To proclaim something ‘the first,’ or to fit it under any superlative as makers of internet today are wont to do, inevitably will ruffle some feathers. And in the photo world, few things are as contentious as the limits, definition, and assessment of street photography. On the one hand, the label may be used to elevate an ordinary snapshot taken within the public sphere into something that speaks more about the human condition at large. On the other, it may reduce an otherwise perfectly good ‘documentary’ photograph into something more specifically about a solipsistic pursuit.

For Street Week here at American Photo, we’re showcasing portfolios that push the traditional limits of the genre—images that are posed, made in suburbia, or rely heavily on artificial light. To me it seems that modern street photography doesn’t even necessarily need to be made on the streets to qualify. Notable series shot underground in the subways of New York by photographers Bruce Davidson and Christopher Morris are also kind of exemplary of the genre, suggesting that perhaps it’s more about an aesthetic sensibility, or an eye for thematic grit.

[Related: How Instagram Changed Street Photography]

Despite a definition so elusive, we humbly propose Paul Strand’s 1916 photograph titled “Blind,” as a reference point for the origin of street photography. The image was made in New York, a single exposure shot on a view camera, most likely the Adams Idento he used for much of that decade, which made 3¼ x 4¼ glass plate negatives. According to Anthony Montoya, the former Director/Curator of the Paul Strand Archive, Strand fixed a dummy lens to his camera, or what the MET (which now owns the only vintage platinum print of the image ever made) calls, a “prismatic” lens. This allowed him to photograph at a 90 degree angle from where he and his camera were faced and avoid being noticed, making “Blind” one of the earliest noted surreptitious images. Montoya says it’s not his most reproduced—that would be “Wall Street,” 1915—but it is arguably his most important because of how it prefigures his significant contribution to portraiture in years to come.

Surely, one must think, that by 1916, nearly 90 years after the inception of the medium, couldn’t there have been some other street photograph that predates? It seems so obvious and simple of an impulse—after all, the very first photograph ever made, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s “View from the Window at Le Gras,” c. 1826., is of a street, though it wasn’t made on the street. The photographs of Jacob Riis shot throughout New York slums in the 1880s definitely fit the aesthetic or thematic qualifier we mentioned before, but that body of work is much more unified and sustained and prefigures social documentary photography, which most agree stands apart from, though doesn’t necessarily exclude, street work. Then there is the question of Stieglitz and Atget, both of whom predate and are likely the best fracture points to our claim.

The reason we’ve chosen Paul Strand’s image is not because nothing dated earlier could qualify, it’s that his is among the earliest, most significant, and influential photographs that across form, content, and means of production best anticipates the development of street photography as we know it today. Strand’s desire to be invisible on the street and minimize the presence of the mechanical barrier between subject and photographer anticipates the two big points when the genre exploded—first with the development of compact and reliable take-me-anywhere 35mm cameras, and exponentially after with the advent of the utterly inconspicuous camera phone. The image challenges the idea that photography had to focus on conventional ideals of what’s beautiful, it is socially engaged with issue of poverty, but it is equally concerned with the forms, lines, and clean tonal fields of modernism. The interplay of visual and textual data within the frame, in a particularly self-referential way, anticipates similar juxtapositions, ironic or otherwise, that street photographers commonly use to this very day (note this image by Ruddy Roye made nearly a century after).

Finally, it seems pertinent to anoint an American photographer above others, not from a jingoistic impulse or to fulfill any supposed mandate from our publication title, but because, quite frankly, the genre is weaved into our very culture as one of the earliest modern open societies. Many, though not all, significant bodies of work in street photography—Frank, Winogrand, Levitt, Friedlander, Maier, Meyerowitz—were made in America because our culture has allowed it to cultivate and flourish. It would be foolish to discount the contributions of someone like Cartier-Bresson, but French culture is markedly different in that the nation has all but outlawed street photography for privacy concerns come this day and age. In contrast, over the last century, US courts have repeatedly ruled—in cases involving Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Arne Svenson, and others—that any reasonably expectation of privacy on the street, in the public sphere, may be violated not only for news gathering purposes, but for this very type of creative expression. Though it is controversial at times, street photography, as defined by the image above, has challenged us and brought new ideas into consciousness. If its point of conception, a century ago, is less than certain, what we can be sure of is the continued debate and excitement it will generate in the century to come.

