Jessica Eaton

A gray cube in Eaton's studio

“We’ve all mixed two colors of paint together, and either it makes another color or, if you keep going, it gets muddy and progressively gets darker,” she explains. “In light, things work really differently.” Eaton explains that she exploits the properties of light through additive color separation: whereas the primary pigment colors (red, blue, yellow) get darker as they blend, the primary colors of light (red, blue, green) move toward white. Eaton applies filters in those three colors to her camera and takes multiple exposures, a process that turns the gray form seen here into the vibrant ones seen above. “The color itself is mixed inside the camera,” she says.

One of the byproducts of Eaton’s process is an element of surprise: because her images are created within the camera, she doesn’t know what she’ll get until the photos are developed. “It’s a bit of a conversation with the world,” she says. “With the forces of time and space and contingency and errors that happen, because often there’s so many steps going into one of these, I get back something that’s also new to me, and those are the pictures that tend to end up in exhibits.”

Jessica Eaton

Filter Samples for Spectrum, 2009

Her work in other series, samples of which are also included in this gallery, may use different techniques (for example, Spectrum is the product of covering a window with gels, as shown here), but they all come back to experimentation with light and color. That experimentation is something that she has been building toward throughout her career. Eaton says that when she began taking pictures, in 1998, her work tended toward documentary and portrait photography. But even then, working in the dark room, she says that she felt a push to test different processes and see what would happen. She was aware of the science of light at work even in what she calls “normal” photographs, aware that subject and content buried those phenomena, preventing viewers from seeing what was there. In 2006, her work shifted and she began to bring those hidden elements to the forefront. She isolated light and color and time, even though to do so was to challenge the classical definition of photography as a way to capture a single moment. Her multiple exposures—as in Quantum Pong, which comprises four exposures of more than 500 ping-pong balls that had been dropped 20 feet—allow her to leave that definition behind. “In most of these photographs, what you’re looking at is more than one moment,” she says. “They aren’t static moments of time. They’re layers of time.”

But the photographer likes challenging definitions, and not just photographic ones. Although she dislikes the term “abstract” as a description of her work—it implies that the light she captures doesn’t exist in reality—Eaton says that her photographs acknowledge “how incredibly limited our ability to perceive the world is.” We lack the sensory mechanisms to see her colors with our naked eyes, and Eaton sees that as a metaphor for our inability to see the extent of the physical universe, whether it includes multiple dimensions or parallel universes. And, in that metaphor, she sees hope. “I love the idea that no matter how bad it gets,” she says, “there’s this wild so-called reality way beyond what we have decided it is.”

Jessica Eaton is a Canadian photographer. Her work will be presented in a solo show at next year’s Hyères festival. See more of her work here or here.

Neil Harris

UPDATE: In the first lot of the evening, the framed Robert Capa print pictured above sold for $4,500 to bidder #313, reports TIME’s Neil Harris, who was present at the event. He says that the evening was partly surprising—contemporary photojournalism at Christie’s is unprecedented—and partly somber, as Hammerl’s widow gave a speech and read a letter from their middle child to his father. Once the live auction began, “the mood became quite energized and people started bidding real money for serious pictures,” Harris says. “The first three lots together broke $10,000, which was exhilarating on all levels.”

On Tuesday evening, Christie’s will hold its first-ever auction of contemporary photojournalism prints at its New York City auction house. The event, which will be hosted by news anchor Christiane Amanpour, will benefit the family of the late Anton Hammerl. Hammerl, who had been a photographer and photo editor for outlets from the Associated Press to the The Sunday Star in Johannesburg, was killed in Libya last April. He had traveled to Libya as a freelancer to cover the conflict in that country. He was 41 years old and had three children, ages 11, 8 and 1. His remains have not yet been found.

The auction was the idea of a group of conflict journalists who originally got together, via Facebook, to sell prints to help their colleague’s loved ones. The transition from on-demand sales to planning an auction, under the banner “Friends of Anton,” happened about a month ago, and some of the most recognizable names in photojournalism have signed on to participate: João Silva, Platon, Bruce Davidson, Alec Soth, Susan Meiselas and many more.

The auction, says David Brabyn, one of the organizers, demonstrates the sense of community among photographers who put themselves at risk for their work. “It’s been quite highlighted recently,” he says, “after all the deaths of reporters, both photographers and print.”

But one of the most important prints up for bid was not a donation from someone in that community. Robert Capa’s photograph of American soldiers landing in France on D-Day is perhaps the most familiar picture in the bunch; Capa was killed by a land mine in 1954. The donation comes from the International Center of Photography, where his work is archived. (The winning bid will also include a personal tour of his archive.) ICP was founded by Capa’s brother, Cornell Capa, and the print comes from his personal collection.

