All photos © David Galjaard, from the series “Concresco.”

Dutch photographer David Galjaard discovered an unlikely photographic subject in a slew of concrete bunkers, left over from the Albanian Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who had them built throughout Albania between 1945 and his death in 1985, out of fear of an attack from abroad. In a recent interview with Aperture, Galjaard explains that “bells started ringing when I read about the 750,000 to one million above-ground bunkers that were built in such a small country.” The construction of these bunkers was no small endeavor: For a country with a population of nearly 3.3 million, there is at least one bunker per four Albanians. Though the bunkers were never used for their intended purpose, they still dot the landscape, serving as a symbolic reminder of a nation wrought by more than 40 years of Communist dictatorship that came to a close with the creation of the Republic of Albania in 1991.

Galjaard has gained serious acclaim for his self-published book on the series, titled Concresco (2012), from a mention in PDN’s ”Indie Photo Books of the Year,” to the 2012 Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award for a first book.

– Lindsay Comstock

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“Attic Bedroom, Delhi, NY.” © Trevor Tondro.

The farmhouse, an icon of the leafy, winding roads and staggering farm lands of rural New England, is more than just an emblem of the American homestead. Many of these dwellings stand as relics of the Dutch, English, French and Scotch settlers who built these simple structures as early as the seventeenth century. This series of photographs, by Brooklyn, New York-based architectural photographer Trevor Tondro, were made for his forthcoming book, A Simpler Way of Life: Old Farmhouses of New York & New England, to be released by Norfleet Press in Fall 2013. His images are a chronicle of the cozy, rustic interiors and painterly exteriors of these modest structures, made by carpenters and farmers in the New York and New England countryside.

– Lindsay Comstock

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©Hai Zhang

“Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost” is a series about photographer Hai Zhang‘s unsettling journey through the “new” China, with its accelerated economic and urban development, cultural change, and social upheaval brought on by mass internal migration. Zhang shot the images between 2008 and 2012, and says they reflect his raw anxiety about a future with no certainty beyond the acute metaphysical awareness of one’s own fragility. “To me, it has become impossible to take a shot of today’s China without capturing contrast” on the fault line between China’s past and present, he says. “But what does it really mean?…Can I grasp a sense of today’s ‘Chinese-ness’ through a composite portraiture of my own society? Perhaps this is an impossible ambition. Looking at the pictures I have taken so far, I hate to realize that I am still dealing with illusions and fantasies.”

An exhibition of the work is on view at the Chobi Mela VII International Photography Festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is also showing at Gallery Voies Off in Arles, France through March 3, 2013. (more…)

All images © Henrik Knudsen, from the series, “North Country”

As temperatures drop and northern regions begin to freeze over, it can be difficult to find the inspiration to create. When photographer Henrik Knudsen found himself caught on the road in the middle of a winter storm in upstate New York, he began photographing the people in the cars around him and the whiteout environment he found himself in along a stretch of NY-28, from the Catskills to North Country. The resulting “North Country” series, “became a meditation on isolation and disorientation in the middle of a storm,” Knudsen says.

–Lindsay Comstock

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All images © Steven Laxton

Steven Laxton’s portrait series, “Circo El Salvador,” documents nomadic circus families of El Salvador who perform in rural and impoverished areas of Central America. This form of entertainment is an important escape for those who live in remote areas of the country where they face not only poverty, but also the highest homicide rate in the world. This photographic series placed in the “personal” category of the 2012 PDN Photo Annual  and was the winner of the $15,000 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture.

The 2013 PDN Photo Annual is now open for entries through January 29. With your entry you can opt to have your portraiture considered for the 2013 Arnold Newman Prize. For more information and to enter the contest, visit: http://pdnphotoannual.com

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