© Jill Waterman.  Eva as Kukeri, New Year 2012 in Razlog, Bulgaria.

For the past 30 years, Jill Waterman has traveled annually to a different location to photograph traditional celebrations of the New Year. A year ago, she photographed in the mountain village of Razlog, Bulgaria, where goat-skin clad creatures called Kukeri and exuberant villagers in ceremonial Turkish attire parade through the streets on January 1 in a vigorous dance to ward off evil spirits.

Waterman, author of the 2008 book Night & Low Light Photography and editor for PDN Custom Media, is now in the mountains near Salzburg, Austria, to document the ominous masked figures called Perchten that visit small local villages in “the raw nights” between Christmas and Epiphany on January 6.

For more of Waterman’s New Year’s images from around the world, visit www.NewYearPhotos.com. (more…)

© Arthur Meyerson. Red Hat, Wyoming, 1989.

During a 40-year career as a commercial photographer, Arthur Meyerson has continuously created personal images that “are less about technique and more about a pure passion for seeing and capturing what I saw,” he says. That work is gathered in a new book, The Color of Light. Says Meyerson: “While the subject matter is diverse, the pictures are held together by the fact that they are made up of the three themes that interest me the most in photography; light, color and moments. Light produces color. Light can be soft or intense… color can provoke or excite. It can also inform. At their best, light and color can come together at a moment in time and create an atmosphere, emotional response and/or a sense of place. And for me, that is the power and joy of the color of light.”

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 © Jonathan Hollingsworth

Every year since 2001, no less than 150 sets of the decomposed or skeletal remains of border crossers entering the U.S. from Mexico have been discovered in remote areas of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. In his book, Left Behind (Dewi Lewis Publishing), photographer Jonathan Hollingsworth delivers a sobering look at those who do not survive the Arizona border crossing and the personal effects they’ve left behind.  Hollingsworth traveled to Nogales (site of the largest border patrol station in the U.S.) and Green Valley, where he photographed belongings left on the desert floor by migrants awaiting roadside pick-up at the end of their days-long journey. The work also takes the viewer through the day-to-day operations of the Pima County Forensic Science Center, which analyzes and stores the border crossers’ remains, and works to identify the unknown. Hollingsworth devotes a large segment of the images to the center’s archive of personal effects, creating a quiet memorial for those who died alone, without ceremony, and who in most cases, are still unknown.
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© Patrick Willocq

Patrick Willocq’s project “On the road from Bikoro to Bokonda,” which he created by photographing villages in a Western province in his native Democratic Republic of Congo, was recently awarded the Prix AFD, given by the French Development Agency. The project, Willocq writes, “is a testimony of everyday Batwa Pygmies and Bantu life in the province of Equateur.” Willocq directs the villagers in his photographs to create “Africain tableau,” which is concerned with “human relationships and the role of women and men, the role of the forest, nourishing heart but under daily pressure from the villagers and, traditions still entrenched but sometimes disappearing in favor of more westernized tools and behaviors.” (more…)

All photos © Joseph E. B. Elliott.

Many photographers have documented the monumental steel mills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (one of more than a dozen US cities named for the holy site on the minds of Christians this day). They include Walker Evans, who photographed the city in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration. Joseph E.B. Elliott, who specializes in photographing historic industrial and architectural sites, took more than 1,000 images of the mills from 1989 to 1996, when Bethlehem Steel closed down. His new book of photographs, The Steel, will be published in February by Columbia College Chicago Press. “I certainly feel that I followed the footsteps of Walker Evans,” says Elliott, who shot black-and-white film using a Horseman monorail and an old Linhof Techinika. “I tried to maintain Evans’ dispassionate stance and clarity, but occasionally slipped into a more romantic response to the overwhelming scale and beauty of the place.”

A professor of art at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Elliott has been published in Smithsonian, Wired,  Metropolis and other publications, and his photos are in the collection of the Library of Congress. “In that sense, they reside near Evans’ great FSA work,” he says.

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