“Attic Bedroom, Delhi, NY.” © Trevor Tondro.

The farmhouse, an icon of the leafy, winding roads and staggering farm lands of rural New England, is more than just an emblem of the American homestead. Many of these dwellings stand as relics of the Dutch, English, French and Scotch settlers who built these simple structures as early as the seventeenth century. This series of photographs, by Brooklyn, New York-based architectural photographer Trevor Tondro, were made for his forthcoming book, A Simpler Way of Life: Old Farmhouses of New York & New England, to be released by Norfleet Press in Fall 2013. His images are a chronicle of the cozy, rustic interiors and painterly exteriors of these modest structures, made by carpenters and farmers in the New York and New England countryside.

– Lindsay Comstock

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  Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, September 2011. ©Darren Birkin

Emphasizing close-up action and breathtaking scenery, Darren Birkin’s BASE jumping photographs are a vicarious thrill. The Hertfordshire, England-based photographer has been photographing BASE jumping friends for about seven years, tagging along on trips with his climbing gear “so that I can safely hang off cliffs, wind turbines, stadiums or suchlike” to take pictures, he says. BASE jumpers launch from fixed surfaces, free falling, and use a parachute to finally break the fall. (Although Birkin is an experienced skydiver, he doesn’t BASE jump).

“When shooting BASE I try to get a sense of the action but also of the environment,” he explains. “I found that shooting with wide angle lenses often gives a distorted view and inaccurate perspective that doesn’t really do justice to the environment. To counter this I often use longer focal lengths to create multi-shot, panoramic images.” He then stitches the images together using Photoshop or Autodesk Stitcher Pro. “This technique can give a much better representation of the environment and also allows me to capture a field of view and perspective that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.” More of Birkin’s images are posted on his web site. (more…)

©Hai Zhang

“Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost” is a series about photographer Hai Zhang‘s unsettling journey through the “new” China, with its accelerated economic and urban development, cultural change, and social upheaval brought on by mass internal migration. Zhang shot the images between 2008 and 2012, and says they reflect his raw anxiety about a future with no certainty beyond the acute metaphysical awareness of one’s own fragility. “To me, it has become impossible to take a shot of today’s China without capturing contrast” on the fault line between China’s past and present, he says. “But what does it really mean?…Can I grasp a sense of today’s ‘Chinese-ness’ through a composite portraiture of my own society? Perhaps this is an impossible ambition. Looking at the pictures I have taken so far, I hate to realize that I am still dealing with illusions and fantasies.”

An exhibition of the work is on view at the Chobi Mela VII International Photography Festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is also showing at Gallery Voies Off in Arles, France through March 3, 2013. (more…)

 ”Lady Gaga – Head, You & I,” 2011. Pigment print. © Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

From a portrait of Lady Gaga’s male alter-ego, to a digitally composited three-headed nude woman, to flower still lifes, to unusual celebrity portraits, the photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin have locked in on a unique niche in the image-making industry, gracefully straddling the commercial and fine-art worlds. If their eye-popping and often awe-inspiring imagery is not intended to turn heads, maybe we’ve misunderstood their work. The team, who has been at it for 25 years–both on set as a collaborative photography team, and off, as a romantic partnership–has been dreaming up vivid and imaginative photographic narratives that have garnered them a dream client list, from the world’s top fashion houses to editorials in high-profile magazines to major museum and gallery exhibitions.

An exhibition of their work, hung in groupings of three to juxtapose their diverse subject matter, is on view at Gagosian Gallery in Paris through March 9. To read an in-depth profile of the photographers and view an online photo gallery from the April 2012 printed issue of PDN magazine, visit this link.

– Lindsay Comstock

Editor’s note: Some of the images that follow contain nudity.

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“Harlem, NY,” 1947. © Henri Cartier-Bresson

Though Henri Cartier-Bresson did not craft his photographic career by honing the advancements made to the medium by the advent of color film (he believed the color film of the 1950s to be too technically and esthetically limiting), other photographers carried the torch in understanding how to capture “the decisive moment” in hues that echo reality. “Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour,” on view until Sunday at the Somerset House in London, is a group exhibition that includes the work from photographers such as Ernst Haas, Fred Herzog, Joel Meyerowitz and Alex Webb, who brought Cartier-Bresson’s formal elements of photojournalism to life in vivid color. The exhibition includes ten photographs by Cartier-Bresson never before exhibited in the UK and 75 images from 14 internationally-recognized photographers.

–Lindsay Comstock

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