©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…)

“Desert Fire #249,” 1985. © Richard Misrach

The Robert Mann Gallery in New York City recently moved to a new location and to inaugurate the space, they are hanging a retrospective of Richard Misrach’s landscape and fine-art photography. The exhibition spans the first 25 years of the photographer’s career and includes his seminal work “The Desert Cantos.” According to the gallery, “Richard Misrach: The Desert Cantos” traces the artistic development of the photographer and starts “with the luscious split-toned works realized with a flash shot into desert night scenes. Eerie and magnificent, these works introduce many of the themes that would occupy Misrach in the years to come: staging the condition of aesthetic beauty of the natural world as mediated by human intervention in the landscape — in this case the photographer’s own invasive flash.” The exhibition runs through October 27, 2012.

All images courtesy of the Artist, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles; Pace/MacGill, New York.

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All Photos © Michael Itkoff.

This series by Michael Itkoff was made within five-hundred acres situated between two lakes in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Itkoff says, “To develop a relationship with a specific place, with a piece of land, with a view, with local trees and animals is a profound experience that unfolds over time. Although I have lived in many different places over the years I have managed to return to the same cabin in Pennsylvania for most of my life.”

Michael Itkoff is based between New York City and North Carolina.

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All Photos © Jake Rajs, Courtesy of The Monacelli Press. This image: Havasupai Indian Reservation in Arizona.

Jake Rajs’ recently published book, Carved by Time, captures the magnificence of the the southwestern landscape. ” There’s no place like the Desert Southwest. It’s a land of parched canyons, bleached solitudes, and bulwarks of intoxicating rock,” Hampton Sides writes in the book’s introduction. “It’s the country made famous by Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Georgia O’Keeffe, a queer world of upheaval and stark finality cooked in an unforgiving forge. The scale of its dwarfs human beings, not only spatially  but also chronologically, suggesting chasms of time that mock our relevance in the story of creation.”

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