“Okawa Village, Tosa County, Kochi Prefecture,” 2007, © Toshio Shibata

One of Japan’s leading landscape photographers, Toshio Shibata, is being introduced to new American audiences at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The exhibition, “Constructed Landscapes,” opens April 2o, and runs through October 6, 2013. The exhibition features 28 of Shibata’s large-scale works that consider the relationship between human infrastructure and nature through images of major engineering projects, like bridges and dams. This is the first time his color photographs are showing the in United States. “As stunning as Toshio Shibata’s photographs are, they are infused with deep awareness of humanity’s place in nature,” PEM curator of photography Phillip Prodger said in a statement announcing the show. “As with all the best landscape photographers, his works cause us to reflect on what it means to live in this world.” (more…)

Beijing, China, 1964, © René Burri/Magnum Photos, from the book Impossible Reminiscences (Phaidon, 2013). “In Tiananmen Square, in front of the Forbidden City, there were mass demonstrations against the Americans in Vietnam.”

Born in Switzerland in 1933, René Burri first picked up a Leica during his military service. Through and introduction from Werner Bischof, Burri joined Magnum Photos in 1959 and went on to publish reportage in Life, Look, Stern and Paris Match among countless other publications. One of the remarkable things about Burri’s career, was that from the mid-1950s he worked with both black and white and color. Often, Hans-Michael Koetzle writes in his essay that accompanies Burri’s new book, Impossible Reminiscences, released this week by Phaidon, photographers are great at one or the other, or move on from black and white to color and seldom look back professionally. “[Burri] did the one without abandoning the other,” Koetzle writes. “….Burri has consistently pursued two goals, photographed in black and white and color, as a journalist and as an artist, which—precisely reckoned—would mean that he has lived four lives in photography.”

Impossible Reminiscences features more than 170 of Burri’s lesser-known color images, drawn and edited by Burri from his archive over the course of eight years, and accompanied by his personal reminiscences.
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© Alaisdair Jardine. Baumraum, Andreas Wenning, Between Alder and Oak, Osnabrück, Germany.

What was it about tree houses that so appealed to us as children? The idea of secluding oneself in a space entirely our own—up in the air away from the adult world that was maddeningly always trying to pull us back to solid ground—was certainly a part of the allure. Being closer to the natural world, to the birds, squirrels and other creatures we saw roaming the tress, probably also caused us to imagine having our own little palace in the sky. One look at the marvelous and varied structures in Tree Houses: Fairy Tale Castles in the Air, a new book by architecture writer Philip Jodido published by Taschen, and we are transported back to childhood, and begin wondering just why it is we can’t live in a tree house as adults? The book provides readers a photographic tour of 50 of the best and most interesting tree houses around the world, which vary from rustic to modern and chic. The book also makes us wonder whether our childhood affinity for tree houses helped pave the way for the concern for ecological sustainability that has become ingrained in contemporary society.

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© Ditte Isager

Danish photographer Ditte Isager began her “Dolls” series as a “little weekend project,” a “free place” to experiment and create “little quirky stories.” A successful commercial and editorial photographer based in New York City, Isager is most often called on to “tell others’ stories and build up their universe,” she says. Her “Dolls” photographs, which are created in her studio using natural light, a Linhof 4×5 camera and Polaroid film, have provided her a creative “recess” from the rules and parameters of assignment work. Made over the course of five years, the 23 works are currently showing at Galerie Wolfsen in Aalborg, Denmark. (more…)

All images © Amanda Marsalis & Automatic Books

Photographer Amanda Marsalis was in Venice for a friend’s gallery opening when the publishers of Automatic Books noticed her making Polaroid photographs of flowers. An avid Polaroid user, Marsalis began photographing flowers as her remaining instant film stock dwindled. Though she’d created a zine of some of the photographs, she hadn’t planned on doing much else with her “little project.” The Automatic Books publishers asked Marsalis if they could make a book of her Polaroids, and Reproduction, a lovely 102-page, hand-bound volume came to be. Writes Marsalis in a statement that appears on the back cover of the book: “Reproduction for me is three things: The purpose of a flower, the way the book is being printed, and a woman’s fertility/sexuality. Myself being the woman. I feel in a tradition of classic photographers shooting still lives as an exercise in image making and self examination.”