La Brasserie de l’Ile St. Louis, Paris, 1994. © Peter Turnley-Corbis. All rights reserved.

Photojournalist Peter Turnley, whose images have appeared on the cover of Newsweek 43 times and who is best known for his career covering conflict, also has a softer side. He has been documenting life in his “adopted home” of Paris since 1975–making images that explore love in the City of Lights. He explains that if “there were any justification for trying to bring greater attention to those suffering from oppression [and various forms of injustices],” it would be to also show that “life is beautiful.”  In the 1980s he assisted Robert Doisneau, the French photojournalist and creator of the famous “Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (The Kiss)“ photograph and says he is “proud to continue to underline the ongoing universal theme of beauty and romance and love” in his work. He is currently working on compiling his “French Kiss” series of nearly 40 years of work into a book with the same title.

To read more about his week-long street photography workshops, visit this link. For updates on his work, visit his Facebook page.

–Lindsay Comstock

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 ”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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"Luxembourg," 1923-1925. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden.

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit on Eugène Atget is named after the sign that hung outside of the photographer’s studio door, which simply said “Documents pour artistes” (Documents for Artists). Atget photographed Paris over the course of his 30-year career with the artist in mind, often capturing detail-rich scenes like an abandoned park or rural courtyard that could serve as source material for painters and others. Taking care to avoid cliché sites such as the Eiffel Tower, Atget instead “focused on the fabric of the city,” including parks, street scenes, store displays and building facades. The rare times Atget did photograph his fellow Parisians, he focused his camera on those living on the fringes of society: street merchants, Gypsies and prostitutes.

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