The contemporary style they seem to be working in too often creates emotionless, sterile images, disconnected from any real human experience, but not here. Whether in groups or alone, the people on view seem lost in a very familiar kind of contemplation of nature. We all have felt that flash of loneliness and insignificance and wonderment, looking out at the majestic, slightly surreal vistas that only nature can present us with. It’s nice to know that contemporary photography can still document those feelings.

Photography by Inka and Niclas

Ryan McGinley: Grids / Animals
May 2nd – June 2nd 2012
Team Gallery

Animals
83 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013

Grids
47 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10013

Mark Borthwick: Fountains of Ardor
27 April – 24 May, 2012

Comme des Garçons
Linienstrasse 115
10178 Berlin

Jim Goldberg

Continuing its Postcards from America series (previous coverage here), Magnum has sent ten photographers to Rochester, New York, to create an visual archive of an American city. Rochester, former home of Kodak and in economic decline, seemed the ideal choice. Since each of the participating photographers possesses a very specific photographic style, House of Pictures (as they are calling this portrait) promises to be an expansive, and definitive, visual document of place in the midst of profound transformation. See the New Yorker’s interview with Alec Soth, here. Below, a selection of recent work.

Donovan Wylie

Alec Soth

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Paolo Pellegrin

From Doug Rickard’s terrific site American Suburb X, haunting portraits of Cambodian prisoners at Tuol Sleng taken soon before their execution by the Khmer Rouge (the images were published by Twin Palms in Killing Fields). What is most incredible and most terrifying about these images is the lack of emotion on most of the subjects’ faces. Since these images were taken for prison record keeping, their lack of affect might be taken as a form of resistance; perhaps the prisoners gave no quarter to their tormentors by denying them any permanent evidence of submission. But what if the prisoners didn’t view these photos as photos? Or the photographer as photographer? Perhaps their gazes show no affect because they didn’t imagine these images would ever really be seen. They ceased to be images and became simply information. What the images really show is a medium losing its traditional meaning, being stripped of its power as a mode of communication. Only when we can use these images for good, as way of showing, and preventing, atrocities, can any true power be regained.

But none does achieve the curiously moving balance between distance and empathy like Berlin-based photographer Tobias Zielony, who has spent the last few years hanging around the abandoned outskirts of Western industrialization, spending time with what during the Paris riots French president Sarkozy famously dubbed racaille – trash. The results show a different kind of youth, or rather the regular kind of youth, the one we tend to look away from and quicken our steps – disillusioned, bored, normal. But real people, who happened to be born into different circumstances than the academic middle class that we might be used to. It’s grand and honest work.

His latest series, Manitoba, documents the native indigenous youth in the Canadian province, lost between the two cultures of their ancestors and modern life. The photographs are on view at Berlin’s KOW gallery until April 15, with a presentation of the accompanying book published by the indefatigable Spector Books, at Motto on April 12.

Tobias Zielony: Manitoba

KOW Berlin
Brunnenstrasse 9
10119 Berlin

Photography by Tobias Zielony

IPF Book & Zine Fair
07 April 2012
10–16h

The Workers Club
51 – 55 Gertrude
St, Fitzroy, VIC 3065
Australia

Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits are impossible to pull away from. While her subjects range from park-goers and dancers to French Foreign Legion officers, they are all young, and they are all totally open. Dijkstra is unparalleled in her ability to capture the emotional flux of growing up. Each face that addresses her camera (always directly) projects an honesty of feeling, and a calmness, as if Dijkstra had captured them at the one moment of calm in their otherwise turbulent lives.

Dijkstra is currently the subject of a major retrospective at SFMOMA, which will arrive at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, this summer. This promises to be a stellar show.

For those who wish to learn more about her thinking and working methods, she will be talking this Saturday with Guggenheim curator Jennifer Blessing, on a discussion panel at AIPAD Photography Show.

Photography by Rineke Dijkstra

One of the best shows currently up in Chelsea, Paul Graham: The Present is a thrilling, engaging, and slightly frightening mediation on how we understand and experience day-to-day life in the city. Many pairs are hung near the floor of the gallery, which explicitly inserts the viewer into the scene pictured, and challenges the viewer to question how he or she experiences everyday travels through a bustling city.

Graham’s large-format photographs function in pairs, each showing the same location (outside a Citibank, or an office building), at different times. The lighting and composition of the images have a distinctly cinematic quality, and the poses could be staged, but the picture’s veracity never quite seems in question.

Graham’s photos are like portraits of the films we daydream our lives (and the lives of others) to be. They are our inner monologues, externalized, and as such are meditations on the role photography plays in how we construct our personal identities.

Paul Graham: The Present
On view until April 21st
The Pace Gallery
545 West 22nd Street
New York