All photos © Tabitha Soren. Above: Running 000927, 2012.

Tabitha Soren began her series called Running with a chance discovery after photographing her daughter by the headlights of a car, in the act of running. Upon seeing the images, Soren had the sense she was trapping her daughter inside the frame. “I started thinking about panic, resilience, and the role of accident in life,” she says. “Also, when people are running their bodies contort and we get to glimpse emotions that are normally kept hidden.” Soren’s Running series, along with the work by five other photographers (Martin Bogren, Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman, Monika Merva, and Shawn Rocco) is included in Fresh, the annual summer exhibition at Klompching Gallery. The artists were selected by Darren Ching (owner of the Klompching Gallery) and distinguished collector, Fred Bidwell (Bidwell Projects), for their consistency of vision, originality, craftsmanship and strong viewpoint. In addition to the gallery show, which opens tomorrow night, the artists’ works will be published in Blink magazine, and showcased online by Flak Photo.

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© Antonio Bolfo/Reportage by Getty Images.

Antonio Bolfo worked as a police officer in the NYPD from 2006 to 2008 where he patrolled some of the most dangerous housing projects in the Bronx. Bolfo says, “There was a substantial amount of depression in the unit and at the precinct in general, but no one would ever admit it out of fear it would be taken as a sign of weakness. People deal with depression in a number of ways, some take to alcohol, others to infidelity. For me it was photography that helped ease the burden.” Bolfo’s series, IMPACT: Life On The Housing Beat opens tomorrow, July 24, at the Half King gallery in NY. The photographer will participate in an opening night discussion with Ed Conlon, former NYPD detective and author of Blue Blood.

Operation IMPACT is an NYPD program that assigns young, untested officers to the most violent and dangerous neighborhoods of New York City for a full-scale plunge into “The Job.” Part field training, part trial by fire, IMPACT pits these officers against some of the most vicious criminals in the country on a daily basis. This photography project follows one IMPACT unit consisting of thirty rookies assigned to housing projects in the South Bronx, one of the poorest and toughest neighborhoods in America.

Many criminologists directly attribute Operation IMPACT to New York City’s 21st century revival. But the focus on arrests comes at a price: sacrificing community policing, which leads to a tense relationship between the neighborhood’s beleaguered residents and the overstrained cops.

Above: Officers Weadock, Olivero, and Suarino (left to right) helplessly listen to a colleague cry for help over the radio in the Mott Haven neighborhood of South Bronx. Because IMPACT cops patrol on foot and have no access to police vehicles, they are unable to respond to the officer in need of assistance.

-text courtesy Antonio Bolfo
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All photos © Tina Hejtmanek.

 Returning to Marfa

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All images © Amanda Marsalis & Automatic Books

Photographer Amanda Marsalis was in Venice for a friend’s gallery opening when the publishers of Automatic Books noticed her making Polaroid photographs of flowers. An avid Polaroid user, Marsalis began photographing flowers as her remaining instant film stock dwindled. Though she’d created a zine of some of the photographs, she hadn’t planned on doing much else with her “little project.” The Automatic Books publishers asked Marsalis if they could make a book of her Polaroids, and Reproduction, a lovely 102-page, hand-bound volume came to be. Writes Marsalis in a statement that appears on the back cover of the book: “Reproduction for me is three things: The purpose of a flower, the way the book is being printed, and a woman’s fertility/sexuality. Myself being the woman. I feel in a tradition of classic photographers shooting still lives as an exercise in image making and self examination.”

© Alison Carey.

Alison Carey’s ambrotypes depict ancient marine environments from each of the seven periods in the Paleozoic era. Using clay, Carey handmade models of extinct underwater vertebrates and invertebrates to use in the dioramas she built for her series “Organic Remains of a Former World.” She then photographed each diorama and used a development process that dates back to the 1850s, giving them a blurry, outdated look and filling the pictures with contrasting light to create an underwater world never seen by humans.

Her work will be featured along with artists Tami Bone, Christopher Colville, Jeremy Dyer, German Herrera, Tomiko Jones, Chris McCaw, Robin Robinson and Curtis Wehrfritz in the exhibition “Not Kansas: Photographers Explore Their Own Worlds,” on view at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco from July 19 to August 31, 2012. There will be an opening reception this Thursday, July 19 from 6pm to 9pm at the gallery.