At the time of his death, in a Libyan mortar strike in April of 2011, Tim Hetherington was one of the most well-known and respected conflict photographers working. This was due in part to his role as co-director on Restrepo, the 2010 documentary that followed the day-to-day life of an American platoon in Afghanistan in immediate, intimate detail.
     But Hetherington was entrenched in more than filmmaking, and more than Afghanistan’s fighting. His approach to photojournalism meant pushing the boundaries of image-making, and working across several types of new and digital media to build a more communicative message. But as grand a scale as he worked on, Hetherington’s project was always to immerse the viewer in an individual’s story. His larger body of work—photographing civil war in West Africa, a short film, portraits, interviews, and firsthand accounts of life in war zones—depends on that same depiction of the personal used so grippingly in Restrepo.
     The first major exhibition of Hetherington’s photographs, opening at the Yossi Milo Gallery in April, spans his short and extraordinary career. Protagonists appear from all sides, and at all moments in the day life. Liberian women juggle babies and handheld missiles. American soldiers sleep in one photo and wrestle in the next. Hetherington was adept at catching the beauty of these terrains and the bleakness of a war zone in the same frame. This makes for compositions both aesthetically gorgeous and emotionally volatile, and a collection of work that offers as many moments of peace as it does conflict. Hetherington’s legacy will be his gift of seeing the whole picture.

Slideshow

For two consecutive summers, photographer Cass Bird visited Sassafras, Tennessee with a group of beautiful, masculine young women from New York City. She brought along party dresses and tutus, and asked the women to forego cutting their hair in the months leading up to the second summer’s shoot. Rewilding, Bird’s new book, is the photographic story of these summers – an inquiry into and observation of the broadening paradigms through which we understand gender. The photographs in Rewilding are intriguing; they evoke a sense of the ethereal while exploring the spaces beyond the generally accepted confines of masculinity and femininity.
     As with all of Bird’s work, Rewilding’s depth is uncontrived, its beauty authentic. Bird will be at the Lead Apron in Los Angeles on March 15 and at Dashwood Books in New York City on March 22.

In the introduction to the book, Jack Halberstam writes about how you depict gender as contrast. What do you think of this idea?
I had actually never thought about it in those terms. I think that gender is expressed as a contrast, and I am curious about how that contrast or that divide fades away at times. There’s a hetero concept where if you put a masculine girl into a hetero-dress, she’ll be cured of her masculine nature. But it actually does the opposite: if you stick a masculine girl in a tutu or a dress, she looks even more masculine.

Slideshow
 

Richard Renaldi has had quite a career. His first book Figure and Ground was published by the Aperture Foundation and since then he has been included in shows at the ICP and the Yossi Milo gallery. Naturally an extrovert and fascinated by people– “I’m the youngest of five from an Italian-American family,” he tells PLANET– Renaldi has documented a vast and colorful array of subjects from sexual minorities to civilians from small suburban towns such as Fall River, Massachusetts.
     Renaldi’s work is consistently from a poignant and respectful perspective and is often humanistically humorous. Bus Travelers likewise embodies these trademark characteristics that is prominent in Renaldi’s work. These attributes are not only results of Renaldi’s character but also due to his choice of medium. Working with a large-format 8 x 10 camera, also Richard Avedon’s choice of medium for creating In The American West, the slow and meticulous process of photographing the subjects require the cooperation and patience of both the photographer and subject.

Slideshow

Despite a cold and rainy night, the Yossi Milo Gallery was barely navigable at the opening for First Look, the inaugural show in the gallery’s new space. A group exhibition of photographers whose first solo shows in New York were presented at Yossi Milo, First Look brings together disparate images in a way that highlights their similarities and elucidates their shared truths.
     Welcoming visitors to the gallery are two photographs by Pieter Hugo; in one a slum-dwelling Ghanaian girl clad in all white looks out from atop a gigantic mound of smoldering electronic waste, a bowl balanced on her head for the collection of valuable debris. Hanging opposite are three portraits of pink-lipped, primly dressed children taken by Loretta Lux. They are so wan their blue blood is almost visible beneath their skin, while their empty eyes render the images eerie, rather than the portraits of young idyll they may seem at first. This juxtaposition of Hugo’s and Lux’s images tempts the viewer to imagine that the girl on the garbage mound and the children in the portraits could look outside their frames to see each other across the room, and find some solace in their very different, yet equally terrifying worlds.

