© Maggie Taylor. “The moth house”  from 2012.

Photographer Maggie Taylor‘s retrospective No Ordinary Days, featuring 120 of her images, will be released in January from University Press of Florida. Her husband, photographer Jerry Uelsmann, is currently exhibiting a selection of his work in Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Studio 360, a nationally syndicated program produced at New York radio station WNYC, recently featured Taylor and Uelsmann in a segment called “Faking It: Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor“.  As part of the program, the couple provided ten images that Studio 360 listeners can download and manipulate as part of a photo re-mix contest. Taylor and Uelsmann will judge the entries and announce a contest winner in December.

© Kirk Crippens.

“Traveling ten thousand miles is better than reading ten thousand scrolls” is a Chinese proverb that speaks to the heart of Kirk Crippens’ recent portrait project. He was hungry for knowledge of China that he couldn’t get just by reading, so he traveled from his home in the East Bay area to the small city Chinese city of Lishui. With just two words of Mandarin (Ni hao, which means “hello”), he managed to meet hundreds of people who allowed him to photograph them and who took him into their homes and into their confidence. Crippens is one of three photographers (along with Maggie Preston and David Wolf) participating in the 2012 RayKo artists-in-residence program. A joint exhibition is currently on view at the RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco through December 14th, 2012.

© Jen Osborne/Courtesy of COLORS Magazine.

Jen Osborne is a Canadian photographer who currently lives in Berlin, Germany.  Her work typically revolves around therapy and escapism. In early 2012, Jen was sent on assignment by COLORS Magazine to a rehabilitation center in Bellingham, Washington. She was asked to photograph patients at the center during a visit by two friendly llamas named Marisco and N.H Flight of the Eagle. Accompanied by Niki Kuklenski, the llamas stopped at each bed to kiss the patients or receive a hug. The COLORS story explained: “For some, it’s the most cuddling they receive in their time at the center; for others, it’s a welcome novelty, relieving the boredom of life in an institution. The llamas leave a profound impression. ‘I had never met one before,’ remembers Holly Barto, a patient. ‘It was heaven. Just emotionally – to be able to touch an animal and hold an animal close.’ “

© Shadi Ghadirian. From the series Miss Butterfly, 2011.

The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art and Society (Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art) presents the work of 24 contemporary women artists of Middle East heritage who examine matters of gender, homeland, geopolitics, theology, and the environment through painting, video, photography, sculpture, film, performance art, and multimedia. These artists challenge Western stereotypes of women in the Middle East, while acknowledging existing social and theological restrictions that have caused many of them to leave their homelands. The book presents artists well known in Euro-American countries such as Mona Hatoum, Parastou Forouhar, Shirin Neshat, Sigalit Landau and Shazia Sikander, but also artists whose work is primarily known only in the Middle East.

This volume is edited and with text by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, co-directors of Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art with additional essays by Margot Badran, historian of the Middle East and Islamic societies, and a specialist in gender studies; author and curator Kelly Baum, and curator and writer Gilane Tawadros. The authors in this volume address trans-nationalism, the artists’ sense of unease about the world today, and their responses to the political uprisings and events in their countries of origin. The book also addresses the historic and contemporary impact of Middle East culture on black Africa and South Asia. The book is published in conjunction with a fall 2012 multivenue exhibition at Rutgers and Princeton Universities and the Princeton Arts Council/Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, among other locations.
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Lena (left), sentenced for organizing a rape, and Katya, sentenced for theft. Juvenile prison for girls, Ukraine, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Michal Chelbin‘s book Sailboats and Swans was recently released by Twin Palms Publishers. The images were made by the Israeli photographer in prisons throughout the Ukraine and Russia, and explore the idea of what it’s like to be locked up and constantly watched. Novelist A.M. Homes wrote the text for the book, an excerpt of which is below:

“The images are about a kind of discomfort–theirs, hers, mine and ours. It is like an old-fashioned staring contest–one guy looks at the other and the first one who blinks is the loser, except Michal Chelbin never blinks. Instead she captures with the click of a shutter. Chelbin is always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. She captures–we shudder.”

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