Wedding Portrait (prop), 2008

Fascinated by the aggressive and over-the-top building and marketing of real estate in Arizona, Scott Lizama began photographing the extravagant interiors of model homes for sale. While photographing this series, the housing market collapsed, and the visual evidence of the Arizona construction boom was everywhere. The development companies, who had once tried to build as many houses as possible into their purchased plots, had gone bankrupt. These companies abandoned their projects mid-construction, forcing home owners with devalued new purchases to live next to half-built projects, and many acres of land with subdivision infrastructure in place, but no dwellings on them. These photographs depict both the crass facade of material wealth used to sell these houses, and the remains of what the housing market collapse left behind.
Scott Lizama is a photographer and PhD student in environmental psychology at the City University of New York and an adjunct faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design in New York city.

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All Photos © Rania Matar.

Rania Matar captures the interior lives of teenage girls in intimate portraits shot within the personal spaces of their bedrooms. From stark and paint-chipped to clothing-cluttered and graffitied, the rooms offer an insiders’ peek into the girls values, desires, fears. Photographing girls from both the United States and Lebanon, Matar’s unbiased documentary questions what it means to grow from girl to woman, and how our identities spill over into our material worlds. With essays by Susan Minot and Anne Tucker, A Girl and Her Room is a captivating study of teenage self-expression. – courtesy Umbrage Editions.

Above: Lubna,  Beirut, Lebanon 2010

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All photos © Deborah Mesa-Pelly

“I’ve been working on location, setting images in overlooked and all too familiar spaces. There is a ritualistic aspect in the way I establish these photographs that traffic in both photography and sculpture to arrive at narrative. The activity of collecting and repurposing found objects transforms an inspirational poster into a backdrop for a neglected turtle’s tank while simultaneously expanding the shallow pictorial field with deep space illusion. Through restaging domestic interiors and questioning the photograph as document, perception is jarred and the knowable questioned.”

Deborah Mesa-Pelly has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her photographs are part of the public collections at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, Seattle Art Museum, The Orange County Museum in Los Angeles, The Neuberger Museum at Purchase College, The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and Centro de Photographia, Salamanca, Spain. She is a professor of photography at Purchase College. Born in 1968, she immigrated to the US from Havana, Cuba when she was 3 years old and currently resides in New York City with her husband artist Michael Wetzel and their daughter Alba Rose.

Above “Bed Cage” 2011

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