Malwine Rafalski is a German photographer based in Cologne. She began studying photography only six years ago, and has worked as a freelance photographer since graduating last year. Her work focuses on the edges of society, the fringes of civilized communities. She has photographed gypsy populations outside of Bucharest; young, single mothers in their homes in Germany; and in her most recent project, Holon, she photographs forest-dwelling communities that have rejected today’s mechanized society for a utopian vision of communion with the natural world. She answered via email a few of our questions about her work and these mysterious off-grid lives.

What does “holon” mean?
The term holon describes something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. Each holon has two tendencies: to exist as an autonomous, self-reliant unit and to be also an integral and dependent part in sub-ordination to controls on higher levels. It is a system (or phenomenon) which is an evolving self-organizing dissipative structure, composed of other holons, whose structures exist at a balance point between chaos and order. It is more a scientific term, but it describes the people of my series perfectly.
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In mathematics, a strange attractor occurs when a “trajectory of a graph seems to be attracted to certain point(s)/line(s)/plane(s) in a seemingly unpredictable manner,” explains Aki Sasamoto. Strange Attractors, her show in the Whitney Biennial, explores the question of whether one can experience this mathematical phenomenon in everyday life. How do we end up in certain places? Why are we drawn to certain things? Sasamoto asks, “Can I feel that math through my life?”
     During her performance, Sasamoto talks about her current fascinations — hemorrhoids, psychics, and doughnuts — as well as seemingly real-life experiences, such as ominous encounters with a series of psychics. As she speaks, she roams about her large, found-object installation, echoing the mathematical phenomenon that obsesses her.
     Observing Sasamoto’s performance is akin to running into a stranger who volunteers inappropriate personal information — intense discomfort arises as the artist describes, for example, her most recent hemorrhoid. In the case of the stranger, however, it’s relatively easy to excuse oneself; with Sasamoto, listeners feel compelled to linger in order to see where her trajectory will lead her.
     The specificity of the dates and times of her performances at the Biennial echo the mathematical theme: Sasamoto performs at 4pm only on dates that have a 6 or 9. Anyone interested in the mathematics of randomness has until the exhibit closes on May 30 to join Sasamoto on her occasionally discomfiting — yet often enlightening — exploration of this obscure mathematical principle.
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Christian Boltanski, the French artist who works in various media, has always resisted all but the most abstract interpretations of his work. His new exhibit, titled No Man’s Land, on view at the Park Avenue Armory deals with “human identity, memory, and loss”, according to the press release. Still, I couldn’t avoid the overwhelming feeling that this impressive and grandiose installation, with its 60,000 pieces of discarded clothing, is about the Holocaust.
    The exhibition was held earlier this year in Paris, in the Grand Palais. But the glass ceiling and the Art Noveau cuteness of the space negated the poignant effect of the exhibit. The Armory’s vast Wade Thomson Drill Hall, with its industrially grim ceiling, is cold and uninviting, which suits No Man’s Land well. Boltanski is much more famous in Europe than in the US, and while I had to wait in the ticket line in Paris, at the Armory I had the entire exhibition just about all to myself, which added to the experience.
    Upon entering the hall the viewer is greeted by a tall, wide wall of rusted tin boxes, each randomly numbered and illuminated from above. This unwelcoming structure invokes the systematic nature of the Holocaust, where Jews were exterminated with machine-like efficiency.
    Rounding the wall, the visitor is surprised by the spaciousness of the gigantic hall, successfully juxtaposed against the claustrophobia of the tin box wall. Thirty tons of discarded clothing lay on the wooden floor in a grid.
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Los Angeles-based designer/writer David Yoon transforms LA’s overwhelmingly expansive thoroughfares into more digestible streets in his blog, Narrow Streets: Los Angeles. The project — “a fantasy urban makeover” — began one Fourth of July weekend when Yoon was strolling along Montana Avenue and was struck by the sheer emptiness on the otherwise bustling five-lane road. Inspired by the narrow corridors of old Europe, Yoon took carefully framed photos of the street then went home and narrowed it down to a single lane in Photoshop. The result was “irresistible in its suddenly human scale” and the start of Narrow Streets: Los Angeles.
     Designed to provoke the viewer’s imagination, Narrow Streets emphasizes the importance of street design in dictating car speed, traffic, and ultimately our perception of urban environments. Through narrowing L.A.’s oversized streets, Yoon hopes “to re-calibrate people’s standard of space”, and in doing so “provoke people into re-examining their urban environments in a way that is immediately visual and visceral”. While Yoon considers Narrow Streets to be more fanciful than practical concept art, “the project has definitely struck a chord with people who are hungry for a city that’s less car-focused, less about being a place to plan getaways, and more about enjoying life on an everyday basis”. Narrow Streets may just be a pipe dream for Los Angeles, but it’s certainly redefining the way we view our vast city of asphalt.
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Though hardly a stranger in photography circles, Rosalind Solomon is gradually gaining prominence in the mainstream. After four decades trekking Japan, Guatemala, Peru, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Poland with a medium format point and shoot, the veteran photographer and recent octogenarian is being celebrated in New York in multiple ways. Her single-artist exhibition, RITUAL (now on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery through June), and the MoMA’s Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (taking place nearly twenty-five years after her first Ritual show at the MoMA) feature the artist in bold documentary form. Reflecting an ongoing theme in her work, RITUAL documents private meditation and communal rites binding people of various cultures. A humanist to the core, Solomon captures expressions sharpening the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
     Known for her window-into-the-world immediacy rendered via the use of square format and strobe lighting, Solomon’s work has often been likened to that of Diane Arbus (with both women’s penchant for deviant subject matter only augmenting the comparison — the former favoring battered baby dolls, the latter, society’s castoffs).
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As we grow more and more distressed by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s a good time to remember Newtown Creek, a similarly devastated body of water that runs right through Brooklyn and Queens. Once teeming with plant and animal life, the creek was polluted by decades of industrial dumping, and by the gradual leakage of 17 million gallons of oil from underground storage tanks. More than ninety-five acres of water and land were spoiled. Although a clean-up was undertaken in the 1990’s, the area remains too toxic for conventional development and was recently added to the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List.
     Brooklyn-based photographer Anthony Hamboussi traveled the length of the creek from 2001 to 2006 to compile Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York’s Industrial Waterway. His images poignantly capture the remains of what was once a thriving industrial culture. Waterfront plots are built up with factories, warehouses, silos,  smokestacks, and shipping piers, many abandoned and in disrepair. The creek itself is visible only in low, dark stretches, frozen in the winter and fetid in the summer. It looks more like a sewer than a natural body of water. Some factories along the shores remain active, but the only signs of natural life are weeds sprouting up through the paving.
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NEOZOON, a street art collective based in Paris and Berlin, forces us to confront the ways in which we relate to animals. The group’s initial project was to take discarded fur coats and cut them into animal shapes, which it pasted to city surfaces. The artwork was often site-specific. In Berlin, for example, the coats were recycled to look like bears, because of the city’s official mascot and the two bears who live in a small enclosure for public viewing in the middle of the city. The fur coat animals force the realization that the pelts were once the skins of living animals, and thus provoke consideration of the public’s celebration and simultaneous exploitation of the captive creatures. In Paris, the collective created a flock of fur-coat lambs that innocently meandered its way across city walls toward Parc de la Villette, which was the site of some of the largest slaughterhouses in 19th-century Europe.
     The latest project by NEOZOON is the non-toed fur-coatie: Pellicusia Urbana. Continuing the collective’s exploration of public attitudes toward captive animals, the non-toed fur-coaties are upcycled fur coats stuffed with moving machinery that creates an effect eerily similar to that of a living, breathing animal. Zoos in the German cities of Münster and Magdeberg have populated a few of their cages with the fur-coaties, complete with signs and descriptions. The fake creatures have also been spotted in public parks and playgrounds throughout Berlin.
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As a Seattle native, the photographer Eirik Johnson has been a life-long witness to the detrimental environmental effects of the logging and fishing industries in the Pacific Northwest. Sawdust Mountain, Johnson’s collection of photographs published by Aperture, is a simple, honest, and melancholy book which looks at the precariously intertwined relationships between these industries, the people who rely on them, and the way in which such machinations affect the natural world.
     Sawdust Mountain makes painfully clear the fragility of these industries’ dependence on natural resources while also evoking a sense of nostalgia for a fast-disappearing way of life. Viewed as a whole, the collection of photographs unveils the devastating uncertainty of the region’s future. Ultimately, these pictures make clear that fishing and logging are, at best, perilously sustainable. In this way, although Sawdust Mountain focuses on the Pacific Northwest, it speaks to global environmental issues.