Slideshow

Lee Jeffries’ portraits of the homeless are neither documentary photography nor the kind of detached, quick-fire street photography practiced by artists like Weegee. Each photo begins as a conversation, in which Jeffries approaches a person living on the street and simply attempts to get to know him a little better. It’s an everyday gesture, but one that most people would never make—and one that informs the resulting portrait tremendously. Jeffries’ photos, with their lyrical surfaces and intimate framing, make for one of the medium’s most empathetic and affecting tributes to a group of people who remain either de-humanized or flat out invisible in the public discourse.
     Jeffries began the project in 2008, back when he still counted himself an amateur photographer, and since then has only expanded its reach. In addition to his native England, he’s shot the homeless populations of Rome, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, and, several times, Los Angeles. His first book of the portraits, Just Talkin’, is a non-profit publication that donates all its proceeds to charity. We spoke to Jeffries as he finishes his latest collection, a series on the homeless people of Miami.

Slideshow

Ghost Country is a haunting and romantic collection of images, collages and prose by Jordan Sullivan and jewelry designer Pamela Love. The book is a Memento Mori, containing 55 images with phrases such as, “Paradise is a deadman’s town”, painstakingly tracing a past that is lost and a future no where to be found. The book was born organically during a trip to New Mexico where Love was researching silver mines. Sullivan tells PLANET the two found similarity in Love’s jewelry and Sullivan’s work which naturally led them to create Ghost Country. He reflects on the process of editing and says, “It was as if seeing the past and the future at once. I realized so much of them had to do with love and death and this sort of broken portrait of America started coming together.”
     Surprisingly, Sullivan was originally a painter and the only photographs he had been exposed to as a child consisted of photographs from National Geographic and “a few pornographic shots stolen by a friend”. Now an artist in his own right, Sullivan’s solo show combining sculpture, collage and photography titled, A Room Forever will open at UTRECT/NOW IDeA gallery in Tokyo this April. Also a curator, his first group show titled, The Wild & The Innocent, will be on view next month at Clic Gallery in NYC featuring Agnes Thor, Todd Jordan, and Brea Souders among others.

Slideshow

Husband and wife Neil Krug and Joni Harbeck have given birth to a poignant ballad of imagery that incorporates both psychedelia and spirituality. Pulp Art Book is an examination of societal life during the 1960’s and 70’s as well as a stylistic homage to B movies and Spaghetti Westerns. Krug has drawn attention in recent years for his commercial work with the likes of Ladytron, The Horrors, and Devendra Barnhart, while model Joni Harbeck has been a muse to many and is the heroine of the print trilogy. We asked the two Kansas natives to share what Pulp Art Book is all about. 


Tell us about Pulp Art Book: Volume Two. Is there a specific story line?

Volume Two introduces a bunch of new characters and vignettes that we’ve been working on for years. It also follows the same format as the previous volume in size and similar in page count. We’ve always wanted the books to sit nicely together as a collection. 
     When Joni and I put together the themes for the shoots we almost always incorporate a storyline, even if it’s loose one. For us, it makes the experience of viewing the material more enjoyable for the collector. That being said, sometimes we just shoot something that has no meaning whatsoever, so it depends on our mood, too.

Slideshow

For Julien Langendorff, the seventies never really went away—heavy metal, spiritism, violence-tinged pornography, and a growing consciousness of the world outside the body are all still pressing concerns. Langendorff’s imagery comes from the far-reaching, contradictory world of 1970s subculture, mixing psychedelia’s rainbows and galaxies with BDSM pinups. However, the minimal collages often employ just two photographs, torn and joined in exactly the right place to create a precise juxtaposition. A sculpted angel and a porn actress mirror each other’s poses perfectly. A skull and a planet, exactly the same size, orbit each other. Body parts are replaced with clouds of stars.
     The visual rhythms serve as a greater force that holistically links the small and the large, the physical and the spiritual. Langendorff leaves his edges ragged and his placement on the page seemingly haphazard, in order to present his work as low-key and handmade: the result of a momentary idea, an unremarkable and entirely organic occurrence. These images, he posits, are more relevant and interconnected than we think. With almost Zen-like composure, the work suggests that no group of concerns, no aesthetic, could possibly intrigue so many people and still be considered “counterculture.” His show Goddess Fuzz Fantasy will open at agnès b. Galerie Boutique on February 11th.

Slidehsow