Even though neither Capa brother is alive to bestow his friendship on Anton Hammerl, it’s a fitting donation, says Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa Archive at ICP. Cornell Capa, she says, was generous with his prints during his lifetime—and this is a particularly poignant cause. “His brother and Anton both died while photographing overseas, doing a job they felt compassionately about. They were both committed to bringing back real stories about what was happening in the world and what they saw,” says Young. “Cornell founded ICP in part to educate people, not only about photography, but that through photography we can learn about political situations, and consequently make social and political change.”

And the picture, beyond its historical significance, has its own measure of poignancy, she adds: “It seemed like an appropriate image, one of great courage both on the part of the American soldiers and of the photographer.”

More information about the Friends of Anton auction—including ticketing and absentee bidding information—is available here.

Recently, that includes Isadora Kosofsky, who, after the death of the maternal grandmother who raised her, began to search for catharsis through photography. “Grief following my grandmother’s death unconsciously led me to photograph the lives and relationships of the elderly,” Kosofsky says.

The trio’s relationship clearly challenges cultural norms. Will, describing the trio’s bond to Kosofsky, said, “We live above the law. Not outside the law, but above the law. We are not outlaws.” Will, Jeanie and Adina are connected by more than time and space. “There are many different kinds of love,” Adina told Kosofsky. Their relationship, like all relationships, can be frustrating for all three. Jeanie once confided in Kosofsky that “to share Will is a thorn in your side…A relationship between a man and a woman is private. It’s a couple, not a trio.” But despite Jeanie’s misgivings, she must share Will with Adina and Adina must share Will with her.

Kosofsky met Jeanie, Will and Adina three short years after picking up a camera. “I befriended the group because I recognize a part of me in both Jeanie and Adina. Will, too, is familiar to me… a reflection of men I have known,” she says. “When I share in their lives, I am reminded of my adolescence.”

Kosofsky herself is not that far removed from adolescence. She is 18 years old and is now a documentary photographer based in Los Angeles—finding inspiration from photographers like Jane Evelyn Atwood, who spent years documenting one subject. Kosofsky believes long-term projects offer the opportunity of deeper and more poignant storytelling. In her own projects, it is her goal to “devote myself to living amongst my subjects as an occupant, rather than a visitor.”

“The aged are becoming increasingly hidden and disenfranchised. I noticed that even towards the end of my grandmother’s life, she appeared distant from society,” Kosofsky says. The photographer is currently engaged in photographing a three-part series on aging—a subject about which she is passionate. “I feel that age is a perceived barrier and that we too have once, either literally or figuratively, shared their fear of isolation and their wish for acknowledgement,” she explains. “Even when Jeanie and Adina are not present, Will walks with his right hand straight and open at his side, as if he were waiting for someone to hold on.”

Isadora Kosofsky is a Los Angeles-based documentary photographer. More of her work can be seen here.

“That’s when I got hooked on celebrities,” says Galella, who would reinvent celebrity paparazzi culture over the next few decades through his relentless style and candid portraits. “Being in Hollywood, I figured I’d see what these stars look like.” The young lensman crashed premieres, introduced himself to celebrities and even took an acting class to overcome his shyness about rubbing elbows with Hollywood’s A-List.

Though he’d photograph countless stars throughout his career, including Madonna, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando, Galella’s favorite subject would become First Lady Jackie Kennedy. “She was my muse, my golden girl,” Galella says. “She was my ideal subject for many reasons—she did not pose, she was active, and for the most part, she would ignore my camera.” Even later restraining orders issued against Galella would not deter his obsession with the notoriously private Kennedy.

Galella has largely stepped out of the spotlight over the last 20 years, since he and his wife moved to New Jersey in 1992. But he continues to cover prominent culture events from the annual Tony Awards to this year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala (for the record, he thought singer Beyoncé was best-dressed). “The paparazzi culture has changed drastically,” he says. “When I did it, you had the great freedom to shoot—no fans, no security, no publicists. And I don’t miss it too much because I have the gold in my files.”

Ron Galella is an American photographer. More of his work can be seen here. A new book of his work, Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire!, is available from Hatje Cantz publishers.

“I think a lot of photographers feel this,” he explains, “but it was just out of that general sense of obligation.”

Reed noticed that, while his fellow photographers often spoke of that urge to give back, they lacked a platform to do so in an organized and sustained fashion. In 2008, he and some art- and business-minded friends founded Nuru Project—“Nuru” meaning “light” in Swahili—to fill that void. The business now has relationships with well-known photojournalists, including TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev, and the group is looking to grow with an upcoming Kickstarter drive aimed at funding a marketing campaign. Reed says that response to the project has been positive, but he’s aware of the deeper questions of journalistic integrity that are raised by his brainchild.