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“It was a crazy piece of luck and I ran with it,” says Joel Meyerowitz. Fresh off a dream advertising job that in 1965 paid $29,000 for a week’s work, he and his wife at the time decided to run away to Europe for a year. For the young photographer, whose highly acclaimed career today spans more than five decades, “it was like giving myself a Guggenheim or a Fulbright.”

Over those twelve months driving daily, up, down and across the the continent with a Leica in his lap, Meyerowitz took thousands of pictures from inside of his car — “life along the roadside whizzing by at 60 miles per hour.” When he returned, he showed the work to John Szarkowski, the hugely influential Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who looked through a few hundred and said, “lets do a show.”

Now through the end of May, Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York is reviving European Trip: Photographs from the Car, the iconic and unconventional series which hasn’t been seen it its entirety since the 1968 debut. Meyerowitz spoke to American Photo via Skype from his studio in Tuscany this week about his intentions for heading abroad, manipulating his Leica behind the wheel of a car and exploring the risks and mysteries of the medium.

What do you mean when you call this your “first conceptual work”?
What had happened for me was that in 1964, I took a trip around America. Like so many of my generation we were in search of Robert Frank — to see the America of our moment. I think many of us had the same ambition to go on this quest because we saw that photography could really be a larger statement than just a couple of interesting photographs, that you might be able to say something about the time and the place you’re living in.

On that trip in ’64, I found myself shooting out the car window — I had a Volkswagen Bus with that big window up front — and everything seemed so immediate to me. As soon as you passed something, there was no going back. I made a bunch of those pictures and they stayed in my mind. So when I found myself going to Europe for a year spent sitting in a car, I thought to carry the Leica in my lap. When something happened outside the window, I just reached for it at a 1/1000th of a second.

After a few weeks of doing this on a regular basis, I had the sense that I was inside the camera, that the car was the camera obscura and I was in it looking out the window, which was a frame. I didn’t know what I was capturing, but I kind of accepted it as a phase that I could work in. If I carried the camera every day and every time I drove in the car I took pictures from that position, I’d make thousands of pictures. I thought out of those thousands of pictures, something would arise that was genuine. I didn’t invent shooting from the car, plenty of other photographers did it before me, but I don’t think anyone ever did it with that kind of intensity or focus. It was just a picture here or a picture there in passing.

Was it your plan to exhibit them as a series from the start?
No, I was just making the work because I was in the car and life was whizzing by and the only way to reach it in passing was to go, “click.” In a way it was like a gesture of recognition that there are things that fly by faster than we can really consider. They’re only pure instinct really. I didn’t see any of those pictures for a whole year because I was living in Europe and I wasn’t processing film. I was going on sheer faith that I was getting something.

When I came back to America, I processed all my film myself, I started making my contacts and then my prints, and I was on fire. Immediately I saw quirky images that were fragments. This is what was a conceptually interesting thing to me at the time. I kept on thinking to myself, only the camera can stop this stuff that’s flying by. It’s like the camera tears a fragment out of the continuum and that fragment, if you can fix it at 60 mph so that it’s frozen and sharp, is a very Modern concept — we live fragmented lives.

So here I was feeling the urge to be reaching for something that was passing by that I hardly understood. Instinct was telling me, ‘reach for this, reach for this.’ I didn’t have time to think about it and move around and strategize with it the way Cartier-Bresson might have done, or Robert Frank. It was a very from-the-gut kind of response. I think all of that made it seem like a conceptual practice to me at the time.

When you took your American journey, you were engaging with the Robert Frank narrative, the frontier narrative, the West. When you took your European trip, what was on your mind?
I was young enough to want to know something about myself in the world at large outside of my comfort zone. I wanted to go to a place where I didn’t speak the language, where I didn’t know the culture or the kinds of activities that went on or the significance of gesture, for example. You know, when you travel throughout America — you travel to Texas or Southern California or Minnesota — you’re recognized. Even though they’re regionally different and maybe even the jargon or the way of framing your ideas is slightly different because it’s a different state, nonetheless, you’re recognized because you’re an American. There’s a kind of consistency. But you take yourself and throw yourself into another culture, by living with Gypsies in Spain, lets say, as I did for six months during the trip, and everything is new. I really wanted to get away from my familiar tactics and my familiar understanding of the American system, the American way of life, to see what the rest of the world looked like and what it would teach me about myself. That’s the real adventure, to see how much you can change.

