New York City-based photographer Alessandro Zuek Simonetti was born in Italy and grew up parallel to the urban street cultures of the early 90s. His own distinct photographic language reflects his deep interest in young niche cultures. Quite often, each project stretches beyond the photographic medium, which serves as a sign of his maturing expression as an artist.

SPONSOR

I met this kid Nick Brandreth about a year ago when I was lecturing to his RIT class during one of their visits to New York City. The kid is fearless and driven and an extreamly tallented young photographer. He’s definitely one of the bright young lights on the horizon. Him and I are actually working on a project together that documents High School greco Roman wrestlers. Nick also runs a very popular Bike blog called Trashbike where he indulges his passion for bike culture.

We asked New York-based photographer Mitchell Feinberg where he draws his inspiration from: ‘It can come from anywhere: a window display, a sculpture exhibit, even the basement of a hardware store. Sometimes I will have an old idea that takes many years to gel. Sometimes I’ll come up with something at the last minute. The Muse never tips her hat. As for still life photographs, Karl Blossfeldt’s plant studies, Steichen’s patterns for Stehli silks, and Mr. Penn’s still lifes stay with me, like old friends’. There’s an extensive interview with Feinberg on the Feature Shoot photography blog.

New York-based photographer Kathryn Parker Almanas has been published in American Photo Magazine, 25 Under 25 Up-and-Coming American Photographers, and The Photo Review, amongst many others, while exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia. Phew! Her still lifes of food, in particular, make me kinda hungry. Hmm, what I wouldn’t give right now for an endless buffet and a steaming cup of coffee.

I love the rich colours and sense of unrehearsed movement about the photography of New York-based, Anna Skladmann. She studied at Parsons School of Design before undertaking yearly internships at Annie Leibovitz’s studio and the Magnum Photo Agency.

SPONSOR

We asked New York photographer Christoph Morlinghaus about the process behind capturing one his of stunning architectural and interior shots: ‘More often than not my time at a certain location is extremely limited. For example, for the shots that I took at Terminal 5, there was no access before the shoot day and I had a very short time window between the construction crews finishing and cleaning the terminal and the TSA clearing it. So I just switched to autopilot, mounted my 8 x 10 on a dolly, and literally ran through the building and took pictures. Even if I have more time, I try to work as quickly as I can. When I spend too much time at a certain place, the images tend to be too pretentious and artsy’. There’s an exclusive interview with Christoph Morlinghaus on the Feature Shoot website.

New York photographer Kate Kunath’s series on rabbit breeders captures owners with their furry friends, looking every bit as possessive and enamored of their pointy eared pets as any slightly obsessive dog owner might be. Of the photo essay, she says: ‘I got my big break in 2004 at the American Rabbit Breeders Convention. I’m kidding, but there really is a Best in Show for bunnies every year, similar to the Westminster for dogs, without the high-brow. The first time I went to a show, I was really impressed by the rabbit breeders, so I returned the following year with a photo studio’.

‘The rabbit Standard of Perfection is attained through a regimen of breeding and selecting, much more rapidly than a dog breeder, for example. Which means that they are culling, a process of removing the undesirable genes from the pool, by way of killing the rabbits for food or fur, or giving them to pet stores to sell. It doesn’t sound very pleasant coming from me but the rabbit breeders have a very eloquent way of stating things when it comes to the cycle of life. They are also very professional, as one can see from their expressions. Even proud. Their rabbits as subjects took away some of the anxiety of having their own portraits done. The portrait studio I set up at the show was well attended. I did over 100 portraits in a week’s time’. There’s a full interview with Kate Kunath on the Feature Shoot website.

New York photographer Amy Stein’s work ‘explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment’. Her recently released book, Domesticated, began when she was in grad school. ‘I was simply trying to make compelling images that wouldn’t get eviscerated in critique’, she says of the project. ‘As the series progressed, I began to become interested in exhibiting the work and have had many opportunities to do so this year. The Critical Mass book is the icing on the cake’. There’s an extended interview with Amy Stein on the Feature Shoot photo blog.