“Most photojournalists get into journalism because they think there are stories that are important to tell and they want to make a difference,” Reed says. Nuru helps them do so, but it also re-introduces the frequently discussed matter of whether the journalist’s job is to make that difference or to record things as they are.

NURU Project

Each NURU print comes with a handwritten "backstory" from the photographer, such as this one explaining Espen Rasmussen's print from Balakot, Pakistan.

Nuru Project has so far raised $150,000 for its nonprofit partners, often organizations that work directly with the communities that appear in the photographs it sells. Originally conceived as a group that would organize exhibitions, Nuru transitioned to an e-commerce model in October 2011. Reed now manages the business full-time, seeing it as an extension of the social entrepreneurship he used to practice as a photographer, he says. Nuru sells prints in low-cost, numbered but unlimited editions; half the money goes to an affiliated nonprofit organization that can be selected by the buyer at checkout and the other half is divided evenly between the photographer and Nuru Project.

“I really like creating something that is dedicated to putting photojournalism to some sort of social purpose beyond telling the news, and I think that’s a controversial idea within photojournalism,” Reed says. “On our Facebook page, when we post relevant stories, we’ll get comments that say this is not what journalism is supposed to be about—and then we usually get a lot more comments that are very sympathetic to what we’re doing.”

Nuru Project is not the first group to link photojournalism and social advocacy. Cornell Capa, founding director of the International Center of Photography, introduced the idea of the “concerned photographer” in the mid-20th century and maintained that cameras could catalyze necessary change rather than just preserving an image of the situation that needed it. More recently, VII Photo has sold prints to benefit Doctors Without Borders. And Reed says that he’s noticed a general trend toward socially aware photography.

“There’s this idea that photojournalists should be objective and not have opinions,” he says. “I think the reality is that’s nonsense and we’re all very subjective beings and that photojournalists bring that to their work.”

But several of the points made by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) code of ethics seem to imply that such subjectivity ought to stay out of that work. The code asks that photographers, while maintaining respect for their subjects, “avoid political, civic and business involvements or other employment that compromise or give the appearance of compromising one’s own journalistic independence.”

John Long, who is the Ethics Chair of the NPPA, says that this directive does not mean photographers must not be involved in social action—merely that they must be very careful. He recounts a story from his own career at the Hartford Courant, when an editor asked him to resign from the board of a homeless shelter or refrain from shooting stories about homelessness: in that case, the simultaneous action in both spheres would have been a conflict of interest. “You can have beliefs and you can have a great dedication to your organization that you’re trying to promote on that score,” Long says, “but when it comes time to deal with your journalism you have to remember that the master you’re serving at this point is not the organization but accuracy.”

The philosophy of the concerned photographer is very consistent with NPPA ethics, he adds: as long as the photography happens from a journalistic standpoint, and then the social action happens separately, then the photojournalist is doing his job. And the impulse that drove Reed to found Nuru is, Long says, one that is necessary for good photography to be possible.

“You can’t bring your advocacy to your work but you can bring your humanity,” says Long. “If you don’t bring a passion for people and a concern for the welfare of people and society, if you don’t bring a love of mankind to your work, your work is going to be very hollow to begin with.”

Nuru makes a convenient middle-man, allowing photojournalists to participate in social advocacy without actively giving to the causes involved, especially as the photographs currently for sale were not taken with Nuru in mind. But if Nuru evolves from one-off deals with photographers to extended relationships—as J.B. Reed hopes it will—the organization will butt up against the question of whether journalistic objectivity is in fact possible or desirable in the first place.

LightBox welcomes your thoughts on the matter in our comments section below.

Matthias Fiegl, one of the original founders of the 20-year-old, pinhole- and fisheye-loving, Vienna-based company, recently visited New York City. He sat down with LightBox at the company’s Greenwich Village store— where signs proclaim the “prophecies of the analogue future” and the walls are papered with photographs—to discuss why its competitor’s success is good for business.

“People have tried out filters on Instagram and now they want to do the real thing,” says Fiegl. “We hear that all the time in the shop.”

Lomography started as a way to buy the Russian Lomo cameras that Fiegl and his friends loved, and now sells a variety of cameras, accessories, film, clothing and books. Fiegl says that people are often surprised that the Lomography website sees up to 8,000 images uploaded daily and about 2 million unique visitors each month. It’s a tiny sum compared to sites like Flickr but, Fiegl notes, users tend to be more selective when they need to develop and scan their photos. “Lomography is a niche,” he says. “From that perspective it’s a huge community.”

Lomography

The Diana F+

According to Lomography USA’s general manager Liad Cohen, Lomography benefits from blending online and live communities. Lomography’s website has sharing capabilities, and the stores host photography workshops and exhibitions. One such exhibition is a traveling world tour of a collection of vintage 1960s and ’70s “Diana” cameras (Lomography sells a model) amassed by the award-winning photographer Allan Detrich. The exhibit, which also features camera customizations by local artists at each stop it makes, returns to the U.S. on May 10 and will spend about a month in San Francisco before going on to Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago and New York City.

