© Julio Cordero/Courtesy Archivo Cordero. Above: Bridal Portrait [Matrimonio] La Paz, Bolivia, c. 1925.

FotoFest’s latest exhibition Faces of History – Latin America, organized in conjunction with arts>Brookfield Properties , highlights important late 19th and early 20th Century photographers from five Latin American countries – Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Their works are a profile of change – the mass availability of photography as an instrument for personal portraiture and collective communication and the emergence of new social classes created by the industrial growth of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Latin America. The photographers and their studios were important institutions in their time, recording life across economic and social lines, from native laborers to the wealthy and politically powerful, in these bustling, turn of the century, Latin American cities.

“As photographers ourselves and later founders of FotoFest, we had over 25 years working with photography in Latin America. Its photographic heritage is immensely rich,” says curator and FotoFest co-founder Wendy Watriss. FotoFest did a ground-breaking series of exhibitions on photography by Latin America photographers at the FotoFest 1992 Biennial in Houston. The exhibitions became the basis for a national traveling show and an award-winning bi-lingual book, Photography from Latin America, 1865-1992 published by University of Texas Press (1998).

Faces of History – Latin America is on view June 6, 2011 – August 5, 2011 at Allen center One & Two in Downtown Houston, 500 Dallas Street and 1200 Smith Street, 77002.

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© Joe Pugliese / People

A portrait of Marine Corporal Aaron P. Mankin, injured in Iraq, from a story on Operation Mend. A collaboration between UCLA Medical Center and Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas., the goal of Operation Mend is to treat severely injured U.S. military personnel wounded during service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Joe Pugliese’s series was included in the PDN Photo Annual 2011 online gallery.

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© Mary F. Calvert

Polio victim Abubakar, age 6, crawling next to the footprint of his mother at the family home in Kano, Nigeria, photographed by Mary F. Calvert. Calvert’s story on polio, a highly infectious virus that cripples children it does not kill, is a winner of the BD Hope for a Healthy World Competition in the category of Best Global Health Story, Professional. BD invited photographers to tell stories using imagery on a wide variety of global health issues.

The winners of the BD Hope for a Healthy World Competition will be exhibited during the Look3 Festival of the Photograph, taking place in Charlottesville, VA, June 9 through 11. Exhibition locations and dates, and a festival schedule can be found on the Look3 web site.

© Edward McHugh/Gallery 339. Intake, 2010, Wax-Diffused Pigment Print

Surface Tension, an exhibition of lush landscape images by Edward McHugh, is currently on view at Gallery 339 in Philadelphia. Similar to his earlier photographs, the straight-forward beauty of the landscapes belies their underlying complexity.  Informed by 19th century painting and photography, abstract expressionism, minimalism and a range of other sources, McHugh is able to layer these diverse and at times dissonant ways of seeing into cohesive pictures.  Ironically, these painterly pictures could only be photographs, as McHugh uses the camera’s ability to capture the spontaneous and the uncontrived.  Working at this point of so many intersections, the blurred territory between painting and photography, McHugh is able to instill his images with a genuine sense of mystery. The exhibition is on view until July 9, 2011. To see more of McHugh’s work click here.

-courtesy of Gallery 339.

© Frans Lanting/National Geographic

Photographer Frans Lanting’s surreal landscape of Namibia’s Dead Vlei in the June issue of National Geographic magazine has many asking whether it’s a painting or photograph. Lanting took a break from his current assignment in Africa to discuss the photograph, the result of a “perfect moment” that “came when the sun reached all the way down to the bottom of the sand dune just before it reached the desert floor.”