All images © Trevor Traynor

“Throughout my travels and transit time to and from shoots I started using the iPhone camera to scout locations and collect inspirational content for potential projects. I shot my first newsstand near Broadway and Morris Stretts in New York City and immediately found myself stopping to take portraits at every stand I passed. I’m drawn to the vibrant organized colors and compact product placement that provides an instant time stamp via magazine covers and headlines. The New York City newsstand is a staple in the Big Apple and its perfect square structure is an immediate attraction to the composition fanatic in me. The iPhone has a great dynamic range and its unobtrusive ability lets me shoot with a lot more ease. Paired with editing apps such as Snapseed & PicFx, the end-product emulates the qualities of my favored Hasselblad. I revisited a handful of newsstands with different cameras, and although each camera delivers its own advantage, the iPhone is my current first choice. This project is ongoing and recently I was able to expand the collection to kiosks in Barcelona and Paris.” –Courtesy of Trevor Traynor

To see more of the “NewsStand Project,” visit Traynor’s Instagram feed @ishootpeople or #NewstandprojectbyTrevorTraynor.

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Honolulu, 1968. © Kenneth Josephson, courtesy Gitterman Gallery.

An exhibition on view at Gitterman Gallery in New York City through March 16 features rarely seen images by Kenneth Josephson. This early work of Josephson’s was influenced by Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan and made while he completed his master’s degree at the Institute of Design in Chicago. The exhibition features two continuous themes that have appeared in Josephson’s work since the 1950s: His exploration of abstraction with light, and his dialogue with nature.

Though much of Josephson’s work deals with conceptual ideas, formal concerns are integral to his vision. His early images have a syncopated rhythm of light which is echoed in much of the work he made in the 1960s. It is in his exploration of the abstraction of light in nature that this rhythm becomes almost meditative. In his later work, nature’s palette becomes more subtle and seemingly infinite.

–courtesy Gitterman Gallery

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“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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All photos © Meike Nixdorf.

Berlin-based photographer Meike Nixdorf ‘s series, “In the Orbit of El Teide” explores the idea of perception by questioning  how much information is revealed and  hidden from the photographic frame. Nixdorf navigated the Canary Islands in Spain to capture the changing perspective and atmosphere of the mountain El Teide. As the texture and color in the foreground changes, one thing that remains the same is El Teide’s peak in the background. Nixdorf says, “It is only through looking at these images one-by-one that one realizes how much more information, visual aspects, perspectives or stories-to-be-told there are to just one single mountain–or to any subject matter basically.” See a short video documentary on the making of “in the Orbit of El Tiede”.

Nixdorf’s series was discovered by photo editor Leonor Mamanna of  New York magazine on the blog This isn’t Happiness. See more of our industry leaders’ favorite sources for photography here in the “Like” List featured in PDN‘s current Photo Annual issue.

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All photos © Abelardo Morell. Above: Photographed with a tent camera on a rooftop capturing the view view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura technique has taken him from photographing his own living room to interiors across the globe. “One of the satisfactions I get from making this imagery comes from my seeing the weird and yet natural marriage of the inside and outside”,  he says. In setting up a room to make this kind of photograph he covers all windows with plastic in order to achieve total darkness. Then he cuts one small hole in the materials that he uses to cover the windows. An inverted image of the view outside then floods onto the walls in the room. He focuses the large-format camera on the incoming image on the wall and exposes the film.
Morell recently designed a light proof tent that, via periscope type optics, makes it possible to project a view of the nearby landscape onto whatever ground is under the tent. Inside this darkened space he uses a view camera to record the effect. He says, “I think it is a rather wonderful sandwich of two outdoor realities coming together. This Tent-Camera now liberates me to use camera obscura techniques in a world of new places. I now have a portable room, so to speak.”

Currently Morell’s work is on view in the exhibition, Groundwork, at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery and another exhibition, The Universe Next Door, at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

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