Fiegl theorizes that people who are interested in making art in a novel way want to do something unusual: “The younger the people are, the more they want to do analog,” he says. Lomography once considered selling a digital camera, but a survey of customers revealed that “Lomographers” were more interested in new analog cameras instead. And even if digital filters can achieve Lomography-like looks, Fiegl thinks that users who see themselves as artists, rather than snapshot-sharers, are drawn to his company because it encourages users to keep and come back to older work, whereas the streaming format favored by media platforms like Instagram makes it hard not to just look at what’s most recent.

Even though new customers often have to be taught how to load film and reminded that they can’t see the photos right away, Fiegl says that amateur photographers for whom digital is normal see something appealing in old-fashioned technology—and unlike larger and older photo brands, Lomography has grown alongside digital photography and has not had to struggle to reorient itself in that landscape.

“Maybe the technology is redundant,” says Fiegl, “but it’s opening up new possibilities.”

The Diana World Tour returns to the U.S. on May 10, opening at the Lomography Gallery Store in San Francisco. The show will then travel to Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago and New York. Information from past stops the show has made is available here, and more information about Lomography is available here.

TIME

Visual references of mother and child, at the cover shoot.

In one day, Schoeller photographed four families from across the country who practice this method of motherhood. Using religious images of the Madonna and Child as reference, Schoeller captured each mother breast-feeding her child or children. “When you think of breast-feeding, you think of mothers holding their children, which was impossible with some of these older kids,” Schoeller says. “I liked the idea of having the kids standing up to underline the point that this was an uncommon situation.”

The four mothers photographed by Schoeller were all familiar with The Baby Book but said they had adopted the parenting philosophy for their own reasons. For Grumet, the decision was a natural extension of how she had been raised; she was the daughter of attached parents, and her older sister practices the method as well. “I grew up this way and never thought about raising my kids differently,” she says.

While pregnant, Dionna Ford, who lives in Kansas City, Mo., watched a video of a British woman breast-feeding her 7-year-old daughter. Ford thought she could never do the same — until she discovered how difficult it was to wean her son off breast milk. “After six months, I decided I’d wait until he turned 1,” she says. “But after my baby turned a year old, he was still a baby — not talking, barely walking — and I wondered why I’d stop now.”

Capturing various attached parents — and their reasons for attachment parenting — was Schoeller’s biggest goal for the sitting. “It was important to show that there’s no stereotypical look for a mom who practices this kind of parenting,” Schoeller says.

MORE: Cover Story: The Man Who Remade Motherhood

Sarah Moon

Robert Delpire

Delpire’s transition from 23-year-old medical student to publisher came when he was asked to become editor-in-chief of the Maison de la Medicine’s cultural bulletin for its doctors. Delpire imagined the bulletin as a subscriber-based art review that would be richly illustrated, with a focus on photography. The first issue of Neuf (meaning both ‘new’ and ‘nine’) appeared in June 1950, and over the course of its run, would devote much of its content to photographic works by Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Izis (Israëlis Bidermanas), Willy Ronis and a young unknown artist, Robert Frank. Two of the issues were essentially monographs of Brassaï (Neuf #5) and Robert Frank (Neuf #7), which pointed toward Delpire’s interest in publishing books of photography.

Editions Delpire

Robert Frank's Les Américains, 1958

One link between many of Delpire’s publications would be his interest in anthropology, as could be seen when he switched to publishing monographs of photographers under the short-lived imprint Huit (Eight). Robert Doisneau’s Les Parisiens Tels Qu’ils Sont (Parisians As They Are, 1954), Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Les Danses à Bali (Dances in Bali, 1954) and George Rodger’s Le Village des Noubas (The Village of the Nubas, 1955) are studies in the documentary vein encapsulated in three small-format hardcover books that feel like case studies of mankind. In 1957, he created a small collection of books on culture called the Encyclopédie Essentielle, which included the first appearance of Robert Frank’s Les Américains (The Americans, 1958). That legendary magnum opus came across less as the beatnik road-trip as which it was later perceived, but instead with a particular anthropological flavor through texts—by literary luminaries such as Faulkner, de Beauvoir, Steinbeck and others—that Delpire positioned opposite Frank’s photographs.

Delpire’s career path has been as varied as the books he has published. Aside from the realm of photobooks, he has run a publicity agency with clients that included Citroën and L’Oréal, opened a gallery in Paris, produced a number of films including two by the photographer and filmmaker William Klein, created a creative studio and publishing house called Idéodis and became the first French publisher of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.

Photo Poche

A Photo Poche about the photographer Nadar.