James Rajotte’s photo series on Rochester’s East High School is a revealing insight into the parameters of ‘spatial relationships and the connotations of objects’. Of the work, he says: ‘My interest in photographing East came about as I was volunteering in a mentoring program in which students made short video productions with an anti-violent message. When I decided to photograph, I wrote a formal letter to the Superintendent and the Principal. After a bit of humming and hawing they made me East High School’s “official” photographer. They gave me a make-shift laminated pass and I became friendly with the security guards’. For an extended interview with James Rajotte, check out the Feature Shoot photo blog.

SPONSOR

Milos Radoicic was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he survived the gruesome war, and in 2003 left for Vancouver Canada, to study. He is now living in New York, studies finance, but also indulges his other passion — photography. ‘My focus has always been on street corners, telegraph poles, torn and shredded bits and pieces people fail to see as beautiful’, he says, ‘on things leftover and forgotten that to me seem to be telling a story’.

Jacqueline Di Milia grew up in America’s first mass produced suburbia, Levittown, New York. In Spring of 2005 she received a BFA in Photography from the School Of Visual Arts. After a few years of photo assisting with wide range of photographers, including Danielle Levitt and Cass Bird, she began shooting editorially in 2006. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and obsessively watches French New Wave films. We interviewed her recently.

What made you to start taking portraits?
‘I think it’s something that I was naturally drawn to. I’ve always watched tons of films, so I’m sure that had a large part to do with it. Photography just seemed more accessible, especially when I first got into it in High School. I plan to make a film at some point, but I see it as something that would be pieced together very slowly. It would maybe take five years to slowly collect small bits and in the end they could ideally work together’.

What is the shortest amount of time you were allotted to photograph a subject and who might that be and how did it work out?
‘When I was shooting Beautiful People for Paper magazine, I think that some people were shot in less than 15 minutes. There were an average of 12-16 portraits a day in a nine hour day. My head was definitely spinning. I’ve previously compared it to speed dating. The Beautiful People Issue, is a special situation though. For a solo portrait, I had less than a half hour to photograph a very famous musician from the 70s for a two or three page story. It had been planned that we would do it in an hour and a half and when I showed up, she and her crew were in a rush to get off to lunch so my time was cut down. The pictures were definitely not so good’.

What are three of your favorite locations to shoot?
‘Homes, outdoors, any place with great light and will allow some one to feel comfortable. My favourite shoots are ones where I can meet the subject where they live and simply follow them around for a day. I love it when I can shoot someone and it doesn’t feel like someone is just standing there for the sake of the photo, it makes everything very intimate’.

What camera do you use?
‘A Mamyia 645. An old boyfriend passed it on to me during college. I like it because you can easily strip down all the extra parts and it can turn into a very small, light weight medium format camera. Which is good because it keeps the camera from becoming too intrusive while trying to create a relaxed environment. If I could afford another camera I’d like to get my hands on a Mamiya 7′.

What photographers are you really loving right now?
‘I mostly pull away with inspiration from film makers like Godard, Polanski, and Ozon, to start with.
I love Heidi Slimane’s intimacy, Cass Bird’s energy, Will McBride’s My Sixties, Juergen Teller’s subjects and … I’m not sure where to end’.

Where has your work been seen?
‘Paper, Spin, Bust, Theme Magazine, Harpers Bazaar UK, and The Irish Times’.

You can see the subtle influence of Gregory Crewdson in this photo series — Psych Securities, LLC — of Brooklyn-based photographer, Gerald Edwards III. The work is not only visually stimulating, but also intellectually challenging, posing as many questions of the viewers as it does of the environment in which they were taken. We interviewed him recently and asked him what made him decide to embark on this ambitious project.
‘These photographs, and now subsequently sculptures, all started with Underground Military Bunker, Formerly Krystal’s Restaurant, Florida. I saw this completely benign closed down fast food restaurant, and it hit me like a brick that this was the total intersection of all of the thoughts about development, economics, and that feeding into the paranoid worlds of security and fear in this country today’.

‘Deciding to unleash the restructuring of the photograph, the manipulation, the compression of space, whatever you would like to call it, seemed to fit right in with the adapted and mis-read histories that each image contains. Being born in the middle of the 1980′s has really helped me to see that my relation to a concrete viewing of a photograph just has not made sense in the age of Atari to X-Box, CGI, Photoshop, and on. When you have the Iranians and AP journalists “enhancing” their photographs in order to show power, or Pfizer selling the dream world of perfect eternal erections, these techniques are worth exploring’.