There’s a common critique of the American experience abroad; it’s thought of as shallow and superficial — ‘tapping on the glass,’ so to speak. Were you engaged with that idea, that this type of American ‘Grand Tour’ is thought of as touristic?
I certainly was aware the role that tourism plays and the kind of blindness that affects the short-term traveler where you see only the superficial, the surface of the place. The question for me was how do you get under? How can you peel away the seductive quality of the ancient history and drama of European life? They’ve been there for thousands of years with their temples and their myths and their regional beliefs, all of their interlocking cultural connections because so many warring tribes had moved back and forth across that continent. You could be as far south in Spain as I was and there was both Moorish and Greek and Italian influences. I mean, there they were, aqueducts from the Italians and also water systems from the Moors and the residue of Greek architecture. It’s astonishing to come across these things.

To struggle against that influence, the delights that history provides, to try to see what’s really there, required staying in place for a while. The six months in Spain grounded me because it helped me peel away the superficial things. And even though we were staying put, I was nonetheless driving every day and making these pictures. I felt that I was looking at the absurdity and the darkness of Spanish life seen through the filter of the Gypsies who consider themselves outsiders. In a way we were fortunate to have penetrated the culture and lived within it.

You made over 2000 exposures. You exhibited about 40 photographs. Still, there’s quite a bit repetition throughout and variation on the same themes — planes, trains, automobiles, big skies with a sliver of ground. I took this to be suggestive of life on the road, which can be very exciting, but also monotonous. Tell me a bit about composing the work and editing the final sequence.
If you’re a photographer, you can appreciate that the limitations are: you’re in a car, you’re traveling and you have to make the most of what you have. You have to deal with what’s out the window. You can’t wish for something. You’re always at a distance and I was drawn to that. It must be the landscape photographer in me that recognized something about scale and space out in the wilderness.

I remember coming back from the trip in ’64 and showing some of those pictures where I wasn’t on the street and I was driving through the open spaces of the West to Garry [Winogrand], who was my closest friend at the time. Garry didn’t get them. I showed them to John [Szarkowski] and John got them right away. He said to me: ‘you know, the sign of maturity for a young photographer is the willingness to step back instead of always pushing — the subject, the street — into the face of the viewer. There must be this willingness to look at things through their own way and trust that the reader would be interested enough in the photograph to actually take the trip in and read something small and far away.’

What John said validated the guttural impulse I was having to take these pictures from the car. He taught me to be willing to let the shutter fly. I came back to him after Europe with a few hundred of these and he was amazed; he turned to me and said, ‘let’s do a show.’

It was a kind of test: can a photograph hold up with that much openness in it? That much nothingness? Well-described but yet empty? The question is, why was that so appealing to me? I have two sides of my personality. I like to mix it up on the street, close in and complicated, but I also respond to things that are spacious, diminished and far away. It’s about trust and it’s risky, but I think the more you work with risk as a photographer, the closer you get to the mystery of the way the medium works. The more you’re willing to accept the risk of making a dumb picture, an empty picture, the closer you get to seeing just how expansive the medium of photography really is.

European Trip: Photographs from the Car is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York from April 18 – May 31, 2014

Eugene Reznik is a Brooklyn-based writer and photographer. He contributes at American Photo, Time LightBox, Animal New York and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @eugene_reznik.

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It’s always interesting to see photojournalists enter the domain of commercial photography and to discover how their styles translate within that radically different context. It can be stunning and seemingly natural of a transition, as Ben Lowy demonstrated through his relatively new standalone website for advertising work. It can also be surprising, as in the case of Eugene Richards, whose up-beat, though gritty campaign for an instant coffee brand lives on his website alongside devastating portfolios like “Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.” And sometimes, it can be controversial, like when a landscape by a war photographer ends up getting sold as stock through his commercial agent to a major arms manufacturer.