In 1982 he was appointed by the French arts minister Jack Lang to be director of the Centre National de la Photographie, where he would organize exhibitions and create a collection of small pocket-sized books called the Photo Poche—the most successful series of photography monographs ever published. To date there are over 150 books in the collection, covering a wide range of photographic practices from the documentary-style traditions of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander to the fine arts of Duane Michals, Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon and Joel-Peter Witkin. Hardly any photographer’s bookcase is without a selection of these black-spine bound books.

Nevertheless, of all of his accomplishments, the name Delpire most conjures up his hand in the creation of books such as Josef Koudelka’s Gitans La Fin du Voyage (Gypsies – The End of the Voyage, 1975) and Exiles (1988), Cartier-Bresson’s D’une Chine à l’Autre (From One China to the Other, 1954) and Moscou (Moscow, 1955), Inge Morath’s Guerre à la Tristesse (War on Sadness, 1955) and De la Perse à l’Iran (From Persia to Iran, 1958), William Klein’s Tokyo (1964) and Indiens pas Morts (Indians not Dead, 1956) with photographs by Werner Bischof, Robert Frank, Pierre Verger.

Today, at 86, Delpire seems to sum up his accomplishments with a deceptively simple statement: “A publisher’s job is to showcase the work of others,” says Delpire. “It’s not just the work of a team; it requires deep mutual understanding. I’ve never published anyone who was of no interest to me.”

The Pace/MacGill Delpire tribute opens May 10 in New York City. Five simultaneous companion exhibitions across the city will expand on Delpire’s work.

Jeffrey Ladd is a photographer, writer, editor and founder of Errata Editions. Visit his blog here.

Lannoo Publishers

Moments Before the Flood

The decaying fortifications, much like the human response to rising ocean tides as examined by de Keyzer in his new book, Moments Before The Flood, are telling. They anticipate a massive threat, but cannot hope to prevent it: rising sea levels that would submerge entire countries in Europe present an overwhelming challenge to which most solutions are futile.

“Once it happens, not one system is going to stop it,” de Keyzer says of the potential results of global warming, which inspired him to begin the project as the media covered climate change with greater frequency. “How high can you build the walls, how much money can you spend on it?”

Although de Keyzer admits that the immediacy of the threat is debatable, the photographer’s compulsion to document what has amounted to more than 80,000 miles of European coastline stems from several motives: to observe life on the coast before it is swept away, examine what is being done to preserve it and underscore the tension that arises from an impending threat that overwhelms even the most ambitious attempts to stop it. Each individual picture displays a different mood and aspect of life by the sea—some desolate, some bucolic, but all foreboding when viewed together.

The project is remarkably thorough; de Keyzer describes working for several years with two assistants who would recommend seaside locations he should photograph, “pinning” thousands of different locations to Google Earth in each country, which the photographer would narrow down and enter into his GPS each time he arrived at a new location. He has been working on the project since 2007 and, to date, the project has taken him to more than 20 countries.

The book includes 200 images with nursery rhymes collected from children across Europe printed alongside the pictures to underscore the traditional notion of the shore as an enjoyable place, and thus one less prepared for the substantial danger of rising tides. De Keyzer’s approach to the project was inspired by the maritime paintings of the 18th century, which showed intense beauty paired with violent subject matter. Though the shipwrecks and sea battles are graphic and expressive, it is the context in which they are displayed that de Keyzer highlights for its dramatic tension. Often, the fearsome scenes hung in a placid living room, above a mantelpiece, or in a quiet museum gallery.

“It’s being neutralized. It becomes a commodity,” de Keyzer warns, speaking of the relationship between the decontextualized art and our reaction to the threat of rising tides. “That could mean that you no longer have to worry about it, because it’s there and it’s not real anymore.”

Moments Before The Flood is published by Lannoo, in conjunction with a waterfront exhibition in Ostend, Belgium, on view from May 17 – August 26. 

The series began in 2005, just before his son Seraphin was born. Two years later, his daughter Rubina was born. “The whole process of having children is such an interesting thing,” he says. “They have been very inspiring to follow, and to discover the world and landscapes together with.” The landscapes are often empty but sometimes dotted with a child. In the early pictures, the children are small elements in the larger frame and as the work moves forward through time, the children take precedence over their surroundings.

One of the most exciting aspects of Eskildsen’s process is the influence that bookmaking has had on his direction. Since the beginning of his career he has integrated the bookmaking form directly into his photography process.

As an MA student in Finland, he studied with Finnish masters, Pentti Sammallahti and Jyrki Parantainen. Under their mentorship he was amazed to discover the idea that the photographer could be in charge of the whole process of making the book: from layout to typography to binding to offset printing: “The main idea was that the book itself is the art object, and not a catalog for the exhibition prints.“

Over the next four years as an MA student, Eskildsen made his first two books by hand: Nordic Signs and Bluetide. After school he published iChickenMoon with an edition of 1,800. Most recently, The Roma Journeys—his brilliant book about the European ethnic groups known as Gypsies—was published by Steidl in 2007. “The book is a very flexible format. You can work on only one book or you can print it in an edition of 11,000. Both can be equally inspiring,” he says. “There is something in this whole process which is so magical and keeps challenging me.”