Is the Oracle International headquarters part of this series?
‘Yes, definitely. This photograph starts to dive into the idea of places, or architectures being charged with certain healing or revelatory energies. Throughout history this is has drawn people to these sites through a fervent religiosity of pilgrimage, but now more and more in my head it seems as though the charged spaces of the post-industrial landscape have a repelling charge to the society that surrounds its boundaries. For instance, this photo is of Oracle’s Headquarters south of San Francisco lies in a corridor formerly deemed the world’s best climate, and now is home to more EPA Superfund sites than anywhere else in the country’.

Where did you find inspiration for this series?
‘Each individual photograph varies in its source, a great deal comes from the fragments of various documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. These often render a story that is open ended and up for mis-interpretation and interpolation which is perfect for enhancing the sensation of conspiracy and the tenuous clarity of history itself. I certainly try to read through a good deal of books like Ghost Wars, The Geography of Nowhere, Torture Taxi, Acid Dreams, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, and Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror in order to gain a more full picture and be able to imbue the photographs with awareness that will hopefully punch people who see these images. Finally, inspiration will come from seeing things as they are sit on the land, Psy Ops, Electro Magnetic Pulse Test in Marin Valley, CA, came from instantaneously seeing this cluster of isolated homes and feeling the obvious, that if an electro magnetic pulse were to destroy anything, it might this non-place’.

How has working for Gregory Crewdson influenced your work?
‘Certainly I have learned an infinite amount about camera work, and lighting on a cinematic scale, but the more subtle undercurrents of investing a great deal of time working out the machinations of one’s mind has made massive impression upon me. Such as the understanding that even when a photograph is pre-constructed in your mind, and the actualization of that image is not a singular, instantaneous moment, the transitory moments within that larger flow are completely critical, and magical’.

What is the most elaborate shoot you can recall and what did it entail?
‘Well recently I have begun photographing buildings being imploded with multiple large format cameras. Beyond arranging with the demolition companies months in advance, and the police who secure the perimeter of these places developing the shutter release has been very complicated. The trigger device is a text message sent to cell phones that are rigged to the camera’s shutter, and then in sync they expose the image. So far so good’.

Describe your working process when creating/dreaming up a new project.
‘I spend as much time surfing as possible, and I know that in that environment I am definitely most able to clear my brain, and become rhythmic with my own thought processes. So it is usually directly after being in the ocean, and re-engaging with the world, or internet or whoever, that the most radical thoughts will come’.

Sara Macel’s Nighttime series shot around Brooklyn, New York, reminds me of the movie, 200 Cigarettes. Much like the movie, her photos have an energy of anticipation – like showing up two hours before the party gets going and then walking home at 5am before the sunrise.
What made you decide to start photographing at night?
‘It began in Texas one night while I was driving around my hometown looking for photographs. I put on the song Nighttime by Big Star, which so perfectly captures the idea of being young and trapped in a small town. The project began as a series of landscapes of all the back alleys and parks and driveways I hung out in late at night when I was a teenager. It has since evolved into photographs of my current haunts in Brooklyn as well as photos of the people I see when I’m out at night’.

Do you carry a camera with you at all times or only when you have a purpose?
‘I pick and chose the nights I bring my camera out. Certain nights I go out for the sole purpose of taking pictures. Other times, I find myself walking around without it and then stumble upon some amazing scene and have literally run back home to grab my camera’.

What camera are you working with?
‘This project has all been shot with my Mamiya 7 Rangefinder’.

What are you hoping to find photographing in the wee hours?
‘I’m like a moth drawn to artificial light sources. Neon crosses, movie theater signs, porch lights. The nighttime changes how things look; it adds a sense of mystery to what would otherwise be a benign scene. In terms of the photographs of people at bars, I’m interested in how people act differently in the nighttime. They let their guards down a bit. Of course, the alcohol helps’.

What is your favorite time to shoot?
‘I love that twilight moment when it just gets dark and everything transforms, but it is still early enough to see traces of the day’.

