© 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.

© Chris Buck, courtesy of Foley Gallery. Judd Apatow, Presence, 2009. 20×24 inch Chromogenic print.

For five years Chris Buck made a series of portraits of the famous in which they weren’t actually visible (they are hiding in the shots). The book PRESENCE: The Invisible Portrait  was published this fall by Kehrer Verlag and is available from Amazon  and the photographer’s website . Mr. Buck will be speaking about the book and the stories behind it at the Aperture Foundation tomorrow evening at 6:30 PM. He might even tell us where a few of the people are hiding…

Related article and photo gallery: Hide and Seek: Chris Buck’s Conceptual Celebrity Portraits (From PDNOnline)

© Martin Usborne

The staged and cinematic images in Martin Usborne‘s new book, The Silence of Dogs in Cars, soon to be published by Kehrer Verlag, portray dogs mutely waiting for their owners. Usborne, an editorial and fine-art photographer based in London, tells PDN that the project is, “sort of a metaphor for how we silence animals in our lives,” including, he says, our own animal natures. As the publisher says, “Usborne wants to show that there is beauty in the darkest spaces within us.”

The subjects in the photos — all of which Usborne set up and lit– were dogs he met through friends or while walking his miniature schnauzer. To learn more about what inspired this deeply personal project, how Usborne conceived and created the images, how he published the book, and where his love of animals has taken him next, see PDN‘s article, “Animal Studies: Seeing Ourselves in the Faces of Dogs” in PDN‘s October issue and on PDNOnline.com.

Above photo: “Prospero.”

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All photos © Rafal Milach. ABove: Pervouralsk

7 Rooms, Rafal Milach’s newest book, published by Kehrer Verlag, is the culmination of a long term and intimate view of modern-day Russia. Over the course of six years, Milach photographed seven young Russians through Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk, and became drawn to the “people, food, drunkenness, taxi music and landscape.” Curator Liza Faktor describes Milach’s subjects as “in their 30s, they are intermediates between the ineradicable Soviet mentality and the increasingly anxious Russian mind of today. Milach’s search is the kind which is almost impossible to visualize. And yet, what he has here, in this book, is a fascinating and subtle journey into the loss of direction, into the sad and beautiful connection with our country. You would be surprised that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government.”

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All photos © Monika Merva.

The City of Children is an extensive document of a government-run housing program for runaways and at-risk teens, located in Hungary. The program was founded in the 1950s, when the Hungarian social welfare system emphasized collective solutions to private problems. New York based photographer Monika Merva has worked on this documentary project for over 8 years. Her book The City of Children was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2010.

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