Those formative years in Finland inspired a slow and thoughtful approach to his work. “I like to allow myself to work over a span of years to have a kind of relationship with the work,” he says. “I feel almost that if it is too fast, you might not get to know the pictures before it’s over.” In Home Works in particular, Eskildsen is working very closely in tandem between making the pictures and then taking time to work on layouts and juxtapositions, and to re-edit and refine and then to continue shooting. He plans to give himself two more years to capture his newest home. In this process, he says, “the vision becomes clearer”: “One of the main things I learned is that the work is only half done when you have a lot of good pictures,” he says. “One has to spend a lot of time with these images, too, and work a lot with them.”

Eskildsen’s diligence is being recognized. Steidl plans to publish Home Works in 2015, along with American Realities—about poverty in America (a project originally commissioned for this magazine)—and a third edition of Roma Journeys, both planned for 2013, as well as a re-print of Nordic Signs for 2015.

Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based in Berlin. He is best known for his book The Roma Journeys (Steidl, 2007). More of his work can be seen here.

Stockbridge had been working on a project documenting the interiors of abandoned houses in Philadelphia when he first met the people who would become the subjects of the current project, the people who spend their days hanging out on Kensington Avenue. “I met some very interesting individuals that I had originally shied away from,” he says. “I just began going to the Avenue with my camera and photographs from my previous projects and introducing myself to people and talking to them about the avenue, and that’s when I started to get a sense of the environment.”

With both portraits and environmental photography, Stockbridge aims to capture the sense that a neighborhood like Kensington unites people, for better or worse, through the harsh realities of everyday life.

And Stockbridge says he has found that the people of Kensington are eager to share their stories. “The people I photograph are not trying to hide anything,” he says. “They know that everyone looking at them knows what they’re doing, whether they’re working as a prostitute or they’re selling drugs or they’re an addict.” And in the years he has been photographing them, Stockbridge has become much more comfortable on the Avenue—and the Avenue has become comfortable with him. People approach him when he shows up with a camera. “They usually ask me if I can take their picture too,” he says, “and say, ‘well, I got a story too.’”

One of the stories that “hits the nail on the head,” in Stockbridge’s words, is that of the two sisters “Tic-Tac and Tootsie,” pictured in the gallery above. The photographer says that the similarities and differences between the twins—the echoed hunches of their shoulders, the slight smile on only one face—highlight the contrasts inherent in life on the Avenue. The people in his photographs struggle and survive.

The project is the photographer’s first experience with pairing audio and visual recordings—both of which can be seen on the blog he maintains for the project—and he has also begun asking his subjects to write in a journal that he hopes to display alongside their photographs. He says that the collective history, as written and told by the residents of Kensington, is a necessary counterpart to his desire to use available light and chance meetings to communicate something about the human condition. Although the project now feels almost finished to Stockbridge, he says that it’s a topic that one could photograph forever—and that he may return, in a decade or so to see what has or hasn’t changed. “Every week there’s new people on the avenue,” he says.

And those people will, undoubtedly, have their own stories to tell, in their own voices. “I’m really just trying to show,” says Stockbridge. “I’m not trying to define. I’m just trying to say: ‘look.’”

Jeffrey Stockbridge is a Philadelphia-based photographer. See more of his work here.

That’s what photographer and videographer Shaul Schwarz aims to do with a new series of videos for TIME, debuting today with Schwarz’s visit to the home of author John Irving. “The environment sets you up to meet a person you already know,” says Schwarz.

The photographer asks his subjects what they do when they’re alone at home, really relaxing; for Irving, that question revealed a room devoted to wrestling, the author’s version of what Schwarz calls an “away-from-the-world zone.” Not that it’s automatically easier to access that intimacy when you meet a person in his own space. “Even if you have a new friend and you go to his home,” says Schwarz, “it takes a little bit to break the ice.” But when it does break, the end result is an intimate look at a celebrity, tending more toward a Sunday-morning-coffee-with-a-friend feel than a red carpet one.

“The location is, at the end of the day, some kind of reflection of the person. It’s all a vehicle to show a different look at the person,” says Schwarz. “We all know you can tell a little bit about a person from where he chooses to live.”

Read more about John Irving in this week’s issue of TIME: The Wrestler

Click here to see TIME’s archive stories about John Irving

Shaul Schwarz is an award winning photographer and filmmaker. Schwarz is represented by Reportage/Getty Images.

