As the Olympic games descend on London this month – an event Londoners will likely meet with ambivalence, agitation and hopefully just a little bit of excitement – the Photographer’s Gallery will launch an outdoor exhibit celebrating the city’s rich ethnic composition. London has the kind of polyphony of culture to rival Astoria, Queens; that’s 300 languages spoken and more than 50 non-British communities contributing to it’s ever expanding cultural make-up.

The Photographer’s Gallery has commissioned 204 international photographers to portrait London’s émigré community – residents born in each of the 204 countries competing in the Olympic and Paralympic games that now call London home. Emerging photographers will feature alongside established names such as Toby Glanville, Anders Petersen, Jim Goldberg, Rankin, Stefan Ruiz, Dryden Goodwin, Karen Knorr and Catherine Yass. The entry for British-born resident is a portrait of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, photographed by Andres Serrano a year before his death in February 2010.

The photographs can be viewed in East London’s Victoria Park from 27th July – 10th August.

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To what extent does your environment define who you end up becoming? In the case of Michael Kiwanuka, this extent would be large. The British folk-soul-jazz singer/songwriter, who is in his mid-twenties, is a product of the affluent Muswell Hill neighborhood in North London, by way of Ugandan parents. He sounds, however, like he’s a senior citizen who grew up in the bowels of Middle America. Terry Callier, Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, these are some of the names being thrown around when speaking about Kiwanuka’s debut full-length Home Again.

Brushed drums, super-crisp strings, and immaculate woodwinds are the ingredients in the concoction that is Home Again. Over-polished to perfection under the Band Of Bees’ Paul Butler’s production chops Kiwanuka’s vintage tones deliver primarily neutral sentiments far away from the pain and suffering of his main vocal idol, Otis Redding. But then, Muswell Hill doesn’t give you a lot to worry about. It does, however, give you a lot of rope to experience different kinds of music.

“Muswell Hill is a middle class, predominantly white area,” says the ever-affable Kiwanuka. “What I would listen to would be different if I grew up somewhere else. I don’t know if I would ever listen to Dylan or the Beatles if I grew up in Hackney in East London.

Alison Klayman began making a documentary on Ai Weiwei in 2008, at what must have seemed like a summit of notoriety for the artist. He was in the middle of the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project, an attempt to uncover the death toll from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which the Chinese government refused to name. He had just designed the groundbreaking Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium and immediately denounced the Beijing Olympics in the international press. He had been an opponent of the state for years, with his explicit underground artwork and interest in Western ideas; now he willingly became an open target.

And this is all years before Ai’s infamous 81-day incarceration. Part of what makes “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” so compelling is that the artist’s life—or at least the narrative that Klayman has extracted—seemingly never stops revving up. As a young man Ai railed against an oppressive cultural heritage in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and the Study of Perspective series. He has become more preoccupied with the present in his later career, waging campaigns against the earthquake secrecy and the jailing of Chinese activist Tan Zuoren with dogged endurance. Integral in his mobilizing efforts are his website and Twitter account, which give off an energy and inspiration that “Never Sorry” makes palpable. For dissidents, the young, and any Chinese citizen unwilling to ignore the rest of the world, Ai is a vital figure.

At seven and a half months pregnant, Candy Kennedy and her partner left the sandy desserts of Dubai for the Cape Flats in South Africa. The Cape Flats are notorious as the home of the infamous South African gangs, as a result making it one of the unsafest parts of the world. “Originally the apartheid’s dumping ground” as Kennedy describes, the Cape Flats became home to the “coloured” by force in the 1950’s. Most gang members in the region are mixed in race and range from black, Khoisan, Malay and South Indian ancestry. There are some exceptions however, such as “Whitey”, a caucasian gang member Kennedy met during her journey. These men and women are mostly from dysfunctional families and lack alternatives in terms of career. Becoming a gang member becomes a vital part of their identity, much like the Yakuzas of Japan. The most notorious gangs are referred to as the 26s, 27s, and 28s and are highly organized and controlled from within prison cells. The gangs have their own code of honor and as an ex-gang member described to Kennedy, for the youth it is similar to“joining the army or entering a university”. Most steal and commit crimes to hang around unlicensed, speak easy bars called “Shebeens” and to buy their next fix of “Tik”– the street name for methamphetamine, which provides them with confidence and a sense of being invincible.

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The Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market is teaming with the artsy kids of 3rd Ward for Member Made @ Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market, a one-off specialty market featuring merchandise made by New York City artisans. 3rd Ward is the DIYer’s most invaluable resource in the city, a workspace that rents equipment to photographers, woodworkers, and metallurgists, and offers studio space for artists and classes for novices. Member Made rounds up the best of 3rd Ward’s member professionals, who are independent designers and business- owners in their own right. Among the furniture, clothing, home goods, jewelry, and lighting for purchase will be Stockpile Design’s furniture made out of repurposed ammunition, Let Love Reign’s socially conscious bags, and a plethora of handmade jewelry, utensils, and clothing from around the city.

Member Made @ HKFM will be open this Saturday and Sunday from 10 – 5 at 39th St, between 9th & 10th Avenues.

