All Photos © Melissa Ann Pinney.

For nearly thirty years,  Melissa Ann Pinney has been photographing girls and women from infancy to old age to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Pinney’s work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood, but also the informal passages of girlhood and adolescence. With each view the audience gains a richer understanding of the connections between a daughter and her parents, grandparents, and the larger world of friends and society. The pictures also reflect the ways in which a girl’s world in 2010 differs from the world Pinney knew growing up in the 1960s, and the ways in which the making of a person can transcend time and place. Girl Ascending, published by the Center for American Places, is a sequel to Pinney’s first book, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girl.

-courtesy University of Chicago Press.

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All Photos  © Carolyn Marks Blackwood; above: “Cloud Series #64″

Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s  images are on view at the Alan Klotz Gallery in New York  in a show called “The Wind Blows Through My Heart.” The poetic title seems appropriate for her deceptively simple photos. Blackwood photographs moments when elements — ice on the Hudson River, clouds in the late afternoon – are being transformed by wind, sun, or tides.  As the gallery’s notes for the show explain, her shards of ice look like forbidding landscapes, and her clouds are “the meteorological equivalents of brushstrokes.” (more…)

© Gillian Laub / Courtesy Bonni Benrubi gallery, “grandpa eating lunch”.

Summer officially starts today, and to mark the occasion, we invited some readers to submit images that evoke the feeling and spirit of the season. Featured here is a selection of the images we received. The photographers include Gillian Laub, Gabriela Herman, Wayne Lawrence, Isa Leshko, Markel Redondo, Jennifer Loeber, Ryan Heffernan, Noah Webb, Inga Hendrickson, and Pascal Shirley.

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© Olivia Beasley / Charles Danby

Photographer Olivia Beasley collaborated with artist Charles Danby for their “Model Drawing” series. The intimate addition of pencil to the photographs are in contrast to the nature of photographic reproductions.

More images from this series can be seen in the The Look 2010 online gallery. The 2011 Contest is currently open for entries until June 30, but enter today to avoid late fees. A People’s Choice winner will also be selected.

Gurewitz Couple, Uszhgorod, Ukraine, 2007

In There Was a Forest, Loli Kantor’s palladium prints document the parallel lives and rituals of the disappearing enclaves of Jews in rural Ukraine and the simultaneous, slow reemergence of Jewish culture and identity that is gradually transforming some of the larger communities there today.

Based in Fort Worth, Texas, Kantor showed There Was a Forest as a participant at this year’s Photolucida in Portland, and was also a recipient of the PhotoNOLA Reviewers Prize in December 2010.

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