David Vintiner is a British portrait photographer living in London. These portraits are from a personal project, Enthusiasts, which was selected for the Creative Review Photography Annual last year. He writes: ‘My Enthusiasts were shot on location at a model railway exhibition in Birmingham, England. In my photography I’m drawn to the subtlety of the everyday, in this case, passion for a hobby’.

The neutrality of the background allows us to focus on the differences between an apparently similar group of sitters. I chose to shoot each of these portraits with available light to create an intimacy and subtlety which draws the viewer in to each character, encouraging them to observe the personal detail’. [via Feature Shoot]

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Over the course of the past few months, I started to notice a theme arising in the archives of my own photography work: lone figures standing in the face of adversity, desolate landscapes, beauty, and so on. I recently started compiling some of my favorite images which fit this theme, while continuing to shoot with this in mind. I hope to exhibit this series within the coming year.

Wyatt Gallery is a person, not a place. I met Wyatt almost eight years ago through an ex-girlfriend. Since then, we have traveled all over the planet, photographing things (mostly natural disasters) together. Our first trip was to Sri Lanka in 2004 in the weeks following the Tsunami. Our most recent trip was just a few weeks ago when we went to Haiti.

Wyatt also did a great series of photographs in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Wyatt is a master at shooting landscape and architectural photography (two practices that few of our generation dabble in). Wyatt has also won just about every award that a professional photographer can win, including the PDN 30 award and a Fulbright grant.

Phillip Toledano, whom we mentioned a while back for the lyrical yet heartbreakingly honest photographic style in his Days with My Father project, is also capable of creating staged and fantastical imagery, as with his Hope&Fear series. In many cases, he combines the two sensibilities. In A New Kind of Beauty, Toledano documents plastic surgery patients, drawing out both their ethereal qualities as well as their tragic humanity.

Who wants to be famous? A lot of people, that’s for sure. And the first ones are the mothers of little American girls.
 High Glitz: The extravagant world of Child Beauty Pageants shows images of the children that take part in the different beauty contests around America, bursting as they are with extravagant haircuts, haute-couture dresses, false teeth and all the artificial beauty that you can imagine.

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Working out of Portland, Robbie Augspurger got his first camera for his twelfth birthday, held at Showbiz Pizza Place, where there were animatronic animals wearing suits and playing in a band. He didn’t immortalize that rare vision on film that night, but ever since he can remember, he was interested in taking pictures.

The work of New York-based photographer Manolo Campion draws from a broad spectrum of experiences, including formal training in photography from the Pasadena Art Center in California, and time spent living and working in London.

This photo series by Winkler and Noah captures children as puppets, creating a sense of hyper-reality where the protagonists of their portraits appear in a real context, but stand out from it as if highlighted by reality itself. Of the project, they says: ‘The Puppet Show came into being by chance, one late summer afternoon two and a half years ago, after a day at the sea with our granddaughter, Beatrice. We had the idea of photographing her together with her mother. Among the various pictures, there was one where she was alone, leaning with her back against our wardrobe and looking into the camera with an embarrassed smile. She had all the typical features of a doll: a round head, blond curls, blue eyes, tanned skin, a flowery dress’.

‘Almost as a joke, and with the subject’s agreement, we had the idea of turning her into a doll, to all effects. Then, during the months after taking the picture, we reflected a lot about what a photo of that kind could symbolise, and in general, about how much the media are able to manipulate children’s behaviour. From these first considerations, a sizeable project came into being, to which we have now dedicated more than two years work involving another 29 little protagonists’. See more photos in this series.

Born and raised in a small American farm town, Ryan Robinson is known for his witty and irreverent photography, which shows off his detail, composition and dynamic use of color.

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Dadadadaaaaa! Kids are superheroes. Only in adulthood do we lose our charm and imagination. Jan Von Holleben’s latest photographic series Dreams of Flying distills the preciousness and freedom of a childhood many of us are lucky to have had. Van Holleben created various action scenes on the ground and shot them from above to achieve an interesting balance of reality and make believe.

Davin Youngs has got something sweet going on. His pictures, as he calls them, are the of-the-moment kind. Y’know, the spontaneous, romantic, stylised yet amateurish thing photographers are doing these days. Like American Apparel, but lost in the woods or asleep on the toilet. I really appreciate it. What I appreciate less is Davin’s written and photographic portraits of his relationships with his closest friends and family members. It’s a nice concept, but I just see it stumbling drunk into a bush of self indulgence.

Tealia Ellis Ritter is one of many talented young photographers featuring in the new Flak Photo Email Issue. Flak Photo is our favourite photo-based website and blogzine and features work from an international community of photographers.

Photographer and web designer Jan Sochor was born in the Czech Republic but moves between South America and Europe often. Over the past five years he has lived and worked in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Spain, the Czech Republic. His photographic work ‘focuses on showing and documenting the Latin American continent, the everyday life, social and cultural issues’.

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