In the case of David Guttenfelder’s new black-and-white print campaign for the agency CP+B and the non-profit Mission 22, it just makes sense. Guttenfelder, who has spent much of the last 20 years covering conflict for the Associated Press and helped open the first western news bureau in North Korea, went freelance again recently and is back in the US shooting for National Geographic. Mission 22, which takes it’s name from the shocking statistic that 22 veterans of war take their own lives every single day, aims to raise awareness for struggles brought back by those who return from the combat zone.

[See also: Craig Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Portrait of PTSD]

There are now more army lives lost to suicide, often at their own homes, than on the battlefield. Guttenfelder went to those homes and shot a series of quiet domestic verticals which were overlaid with sobering text and remind of Ashley Gilbertson’s series “Bedrooms of the Fallen.” According to Adweek, they’ll be running this month in Fortune, Money and Esquire, as well as on billboards in four cities. See more at mission22.com.

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The numbers on Lucas Samaras’ CV are just staggering. Over the last five decades, the Greek artist has been the subject of over 100 solo exhibitions and seven career retrospectives, with his work included in over 40 public collections of the most indisputably important museums in the world. I have to admit though, I hadn’t heard of him until recently when, scanning photo exhibition listings, I spotted an installation shot for his current show (35th at Pace Gallery, May 2 – June 27, 2015) that looked absolutely nothing like any others. Were it not for his accolades, I guess, I may have been quick to write it of as just some trippy retro-digital “arty junk food” of the Carsten Höller variety. Perhaps different for the sake of being so, impenetrable, but ultimately just shiny and shallow. Once I stepped into the room though, it was another story.

There are 720 individual photographs on view in “Album 2,” but they’re all part of a single work. Small pigment prints are lined in a grid along three walls with a number of enlarged ones hanging overhead. Mostly they’re self-portraits, ranging from what appear to be old family photos to contemporary images showing his 79-year-old self. Virtually all are manipulated somehow, either through advance digital processes, crude Microsoft Paint-like effects, or in-camera techniques, filters, dyes, and mirrors with which Samaras established his early reputation as proto-Photoshop artist and kind of define his career-long probing of his psyche and identity through altered images.

The sheer volume of images is so overwhelming it’s impossible to allot any single one a decent amount of attention—further hampered by a mirrored cube-within-a-cube installed in the center of the room. Large, imposing, and situational, like a Donald Judd, the cube casts fragmented reflections of the art, audience, and itself, changing every second as you circumvent the space. But unlike Judd’s heavy metals, the glass creates a kind of hall of mirrors effect, a mise-en-abyme, or an infinitesimal non-space in the room’s core, which upon approach, makes one feel like they’ve fallen in, disintegrated, and become a part of the installation.

More than an artwork, Samaras has created a space for contemplation—of how we see ourselves and others, of the interplay of time and space and imagery, of what we choose to keep storing on on our hard drives. If difficult to make any sense of, and perhaps overstimulating, the experience can also be quite meditative. The exhibition catalog, which is also published as an iOS app, features all the images on view in an accordion-like spiral-bound book, along with two introductory poems, so to speak. They feature one word per line, enjambed all the way through, with equal parts reflection on mortality and quotidian detains and pronouns, sounding kind of like a current day Frank O’Hara. Though decidedly abstruse, it might still offer the best insight into the work, and I’ll conclude by quoting from it here in lieu of further speculation:

“In my computer I’m stitching present and past photos in cartoony ironic lavish space. Ornament for the hoarders. Album No.2. Don’t throw anything away without giving it a mental good riddance squeeze…

I thought it’s time to recall how I looked over the years without remembering through photos. Not possible. I was a formless energy somewhere behind my eyes mixed up with the things I looked at…

The calming thing was the space I occupied, the room, the neighborhood the city.”

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This year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize was awarded to the duo Mikhael Subotzky, a South African photographer, and Patrick Waterhouse, a British artist, for their ambitious book, Ponte City. Published by Steidl, the tome weaves a transmedia narrative about the complex social history of South Africa’s most notorious and mythical housing block through photos, essays, and an extensive archive of found material and historical documents. It is part of a long-term, and in some regards obsessive project that was memorably installed at the ICP Triennial in 2013 as a series of 13-foot light boxes showing 600 typological images (Windows; Doors; Televisions) replicating the 54-story cylindrical tower—”floor above floor and flat by flat.” Prior to that it recognized with the Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles 2011.

