008.

“Turning points, in-between states, a beautiful kind of limbo that tugs at the heart and suggests stories of loss and remembrance. That is what photographs are, after all, memorials that stop time and hold it for a moment, for our contemplation. If Backhaus’s photographs are partly memorials to lost combs and half-eaten apples, they surely allude, as well, to other things that have been lost along the way.”

— Jean Dykstra, from the introduction of What Still Remains

Photo © Matt Eich/Aurora Select

“An inmate who goes by the name ‘Paulie’ tunes a guitar in the yard while another inmate sunbathes at Hocking Correctional Facilities in Nelsonville, OH. Thought of by some inmates as ‘a place to die,’ Hocking Correctional Facilities in Nelsonville, OH is a strange combination of prison and home for the elderly. Many of its 475 inmates will never again live a free life. One prisoner said that HCF is much nicer than other prisons he’s been in because if you lie on your back, look straight up and ignore the barbed wire, you can see trees and blue skies—allowing you to imagine you’re free.”

—Matt Eich

Eich recently won the SportsShooter.com Student Photographer of the Year contest (where PDN Creative Director Darren Ching was a judge).