© Douglas Kirkland

Renowned for his work in photojournalism, celebrity portraiture and film photography, Douglas Kirkland’s retrospective is a compelling look into a career in photography spanning over five decades. With just under 200 images, this exhibition features portraits of celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, ‘Coco’ Chanel, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and other icons, alongside iconic stills taken on the sets of acclaimed films such as The Sound of Music (1965), Out of Africa (1985), Titanic (1997) and Australia (2008).

“I had imagined my life and then I had lived it. My images tell the story of a dreamer with a camera in his hands. I have always seized the day. For me, photography has always meant to imagine and interpret persons, sites and events. I understand the world better with a camera.” —Douglas Kirkland
[Interview by Moria De Zen, Bassano Fotografia, 2011]. Kirkland’s retrospective at the Southeast Museum of Photography will run from October 21, 2011 – February 19, 2012. On Thursday, Oct 27 Douglas Kirkland will present a special keynote seminar at PDN’s Photo Plus Expo.

All Photos © Peter Hebeisen.

Swiss photographer Peter Hebeisen has visited 50 of the most famous European battlefields of the 20th century. Though once the epicenters of drama, these landscapes appear still and peaceful, like the calm after a storm. Hebeisen, who is based in Zurich and Paris, drove thousands of miles, capturing contemplative images in large format, in a project that attempts to come to grips with the past.  Twenty of Hebeisen’s large-format images are now on view in “Metamorphosis & Myth” at Gallery 291 in San Francisco through November 5.

Above: Battle of Halbe, Germany (April 24, 1945 to May 1, 1945).

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During the 1950s, Martin Karplus captured the lush hues of the Southwest’s culture and landscapes during his travels there as a post-doctorate fellow. Kodachrome may be gone, but its vivid color qualities lives on through his works which will be exhibited in Stoneham Gallery of the Griffin Museum from Jan.–Feb. 2012, as well as in three additional venues during the next two years featuring different bodies of work. Karplus is currently a Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and Biophysics at Harvard and showed his work as a participant at this year’s Photolucida in Portland, Oregon.

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© Nick Brandt. Courtesy Hasted Kraeutler.

“What I am interested in is showing the animals simply in the state of being. In the state of being before they are ‘no longer are.’ Before, in the wild at least, they cease to exist. This world is under terrible threat, all of it caused by us. To me, every creature, human or nonhuman, has an equal right to live, and this feeling, this belief that every animal and I are equal, affects me every time I frame an animal in my camera. The photos are my elegy to these beautiful creatures, to this wrenchingly beautiful world that is steadily, tragically, vanishing before our eyes.” – Nick Brandt

Brandt does not use telephoto lenses because he believes that being close to the animals makes a huge difference in his ability to reveal their personality. He writes: “You wouldn’t take a portrait of a human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you’d move in close.” After this photograph was taken in 2007, this elephant was murdered by poachers. Nick Brandt began the Big Life Foundation in 2010 to better equip rangers who enforce anti-poaching laws in Amboseli National Park. Nick Brandt is represented by Hasted Kraeutler gallery in New York City.

© David Maisel. Above:History’s Shadow AB3, 2010.

History’s Shadow, a new book by David Maisel (Nazraeli Press), examines art and artifacts through his photographs of museum conservation x-rays. Like spectral transmissions conveying messages across time, the images in History’s Shadow make the invisible visible – expressing the shape-shifting nature of time itself and the continuous presence of the past contained within us. “What do these works of art from past cultures have to teach us about our current point in human history or about our relationship to the past?,” writes Maisel in his essay. “The x-ray provides a filter and a means (much as perception itself is both filter and means) to read the intrinsic properties of these works, the trace elements with which these objects are imbued.” The book also includes X, Curator, a short story by Jonathan Lethem.

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