Simon, 37, had to find a lot of ways in for her new show, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, which is on view through Sept. 3 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City before moving to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The organizing principle for this project is what she calls bloodlines: all the living descendants, plus any living forebears, of a single man or woman who sets a story in motion. Traveling to 25 countries, Simon tracked down hundreds of family members bound together by not just genealogy but often some curious or painful fate.

Read more about Taryn Simon in this week’s issue of TIME: There Will Be Bloodlines

“I call them ‘men in black,’” said Morris, a contract photographer for TIME since 1990 (focused on politics since 2000) whose career has included everything from capturing the war in Chechnya and the designs of Chanel.

“If you’re assigned to the President, to me it’s one man in a suit and if you do this very long, it gets a little old. So it’s nice to turn away your camera from the President and look at what’s around him. And the Secret Service detail, it’s quite intriguing actually,” Morris said.

The intrigue around these agents tasked with protecting the nation’s leaders has grown in recent weeks to include a major sex scandal. More than half a dozen officers have been pushed out of the agency since the news broke over 12 agents allegedly hiring prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, during a mission to prepare the Caribbean city for a visit from President Barack Obama.

Morris said such behavior would be unimaginable for the elite cadre of agents he has encountered among the presidents’ immediate security detail, whose nearly every moment is consumed by the job.

For Morris and other White House photographers, there’s also a distinct advantage to this group of agents’ singular devotion to security. They make good subjects to photograph.

In slide nine, an agent traveling with President George W. Bush in 2004 mutely stares ahead sweating in a hot room, zeroed in on his task, unable to acknowledge Morris and the multiple clicks of his shutter.

“If I see a business man on the street, I can’t approach him with a camera and start photographing him without causing him to react a certain way, ” Morris said. “With the Secret Service they maintain their posture, they maintain their pose.”

Christopher Morris is a contract photographer for TIME and represented by VII. See more of his work here. 

What is real? What is unreal? In a world where reality and history can be recreated and manipulated to appear authentic in a photograph, it is imperative that we ask these questions. We, as a society inundated with visual culture, are trained to ponder the truth and meaning behind what we see—but what if a photograph was created to question reality? To question history? Stan Douglas creates images that catalyze critical analysis and force their viewers to revisit the scenes they depict. Douglas, in creating new images of scenes in history, ponders the truth within the medium of photography and the sociological issues that lie in the passages and stories illustrated in his photographs.

Based in Vancouver, Canada, Douglas approaches each image with epic, Hollywood-level production—tapping into his history as a maker of films and video. Demanding the most active viewer who questions, challenges and investigates all that he or she sees, each image is created to excruciating detail.

Linda Chinfen; Courtesy the artist

A production photograph depicting the lighting and building of the set of Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008.

Courtesy the artist

A 3-dimentional rendering Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008.

In producing Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008 (slide #4), Douglas built a set to recreate a scene of the actual intersection in Vancouver. The placement of the actors in the image was pre-envisioned in three-dimensional renderings to anticipate the actual photograph. Not one detail was left unnoticed—down to the products in the dressings of the windows and the scraps of paper that lie on the streets. The mural-sized image, which was composited from 50 different images from the same shoot, is one of four in his series Crowds & Riots. All the images in the series are large scale tableaux depicting vignettes from Vancouver’s history—reflecting on matters of the police, class and social order.

Gjon Mili / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Multiple exposure stroboscopic shot of actress and dancer Betty Bruce doing a routine for Broadway show High Kickers

In his series, Midcentury Studio, Douglas took on the identity of a photojournalist working between 1945 to 1951 (a selection of this work is represented by slides #6 – #9 in the gallery above). Inspired by imagery from this time, Douglas created images that discuss the decisive moment in photography—as Henri Cartier-Bresson explained, the exact moment that the photographer makes the photograph by firing the shutter of the camera—that very moment which is creative. Unfolding on Cartier-Bresson’s expression, Douglas constructed and carefully created these scenes to capture this experience and illustrate the scrupulous amount of information and action that lies in each frame of a photograph. In Dancer II, 1950, 2010, Douglas created an image similar to one from our own archive shot by famed photographer Gjon Mili for LIFE Magazine.

In Douglas’s most recent series, Disco Angola, most recently shown at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City in April, he once again approaches the identity of a photojournalist. This time, he is one who travels between New York City and Angola in the 1970s. Each image in the series utilizes the nature of body language as insight into the historical moment—from the pensive waiting of the Portugese colonialist awaiting evcuation (Exodus, 1975, 2012), to the interracial-intercultural array of dancing people (Club Versailles, 1974, 2012), to the group of rebel fighters performing capoeira, the Brazilian martial art that originated in Angola (Capoeira, 1974, 2012). Disco, a source of escapism for New Yorkers from the nearly bankrupt city at the time, traces its roots to Africa. Connecting these two seemingly disparate places, separated by thousands of miles of ocean and cultural-political borders, Douglas traces subtle parallels between New York’s struggles and the emerging Angolan liberation fight for independence from Portugal—one which would ultimately lead to a decades-long civil war.