Where has your work been seen?
‘The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Jen Bekman Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Nutopia Magazine, Vision Magazine, and American Photo college edition’.

SPONSOR

New York photographer Sarah Wilmer creates dark, nightmare-inducing photographs that have a strange sense of innocence about them. They’re like movie stills, a cross between Lost Highway and Pan’s Labyrinth. We interviewed her recently to get the inside word on the inspirations behind her work.
Your photos have a cinematic quality to them. What films (or other medium) would you consider to be influences? ‘I love the work of Dario Argento, Roman Polanski, David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Their films are so beautiful and interesting, I would say all of them have influenced me in one way or another’.

Where do most of your shoots take place?
‘In and around New York City’.

What is the most elaborate shoot you can recall and what did it entail?
‘There isn’t one shoot that stands out as being particularly elaborate. It’s like you have an idea, and you make it happen. It’s work and challenging and sure there are a lot of details to manage, but when you are excited and passionate. it’s all just part of the process’.

If you could photograph anyone, who would it be? And where?
‘I’d like to do a series of photos with Joanna Newsom in Iceland with local animals and children’.

Where has your work been seen?
‘I have had solo shows in New York City, Washington D.C. and Portland Oregon. I have been in group shows in New York City, Los Angeles, Portland Oregon, Tokyo, St.Louis and Washington D.C. My work has been published in V Magazine, Korean Vogue, Vision, Surface, Rolling Stone, Spin, PDN, Billboard, Marie Claire, XLR8R, Tennis, Spex, and Nomenus Quarterly, among others’.

Gregory Krum‘s series ‘Hard Times — Interiors Considering Varying Degrees of Failure’ reminds me of sneaking back into my high school and stalking the deserted halls while everyone else is in class. We caught up with the New York-based photographer to find out about his process and inspirations.
Many of your photographs have a trespassing feel to them. Is this intentional? ‘Sort of. Often there is a lot of effort to remove as much as possible any evidence of the camera, its optics or the feeling that someone was there taking a picture. For me, however, I wanted the camera to be very present. But it probably feels like trespassing because I generally was. It was not about asking for permission it was about ducking in, using a chair on a table as a tripod and making the picture while no one was looking’.

What inspired your Hard Times series?
‘I was really interested in two things at once, the sort of formal concern with the actual arrangement of objects and the palette of spaces and then exploring the delicate emotional stories carried within these interiors, especially ones that are caught off guard. This was the beginning of a search for the type of picture I wanted to make, but did not know what it should look like. I knew all the things I didn’t want it to be: cruel, heroic, sappy, clean, desolate, I was trying to find an antidote to the ironic and also to the documentary’.

It looks as though you have been working on this series for a number of years, are you constantly on the lookout for Interiors Considering Varying Degrees of Failure?
‘Yes, because it was not something that I could in any way create or research or even expect to find. It was not an investigation of, say, my friends’ homes, or a document of people living in a particular place. But for years I was really searching, although now I think the series is finished. The final pictures were made last summer in Sri Lanka, in a house that the writer Paul Bowles used to own. The current owner has a perfectly framed tattered flag, I guess from a previous boat or something named Hard Times’.

Do you carry your camera with you all the time or only when you have a specific project in mind?
‘I make most of my work while away from New York, so while traveling, I always have the camera with me. Recently, however, I have been focusing on more specific subjects, disparate things like dust in the air, a village in China, or devotional offerings in Indonesia, but all somehow related to the theme of arrangement and visual language. So now a lot of time is spent figuring out exactly what I will photograph and then I’ll go with the camera and do it’.

Part of the DIY glitterati, the Hamburger Eyes crew are finally getting some props in the publishing world after years of hustling San Francisco streets. Inside Burgerland is a look back at their photography zine, which humbly began as a stapled xerox five years ago. These guys only shoot in black and white with good ol’ fashion film. A style that they unabashedly prefer because ‘it’s cheap’. Their collection of photos are unsettling, subversive, dreamy, and illuminating.