Jury of the £30,000 prize, which is approaching it’s 20th anniversary, included Rineke Dijkstra, Aperture’s Chris Boot, Peter Gorschlüter, who is Deputy Director at the museum of Modern art in Frankfurt, and Anne Marie Beckmann, Curator of Art Collection Deutsche Börse. Run-ups are fashion photographer Viviane Sassen, Russian art photographer Nikolai Bakharev, and Zanele Muholi, whose portraits of black lesbian and transgender communities of South Africa are currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Last year’s prize also went to a duo, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

All the shortlisted photographers are being exhibited at London’s Photographers’ Gallery through June 7, 2015, and at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Museum for Modern Art) in Frankfurt from June 20 – Sept. 20, 2015.

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Mary Ellen Mark, who passed away on May 25, 2015, was one the most frequently featured photographers in American Photo magazine’s history, with her images gracing more that half a dozen individual issues from the last quarter century. Upon news of her death, we’ve taken time to reflect on her legacy and dug through our archive to revisit her remarkable contributions to our own pages. Here, we present an exclusive 1998 interview with Mark about her progression through various camera formats, how she composes photos, and why her subjects place so much trust in her. Below, she talks shop with Russell Hart, former Senior and Executive Editor of American Photo magazine (1990–2011).

Master Class

Mary Ellen Mark

This renowned photographer loves the human animal.

By Russell Hart

October 20, 1998

Mary Ellen Mark is a rare breed: a documentary photographer with an instantly recognizable style. Whether she is shooting performers in an Indian circus or the down-and-out in America—subjects she often revisited—her work has a visual consistency that would be the envy of most art-world stylists. (American Photo readers chose Mark as their favorite woman photographer [in an previous feature from this issue of the magazine.]) Yet for Mark, style is not something to be imposed on a subject; she is even reluctant to bring a concept to a portrait. “I find that the subject gives you the best idea how to make a photograph,” she says. “So I usually just wait for something to happen.”

Mark’s portrait of an Indian circus animal trainer with an elephant trunk encircling his face—the cover of her magnificent 1993 book, Indian Circus (Chronicle Books)—is a case in point.”First I had the trainer behind the elephant trunk,” Mark recalls. “It was the trainer’s idea to have the elephant wrap its trunk around his head. It never would have occurred to me to have that elephant do that.” But what clinched the shot for Mark was another bit of serendipity. “What really made the picture good was the expression in the elephant’s eye,” she says. “It happened in just one frame.”

Mark’s image of a circus clown waiting outside a tent to start his performance is another example. “He was lying across the back of his donkey, and suddenly the donkey yawned,” says Mark. “The picture wouldn’t have been anything without that yawn.” But what’s more striking about the image is its eccentric composition—with the figure at the motto and the animal’s legs cropped off—and the fact that Mark would risk such composition even when the yawn presented itself. “You always have to think about your framing,” she says. “Sometimes you make the wrong choice, and it doesn’t work.” Mark feels the relationship between foreground and background is key: “If the background doesn’t work together with your main subject, you won’t have a good picture.”

Though she shoots in a variety of formats, Mark has taken the Hasselblad’s familiar square to an extraordinary level of compositional sophistication. “It’a a beautiful shape,” she says, “But coming from 35mm’s long rectangle, it’s kind of a shock to work with the square. There’s a tendency to keep everything symmetrical in the frame.” Is square shooting mode difficult? “You have to work hard to break the format of the square,” says Mark, whose dynamic compositions—square and otherwise—push and pull at the edges of the frame. “But each format has its own problems and solutions.”

All that said, for Mark, what’s inside the frame is still the most important element of photography. “Finding the right subject is the hardest part,” she says. Indeed, Mark’s ability to penetrate notoriously suspicious subjects—from prostitutes on Bombay’s Falkland Road to Irish gypsies—is legendary, and has been recognized with three NEA grants and a Guggenheim fellowship, 11 solo books, dozens of exhibitions, and countless assignments. Mark says she’s still learning about both the human dynamic and the craft of photography. “There’s only one reason I’ve stayed a photographer for so many years,” she says. “Photography is always challenging.” —Russell Hart

Mary Ellen Mark On Format:

Learning how to use different formats has made me a better photographer. When I started working in medium format, it made me a better 35mm photographer. When I started working in 4×5, it made me a better medium-format photographer.