Douglas’s series Midcentury Studio is currently on view at Victoria Miro Gallery in London through May 26, 2012. More information about the Infinity Awards can be found here.

“The thing that interested me most is that the myth carries on even though there’s huge evidence that Butch Cassidy and Sundance didn’t die there,” he says. “People still tell the stories.”

Ballon first heard the story last summer. The photographer is half Bolivian and travels to the country every year to see his family, so he keeps an eye on news out of Bolivia. He read a film was being made about the legend—that Cassidy and Sundance ended up in San Vicente at the tail end of a streak through South America that began May 1, 1905, when they left their ranch in Argentina to escape the Pinkerton detectives on their trail, that they robbed the payroll of the silver-mining company that owns San Vicente and were killed in a shoot-out shortly after—and was intrigued by the tourists who will make an arduous trip to a distant town despite the fact that the town’s claim to fame is tenuous.

The blur of fact and fiction is the open secret of San Vicente. A grave said to be Cassidy’s was exhumed and DNA tests proved once and for all that it was a different man’s body. In reality, though the outlaws passed through the town, they probably died many years later, in North America. Ballon says that perhaps they encouraged the myth of their deaths as a way to disappear and leave their criminal lives behind.

That sense of mystery and myth informed the pictures that Ballon made: landscapes that create a sense of atmosphere and still lifes that add character, specific and ambiguous at the same time.

“It was about trying to create a sense of who they were and where they were, because that’s what I know. They were there and they traveled these trails and they spent this time in Bolivia,” says Ballon. The photographer trekked the trails where Butch Cassidy would have ridden and rode the same trains. The rock formations, eerie and barren, look just as they would have looked over a century ago, when the Sundance Kid first saw them. And the sense of isolation is magnified because—appropriately enough—there is no one there.

“The project for me was not about creating a factual document of what actually happened, because there are so many versions of what happened,” says Ballon. “That was the strength of the project for me: all the mystery behind that, the fact that everyone has a story to tell.”

Nick Ballon is a London-based photographer. See more of his work here.

Dawoud Bey

Smokey, 2002

The impetus for Harlem USA, which was made throughout the 1970s, was Bey’s visit to the Harlem on my Mind show at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969; it took him ten years to start and finish the work. And although the images in the show don’t superficially resemble Bey’s later work—they are small, made with a handheld 35mm camera, impromptu and monochromatic, unlike the later work seen at right—the photographer says that the series contains the seeds of his later work. “They gave me my initial sense of how to engage people in front of the camera,” Bey told TIME in an email. “I first learned how to translate the physical experience of the human subject into compelling photographic form during the years I spent making pictures in Harlem.”

He is not the only one who sees the thread running through his work. Matthew Witkovsky, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, says that some artists show from their first work a strong sense of who they are and what they want to do. Bey, according to him, is one of those lucky people.

Dawoud Bey

A Boy in Front of the Loews 125th St. Movie Theatre, Harlem, NY, 1976

And Witkovsky says that the photographs, though they remain unchanged, are still fresh. “[Bey] managed to take that ability that cameras have to give you total specificity and imbue it with some kind of other-time-other-place quality,” he says, pointing out an example: in Bey’s picture of a boy outside a movie theater, seen at left, the clothes are quintessential 1970s but the pose is a classic contrapposto. “It’ll always be timely,” says Witkovsky, “because it’s a little bit out of time.”

Bey, who now lives in Chicago, says the photographs themselves are not the only constant. “My feelings about the work haven’t really changed,” he says. “I am still concerned with trying to make resonant photographs of ordinary people.”

Dawoud Bey is a Chicago-based photographer and professor. See more of his work here.

Dawoud Bey: Harlem USA will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from May 2 – Sept. 9. The Renaissance Society in Chicago will also present a retrospective of his work, entitled Picturing People, which includes the later work featured in this post, from May 13 – June 24.

Most poignant—if least conspicuous—are the sawtooth shadows extending from the southwest edge of Manhattan into the Hudson. The longest tooth of them all is cast by the new World Trade tower, which on April 30, the same day NASA released the image to TIME, once again became the tallest building in New York. The Empire State Building, which regained the crown on Sept. 11, 2001, now trails the new building—which stands at 1,271 ft. (387 m)—by 21 ft. (6.4 m). The World Trade tower will get much taller (and the shadow will get much longer) still, when it finally tops out at 1,776 ft. (541 m) sometime next year. The decade-old wound in lower Manhattan has not completely closed, but it’s close—and even from space, that healing shows.

Correction: an earlier version of this post identified the astronaut who took this photograph as Don Pettit.