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If you follow world events at all, you can’t miss Kate Brooks’s photographs. You also might not want to look at them. When her book In the Light of Darkness: A Photographer’s Journey After 9/11 (Schilt Publishing, 2011) arrived at my doorstep, I braced myself. But what stands out most in these photographs — covering [...]

The first time you submerge underwater, you know you are in a different world. Sounds are muted and the blue wash of the water changes colors and contrast, blurring out anything that is too far away. You are in an intimate space, interacting only with your immediate environment, floating freely until your lungs beg for [...]

Words are tucked away at the back of Odyssey, Linda Connor’s most recent book of photographs, a series of 142 tri-tone plates published by Chronicle in 2008. Drawn from work spanning four decades, this book, which accompanied a traveling exhibition in 2009-2010, embodies the very deliberate nature of Connor’s approach. The spare listing of plate [...]

In a booth on a quiet side of the Flying Star Café in the small town of Bernalillo, New Mexico, I found Danny Lyon working on an old Mac Powerbook. His heavy grey wool Pendleton coat, thrown across the table, bore a black and red “OCCUPY” button pinned to its lapel. Lyon, now 70, began [...]

Rising up through Tibet’s Himalayas, the snow-covered peak of Mount Kailash glows as if illuminated from within, radiating a hallowed essence. The sacred site is one of hundreds around the world that Izu has photographed since 1979. His 14×20-inch large format, platinum/ palladium contact prints — among them, Egypt’s Step Pyramid, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Easter Island, Machu Picchu and the Mayan ruins — appear in Kenro Izu: A Thirty Year Retrospective (Nazraeli Press, 2010), his ninth and most recent book.

“It’s not my purpose to photograph the architecture,” Izu tells me from his studio in Rhinebeck, New York (www.kenroizu.com). “I’m trying to photograph the air surrounding it. I feel that the accumulation of prayers over thousands of years is embedded in the atmosphere.”

For the past 30 years, Jim Vecchi’s camera has helped him turn his gaze inward. “My artworks are a reflection of my ongoing search for meaning,” he says. “I rely on beauty and the act of seeing to explore, question and reinterpret the way that we perceive the world.” Vecchi’s photographs offer a way in. It’s as if his [...]

Larry Yust calls his composite images photographic elevations, a term that he says, “I invented, as far as I know.” Photographic elevations reference architectural elevations, which show how walls would appear if you could look anywhere at a building straight on. Elevations are drawn without perspective. Yust describes his photographic elevations as views which are not possible in nature because of [...]

Among the most compelling of Nicholas Nixon’s photographic series are the portraits of his close-knit family. Taken over four decades, these photographs explore long-committed relationships, the passage of time and enduring family connections. Nicholas Nixon: Family Album, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) through May 1, 2011, features more than 70 blackand- white portraits by one of the most celebrated American photographers of his generation.

I first met Maggie Steber in the 1980s at the Maine Photo Workshops. Passion and motivation are the secrets of her success in making photographs for magazines and newspapers around the world. All the big names are on the list: LIFE, The New Yorker, The New York Times…