The situation really dictated what format I use. The voice depends either on whether the subject will be enriched by detail or on how spontaneous I need to be. But even when I shoot 4×5, I try to break the format’s formality—to make the pictures looser. I’ve managed to to that with a few projects; one was photographing ballroom dancers in Miami. It’s risky shooting action with a large-format camera. You have to use a pretty narrow f-stop, a fairly wide-angle lens, and more that the usual amount of light—and be sure your shutter speed is high enough to ever ride the ambient light. For the Miami pictures, I would just prelight a certain area with Broncolor strobes and stop my 99mm lens down to f/22. That way. I didn’t have to hit my focus exactly, so the dancers could just move in and out of the area.

On Lighting:

I used to use no artificial light at all, and shoot everything in 35mm. That’s certainly a wonderful way to work. But when I started doing more portraits, I realized I couldn’t always just depend on existing light. Sometimes you have to work in the studio or a dim interior space and then you have to light it. So I’ve had to learn about lighting. And you learn by looking at light, and the way others use it. When I used to shoot on movie sets, I learned from lighting directors. I’ve learned from good assistants. And I’ve learned from my husband, a filmmaker. I’m not a great lighter; I’ve just learned what works.

I like lighting to be as inconspicuous as possible. Usually I try to add just enough flash to make the main subject stand out. But the subject and the brightness and the distance of the background really determine how much light is needed. It’s had to keep light subtle with dark circus animals, for example—subjects like the standing bear in the dress. You have to put a lot of extra light on them just to create enough sense of texture and detail.

On Trust:

Everyone asks me how I get my subjects to open up to me. There’s no formula to it. It’s just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people—of being yourself. Your subjects will trust you only if you’re confident about what you are doing. They can sense that immediately. I’m really bothered by photographer who first approach a subject without a camera, try to establish a personal relationship, and only then get out their cameras. It’s deceptive. I think you should just show up with a camera, to make your intentions clear. People will either accept you or they won’t.

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On Monday, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut returned to the site of his Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Napalm Girl’ photo, 43 years to the day of making the Vietnam War image that became seared in the American consciousness. Ut, born in Vietnam, was only 21 at the time and part of a network of regional stringers for the AP, an early instance of a western news agency enlisting local talent for conflict coverage. Collectively, with images like Eddie Adams’ Saigon execution photo, ‘Napalm Girl’ helped foment public opinion to end the war. Such literal power of imagery had not been seen before or in the time since for reasons including the mass volume of photos that are shared today and the unprecedented control authorities now exert over the representation of conflict.

Equipped with his iPhone this time for a takeover of the AP’s two-month-old Instagram feed, Ut was able to reconnect with Ho Van Bon, the cousin of ‘Napalm Girl’ Kim Phuc, pictured running on her far right in the iconic image. [Further on the right, beyond the widely published crop, was photojournalist David Burnett, who, unfortunately for him, was busy reloading his camera.]

“In the old days you had to go back to Saigon and develop film,” Ut says in the video above. “Way too long for a story.”

Ut is currently based in Los Angeles and continues filing photos on the AP wire—we featured one of his recent images in our Best Photojournalism of the Year 2014 gallery.

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There’s a distinct New Yorkness about much of Long Island. All through the suburbs and even out to the Hamptons, there’s a sense that the city might as well be right behind your back. But just a little further out along the Sunrise Highway, just past the Napeague straight where the land narrows and the coast seems to hug the road from both sides, something changes.

“That’s an edge in your mind,” says fashion photographer Ben Watts. “There’s sort of enough separation from the rest of the world and you really can’t help but feel like you’re on holiday.”

Situated just three hours apart from New York City, Mautauk feels like it’s anything but. “It’s beautiful and there’s nowhere else you can drive outside a city of New York’s scale to a resort town or a beach town of that capacity—you’d have to fly.”

Watts, known for his vibrant commercial photography and scrapbook-like collages, had first gone out there on a shoot for a fashion retailer in 1996. He says he fell in love with the place over night and soon ended up buying a second home there. His latest book, Montauk Dreaming (Damiani 2015), is an intensely colorful and personal look at the exuberance of his time there.