In my Personal Vision class at the International Center of Photography, one of our first assignments was to photograph a classmate naked. I was paired up with a guy who wasn’t keen on the assignment (he ended up backing out due to moral issues), and the opportunity to photograph a stranger in the nude is yet to come up again. Yet! With that in mind, we interviewed New York-based, Chinese photographer Shen Wei about his series Almost Naked and how he gets through those awkward moments. Who are your subjects and how do you go about finding them? ‘Most of my subjects are strangers; very few are people I know. I find my subjects through many different methods, such as at social events, through friends, on the Internet, and by approaching them on location’.

How do you go about putting strangers at ease when photographing them? ‘It is a complicated process. Every one of my subjects is different. Everyone has their own interest in the situation. What I do is just try to have natural and comfortable communications with them. I see them as my new friends, not just models’.

Do you have specific ideas on how you want to photograph your subjects or do you let them lead the way? ‘I talk to my subjects before I start shooting. When we communicate well, often we just work together. I usually let my subjects do whatever they are comfortable with. I like the moment when emotion appears naturally’.

Has there ever been an occasion when you have felt uncomfortable photographing one of your subjects? ‘Of course, there are a few times, but I always manage to overcome the awkwardness’.

SPONSOR

I am immediately drawn to anything that reminds me of my childhood, so I was taken with this photo of Keren, a subject in Dina Kantor’s quirky and playful series, Finnish & Jewish. We caught up with her recently to discuss the photos. What made you embark on this series? ‘I began photographing the Jewish community in Finland a few years ago as a way to explore my heritage, but also to delve into the issues of making a portrait of a group of people. I also wanted to think more critically about how photography helps define our ideas of identity and community. My mother was born in Finland and emigrated to America as a child in 1947. Almost thirty years later, when she married my father, she converted to Judaism. I am not related to anyone in the community who I am photographing, though we share certain cultural characteristics’.

Is there something unexpected that you found all of your subjects have in common? ‘I’’ve photographed about 300 people, so it would be difficult to generalize and say that they had something besides the community walls in common. I guess they have themselves in common. The community is small enough that they all seem to know each other fairly well –even those people who live in other cities and many of them are related. Everyone was amazing –they were all incredibly nice and hospitable, and they seemed to be just as interested in learning about me as I was in learning about them. Many of my photo shoots turned into dinners and drinks and even a weekend away. I am lucky to have spent so much time getting to know such a remarkable group of people’.

Do you read photography blogs? ‘I do read a handful of blogs, but try to keep it to a minimum. If I read them all I’d never get any work done! Amy Stein and Cara Phillips are good friends, so I tend to check their blogs fairly regularly. Right now, I am helping my friend Kate, who started The Girl Project, with her blog. The Girl Project is an organization that gives teenage girls disposable cameras to photograph anything they like. The photographs are then collected and will be turned into an exhibition and a book. The Girl Project Blog is a great resource for teenage girls to get introduced to photography, and it showcases some of their amazing photographs’.

Are you working on a new project that you can talk about? ‘Honestly, I still have about 100 rolls of film from my last trip to Finland that I am working on, so I’’m not quite ready to move onto the next body of work yet. When Finnish & Jewish is published, I’’ll let you know about the next project!’

Albert Giordan is a New York-based photographer whose impressive client list references almost every big fashion house today. That means YSL, Alexander McQueen, and Armani, to name but a few. It’s little wonder then that they are lining up to work with him. The contrast, depth of detail and simplicity in his work combines to capture the beauty and strength in the form of the products he photographs.

As a teenager, Gregory Crewdson was part of a punk rock group called The Speedies, Park Slope rockers that hit the New York scene in the early 80s. Their hit song, Let Me Take Your Foto, proved to be prophetic for Crewdson. He is now one of the great modern photographers, who seems to picture things in his head and bring them to life. His new book, Beneath The Flowers, is an in-depth overview of the last five years of his work — which is dark, imaginative, mysterious, cinematic and always pushing the boundaries. Crewdson’s cinematic eye details loss and life-changing events in people’s lives. He is one of the few photographers out there who sets up his photoshoots like a film set, built from scratch to finish. They could be as simple as a man standing beside his car in the twilight or even a landscape portrait of a small urban American town. But Crewdson always manages to instill a sense of instability and uneasiness in you.