Every year PDN receives a variety of holiday cards from many photographers. Susan Seubert‘s card this year featured an amusing photograph a palm tree that appears to be wearing a Christmas tree.

Suebert has used her holiday cards as an opportunity to experiment, she explains. “It’s a great way to free oneself from the normal constraints of image making because it can be serious or whimsical. It’s also a great way to reflect back on the year and reconnect with clients and loved ones by sending a hand-addressed card.” Seubert’s holiday experiments have included an entire set of original tintypes of pears, an elaborate table setting, and a wet-plate collodion Ambrotype. “Winter, feasting, celebration, darkness and light have all been themes of Christmases past,” Seubert explains. “This year, since I was in Maui until the end of November, I decided to make my card there…. As we passed by this tree, we noticed that if you stood in just the right position, the tree looks as though it’s topped by a palm, which to me resembles a star, the typical tree-topper ornament.” The play on perspective and tropical theme, Seubert says, were a good way to “send a little bit of sunny Maui to everyone who might be suffering from the winter blues.”

© Sharon Harper

Sharon Harper’s photographic interests lie at the intersection of technology and perception, science and art. She photographs phenomenon, particularly relating to the moon, stars and other celestial objects, that the eye cannot process, using both large-format cameras and 35mm cameras attached to telescopes. Her images record empirical evidence, and at the same time evoke a sense of wonder. Harper explains, “The camera can be seen as a metaphor for the pervasive presence of technology within the landscape, a presence that often interrupts our experience of the natural world. Here the camera creates possibilities for re-interpreting contemporary experience as it mediates and records, generating images that cannot be seen without it.” Her first monograph, From Above and Below, will be released next month by Radius Books.

(more…)

© Naomi Harris. Sikh Motorcycle Club – Vancouver BC

On a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, photographer Naomi Harris took a road trip in the summer of 2011 to photograph Canadians coast to coast. Harris, who is Canadian, has lived in the US for the last 14 years and says that before receiving the grant, she had seen more of America and Europe than her own country. “Growing up in Toronto my comprehension of Canada barely extended past Montreal and Ottawa,” she says. “This journey [in 2011] opened my eyes to my country and how special Canadians are.” Harris plans to continue the project in regions of the country where natural resource extraction is helping the Canadian economy. She is also planning a road trip to photograph around the US, in celebration of her recent decision to apply for US citizenship. Harris says she welcomes suggestion of places of significance and beauty that she should visit. (naomi@naomiharris.com)

(more…)

© Andrew Phelps, “untitled” from the series Haboob, 2011.

“Haboob” is photographer Andrew Phelps’ follow-up project to his 2008 series “Higley.” Once a small rural town in Arizona, Higley was finally swallowed up in 2007 by the explosive growth of metropolitan Phoenix. Rural structures disappeared, and were replaced by housing development and shopping malls. Village roads became grand boulevards. But the financial and real estate crisis abruptly ended the construction boom. Now, sandstorms called haboobs, which are typical of the Arizona desert, blow through the deserted town, and symbolize the fear and insecurity of the middle class. Phelps, who was born in nearby Mesa, Arizona in 1967, is exploring from a personal perspective what remains of the American Dream in the area.  The project has been published as a book called Haboob by Kehrer Verlag, and it is currently on exhibit at the Robert Morat Gallery in Hamburg, Germany until January 12, 2013.

© Gabriele Stabile

For refugees who are being resettled in the United States from countries all over the world, their first experience here often involves a night in an airport hotel in cities like New York, Newark, Chicago, Miami or Los Angeles. As a long-term project, photojournalist Gabriele Stabile and reporter Juliet Linderman photographed refugees in their hotel rooms as they passed their first hours in the United States, and recorded their stories. Then last year Stabile and Linderman reinterviewed and rephotographed the refugees in order to tell the story of how they have settled in their new communities.

The result of that work is gathered in Refugee Hotel, their new book published as part of Voice of Witness, the non-profit book series founded by writer Dave Eggers, which publishes works that address the impact of social injustice through the use of oral histories.

“Just as the banks of Ellis Island once served as the gateway to America for millions of European immigrants, these hotels serve as a gateway to a new, unfamiliar life for refugees in the 21st century,” write Stabile and Linderman in their introduction to the book.

(more…)