Sawdust Mountain is on view through June 10 at Aperture Gallery in New York; the book is available at aperture.org.
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Jens Stoltze is a photographer and editor-in-chief of S Magazine, a fashion/erotica bi-annual out of Denmark with a strong creative nexus in New York. He recently exhibited this work at the Dactyl Foundation in New York City, following a personal and photographic sojourn in Brazil. The show comes down today, May 24, so this is your last chance to check it out in person. Those interested in obtaining a print can inquire via the gallery at www.dactyl.org.

Dactyl is located at 64 Grand Street.
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In light of the recent cloud of volcanic ash that stymied travel plans throughout Europe, many people might not be feeling so fondly toward the arctic region’s geographic particularities. Here to provide a counterpoint perspective is Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson, a native Icelander and member of the Explorers Club who has worked as a photographer for more than thirty years. In 1985 Sigurdsson established Arctic-Images, a studio and graphic-work firm that pioneered the use of digital equipment in Iceland. His incredible ARCTIC IMAGES collection of photographs captures the awe-inspiring span of natural forms found in the arctic.
     Occasionally reminiscent of the best CGI in recent science fiction and fantasy films, the bizarre and magnificent landscapes captured by Sigurdsson provide a humbling view of our planet: what human forms and structures appear in his photographs are shadowed in comparison to the expansive arctic sky, looming glaciers, mountain ranges and volcanic eruptions. The collection should remind those frustrated travelers that while we were all grounded under fluorescent airport lighting, the cause for the worldwide travel snarl was, in fact, simply and stunningly beautiful: Sigurdsson, as ever, was there to capture it for us.
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