We Are the Youth by Laurel Golio and Diana Scholl

I came across this project via LPV magazine, a good introduction to the work: http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/01/we-are-the-youth-by-laurel-golio-and-diana-scholl/

 We Are the Youth is a photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in the United States. Through photographic portraits and written interviews highlighting the participants’ voices, We Are the Youth captures the incredible diversity and uniqueness among the LGBT youth population.

Little Brown Mushroom Books

Yesterday, two books arrived at my doorstep from Alec Soth's book company, Little Brown Mushroom.
The first book/magazine Lonely Boy Mag, Alec Soth's Midwestern Exotica, was much more engaging than I expected, especially the series of photos from a dating website called Goth Scene. The second book,  Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar, include 60 c-prints, each book a bit different from the next. This book has an edition of only 500 with all proceeds going to Tsunami relief in Japan. If you haven't checked out the LBM website, now is the time.

Tim Hetherington's Video Diary

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington died today in Libya while covering the fighting between rebels and troops loyal to Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the has confirmed. Hetherington died after being hit by rocket fire in the city of Misrata. 
This is his video piece "Diary" from 2010: 'Diary' is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It's a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.
http://vimeo.com/18497543
Also, more of his photographs can be seen here: http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/news/Tim-Hetherington-Kil-2485.shtml

This goes out to all you photo book/zine dorks!

We would love to create a comprehensive map of all the best places to buy photobooks and zines around the world and so are asking for your help! Let us know where the best place to buy photography books and zines are near you. We will add them to the map with your comments and a thanks.

Dang, check out the work of Mark Powell

I am super busy this time of year, but when a friend sent me the link to Mark Powell's work, I knew I had to share. Besides the website being a bit of a beast to navigate and loud, oversized font, the pictures are surprising, funny and sad...I think you will agree.

Billy Maynard is 19.

I want to photograph a feeling I’ve had building inside since a young age. But without constructing any of the pictures deliberately. So far I have found this feeling is most often found in outsiders and fringe dwellers. I find myself more comfortable with outcasts. The feeling is growing bigger in me, so the pictures will follow. 

I love Ragnar Kjartansson's videos

Born into a family active in Iceland’s theatrical scene, Kjartansson, 33, likes to say he was conceived on the set of the nation’s first erotic thriller, Morðsaga, wherein his mother plays a lonely housewife and his father a plumber called to fix the dishwasher. (His conception took place the same month the love scene was filmed.) He would come home from school and sit in the darkened hall where his parents variously performed, wrote, and directed, listening to actors rehearse their lines. In Kjartansson, this repetitive toil of the stage struck unusually fertile ground. As a student at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts (he graduated in 2001), he was drawn to what he calls "performance loops" whose Beckett-like routines push toward the transcendent. 

Chris Jordan: Midway

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean.

For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.

Taliban by Thomas Dworzak

Fascinating project by Thomas Dworzak of the Taliban, a must see video:

Janet Biggs at the Mint Museum

After all the confused pomo ramblings and posturings of the 1980s and ’90s, it comes as something of a relief that a number of artists in the millennial years have gone back to classic existential themes. Chief among them is Janet Biggs, whose work documents individuals obsessed with attaining extreme states of being, mainly through athletic pursuits. Deceptively simple, her videos mostly alternate this documentary footage with shots of musicians performing the music heard as the sound track. In Vanishing Point, 2009, Leslie Porterfield, the world record holder for motorbike speed, races away as the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Gospel Choir sings work partly composed by Biggs herself. Duet, 2010, switches between a young violinist and singer performing an aria from the opera Lakmé and footage of the pit crews changing tires on NASCAR vehicles in the middle of a race—particularly apt for the exhibition’s home city of Charlotte, North Carolina, perhaps better known as a center for race cars, banking, and commerce than for the arts. And though we don’t see the musicians in the otherworldly Airs Above the Ground, 2007, their contribution forms an integral part in this collaboration with fourteen-year-old underwater dancer Deanna Mary de Simone, featured in the video.