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We already know that green living means making houses that are smaller and more energy-efficient, reusing existing structures, and incorporating repurposed materials. The new book Small ECO Houses accepts these assumptions and adds a provocative new one to the mix: prefabrication. Most of the houses in this portfolio of outstanding new designs from around the world are mobile homes, or have been assembled from standard modules that were fabricated in a workshop and then delivered to the site. Yet they’ve been conceived with such refinement that it’s difficult to believe they weren’t custom-made.

In the United States, certainly, prefabricated houses carry a strong stigma. They’re considered shoddy and impermanent, a kind of shelter that’s more appropriate for emergency relief than real living. Now designers are looking more closely at prefabrication as a way to control costs and quality by employing highly skilled craftspeople to build on a larger scale in a controlled, studio environment. And designers are bringing a broader, more sensuous palette of materials to the task. There are no white corrugated aluminum panels or flapping screen doors here. Instead, the modestly-sized structures pictured in the book are clad with wood boards, steel panels and rough brick that will weather naturally over years. And the structures are finished with a layer of details — awnings, railings copings — that add sophistication.

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If Heaven is any indication, the members of Pomegranates play an average of eight instruments each. You can pick them out in a kind of parlor game for music geeks: there goes the razzy, feedback- heavy guitar solo, there go the bells, there go the rollicking drum lines and plinky cadenzas on piano. There goes a singer whose syrupy falsetto makes you wonder if he studied with Antony. There go three anthems – “Pass Away,” “Sister” and “Ezekiel” – whose brashness barely connects with the syrupy ballads that follow. Given this variety, you wonder if the band, which takes great pains to use every part of their buffalo, is eclectic or just indecisive. By cobbling together the hallmarks of a hundred different song structures, they managed to create an album that’s less a statement than a showcase. In that light, it’s best to look at Heaven as a kind of musical sample platter – one that, for better or worse, eschews the needs of a narrative.

After almost 25 years of being one of Holland’s most interesting portraitists, photographer Rineke Dijkstra is getting her major mid-career survey in America. After premiering at SFMOMA, Rineke Dijkstra: A Restrospective comes to the Guggenheim this summer, showcasing Dijkstra’s elegant light touch and acute eye for emotional currents. Though she’s searched for unguarded moments in adult subjects, most notably in mothers post-delivery, Dijsktra’s long-standing topic has been youth. In portraits of children and teenagers at parks, dance clubs, and beaches she gleans the earnest, half-formed quality that lies behind any posture or pose of adolescence. Her subjects stand without accoutrements or really much in the way of background, but each photo achieves a beautiful balance between delicate color and light effects, and the glowing openness of the face in the frame.

Dijkstra’s other exploration of the young—the one that’s garnered her the most attention—is an epic time-lapse method. The Almerisa series, which began in 1994 and continues today, comprises eleven photos of a young Bosnian refugee taken once every 1 – 2 years. The series begins with Almerisa at age 6 and its latest installment, taken in 2008, includes Almerisa’s own baby.

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A city that has often been referred to as “the old New York,” Berlin is a place where free spirits migrate to claim as their home, where creativity flourishes, and where reinvention rules. Old apartments from DDR Germany are now used as nightclubs, which tell of East Berlin’s transition from communism to democracy. Like so many others, Niclas Heikkinen, a Belgium native, fell in love with Berlin and the people he encountered there. Ann, a charming transgender model; Suzana, a wild and enigmatic character, full of confidence and wonder; and Paul, one of countless earnest young men comfortable in his own skin. Heikkinen tells PLANET, “Each chance encounter was something I wouldn’t have ever imagined. It’s beautiful when such unexpected friendships form and become such an integral part of your life.” PLANET is pleased to present portraits from Heikkinen’s ongoing series on these free spirits and their vibrant souls, which are what make Berlin such an enchanting city.

Forever traveling, Heikkinen envisions a road trip across the U.S. with stopovers at barn dances and rodeos as his next trip. In the meantime he keeps busy working with cutting-edge fashion brands like Neil Barrett, who will release a Heikkinen-helmed short film this year.

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Some of the most essential life forms on the planet are microorganisms that we know virtually nothing about. Phytoplankton and zooplankton comprise the bottom of the food chain in ocean ecosystems and play vital roles in regulating the Earth’s climate. But with that climate rapidly warming, these building blocks of the sea are disappearing at a rate of about 1% per year. Studying them and collecting samples of organisms that in many cases have never been seen before was the idea behind the two-and-a-half year journey around the globe by the Tara Oceans, a 118-foot schooner with an onboard crew of researchers, which came to an end in Lorient, France in March. (We first reported this incredible story earlier this year.)

The ten-year process to analyze the samples is now in its beginning stages, while future missions by Tara Expeditions are being planned. Next year, the crew will visit the Arctic to create a new inventory of biodiversity there, and in 2014 they’ll head to the Pacific Ocean to study coral reefs, including visits to South Asia, which the recent voyage failed to reach. For now, we can simply marvel at the stunning fruits of Tara’s labors so far with previously unimaginable visions of plankton, protozoa, and crustaceans from deep in the world’s oceans.

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