“I’m shooting my friends, my family, my aspect of Montauk. And it’s how I see it.,” he tells American Photo. “It’s very snap-happy and the photo’s aren’t overly considered in any shape or form.”

The work has a decidedly ’90s aesthetic, with graphics recalling the heyday of MTV, but it was mostly shot with an iPhone and processed through Watts’ own lens and film combo which he had developed for the Hipstamatic app back in 2011. The book itself is in a square format suggesting both online image sharing and the iconic 6×6 medium-format frame once used for much fashion photography, along with the Polaroids that supplemented for light tests.

“The high saturation, high contrast is sort of based upon a style that I was infatuated with when I first started photography and when my career began, in the ’90s,” he says, citing his beloved transparency film and the influence of photographer Enrique Badulescu.

Admittedly it’s no social documentary project. Despite the largely well-to-do itinerant New Yorkers it attracts during the summer months, Montauk is pretty much a working class enclave. The seasonal swells, busier and busier each year, has sometimes drawn ire in the form of comment-baiting blog posts, but for the most part, “everybody’s welcome,” Watts says, and most survive on the economic influx.

“There are a lot of other elements about Montauk I could have included. But I thought why? There are a lot of books that go that route and I didn’t,” he says. “It might sound a little cliché but it’s about summer vibes. It’s very here and now. The casualness of the phone—it’s very sort of about the immediacy of photography.”

Ben Watts’s related exhibition “Wattsup Montauk,” is on view at Milk Gallery in New York, June 17 – July 11, 2015.

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Gerhard Steidl, founder of the German art publisher, has never seen a soccer game. So when Juergen Teller approached him with hundreds if not thousands of images chronicling outbursts of spectator shenanigans from last summer’s World Cup, he thought, “how strange and bizarre. This is how people are when they watch a football game?”

Not exactly. But Teller, in his customary raw and weird snapshot style, caught a peculiar moment in German life when the national football team beat out Argentina last July for their forth World Cup title. His latest book, officially out May 26, 2015, is called Siegerflieger, or “the victors’ plane,” the name for team’s flight home, which Teller greeted, compact camera in hand, along over over half a million of his countrymen. A “sort of euphoric happiness” ensued from months after. His mother at some point even sent him a particularly patriotic pair of German undergarments, which Teller never wore, but carried around and frequently got his subjects to do so.

Part document, part self-portrait of him and his son, the book is his first shot all digitally, “a digital explosion,” he says, and features 400 pages of photos without explanation. “I thought this is so insane, but I didn’t want to write it down,” he explains in the video above. “I wanted people to be quite perplexed by it and not fully understand this craziness.”

Jump ahead to 04:57 to hear some stuff about the blue man and the octopus.

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Candida Höfer’s large-scale photographs of libraries, opera houses, and other grand interiors can be identified by their technical perfection and insurmountable level of craft. Otherwise, the artist’s hand, or style, for lack of a better word, is decidedly and almost entirely absent. As a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German photographer for over three decades has methodically looked toward the structural elements and inherent symmetries of her subjects to dictate her compositions (within the limits of what the lens can capture).

Höfer’s new exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, “From Düsseldorf,” on view in the U.S. for the first time, may come as a surprise then. The show presents a dramatic departure from her work as we know it—stark, minimal abstractions line the gallery walls, a new focus on individual architectural details. These compositions, shot close up, from unexpected angles, show her exerting a decisive and individual vision in reordering elements of these interiors and turning them into something almost unrecognizable. The images themselves appear to be sculpted, clean and almost paper-like, reminding of a Barbara Kasten construction.

Alongside are photographs showing her typical Modernist exactitude in the representation of Baroque spaces (below) which help demonstrate her progression and departure from The Düsseldorf School of Photography. Given her focus on pristine opulence for much of her career, an image like slide seven, aimed downward at the floor, capturing just the slightest bit of scuff, could facetiously be thought of as her ruin-porn moment. The contrast of her early work and this new direction is as intense as when you think about the still-lifes Joel Meyerowitz began making in his mid-70s compared to the street photography of his youth. It’s hard to imagine that many of Höfer new abstractions, if isolated, on their own would really swoon anybody, but within the context of her oeuvre, and maybe the history of architecture, they’re certainly worth a look.

Candida Höfer’s “From Düsseldorf” is on view at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York through June 20, 2015.

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