For their project Memory City, photographers Rebecca Norris Webb and her husband Alex Webb traveled to Rochester, New York—the home of Eastman Kodak for 125 years—to document the city in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy in 2012 and to pay tribute to their respective relationships to analog imagery.

Both photographers used Kodak film for this project. Her husband shot with Koda­chrome, his sole medium for more than 30 years; its once-vibrant color can now be processed only with black-and-white chemistry, giving it a distressed look he likens to fading memories. Norris Webb, who still uses film for all her work, used Portra, inspired by an analogy of the medium as a woman’s special-occasion outfit—memorable, but fleeting, worn only once. “I think it’s the tactile quality that I’ll miss most when I have to eventually switch to digital,” she says. “That slip of celluloid that’s accompanied me to every moment I’ve ever photographed, like a delicate yet indelible dress.”

Norris Webb’s portraits of Rochester women include the image shown here, of the Webbs’ former assistant, Amanda Webster. She and her family reflect the city’s past and present in photography: Her father and grand­father both worked for Kodak, and Amanda is currently studying photog­raphy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Norris Webb photo­graphed her in her grandmother’s house in the 14621 neighbohood—known by its zip code, it’s one of the most ethnically diverse in the city—in the spring of 2012, holding a dress she had worn to an uncle’s wedding.

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For some, the notion of “suburbia” conjures tidy homes, green lawns, and aspirations for peace and quiet and good schools. For others, such as the photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, darkness and disillusionment lurk behind the shiny facades. Strongly influenced by filmmakers like David Lynch, John Waters, Russ Meyers, and Alfred Hitchcock, Cohen’s series—with names like Mr. & Mrs. Teavee and American Nightmare—feature imaginary small towns populated by grotesquely glamorous and tormented residents.

Each series, involving intense storyboarding and creation of characters, takes several months to create. Cohen, currently getting her master’s in fashion photography in London, enlists her friends as models and dramatically changes their appearance with heavy makeup, wigs, and costumes (or in some photos, a lack thereof). The women in her images reflect familiar Hollywood stereotypes, and Cohen attempts to capture resonant moments in their fictional lives. In the image shown above, “The Party,” from the series Hollow Heights about a town by the same name, one guest sits alone, isolated amidst chaos, seemingly full of longing and stranded from her desired destination. A sense of loneliness and discontent is palpable.

“This was one of the hardest photos I have ever had to produce,” Cohen says. “All my friends were actually drinking and having a party. At times they got a little difficult to control!”

See more at nadialeecohen.com.

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Todd Antony was shooting landscapes in the southwestern U.S. in 2009 when he stumbled upon Sun City, Arizona, a desert retirement community of approximately 38,000 senior citizens. Antony, a New Zealand native now based in London, was captivated by the Tim Burtonesque, hyper-manicured city and began shooting portraits of the residents. He kept tabs on the area after he returned home and read about the Sun City Poms, a cheerleading squad of senior women who march and perform up to 50 times a year at conventions, parades, and sporting events. He vowed to return to Arizona to photograph them.

In 2013, Antony finally managed to get back to Sun City, where he created a personal series of 10 group and individual portraits of the cheerleaders. The images make a respectful statement about aging gracefully and optimistically—none of the Poms had performed as cheerleaders before the age of about 60. And Antony says these women pushing back on societal norms offers an intriguing contrast to garish child pageants, where very young girls are encouraged to look and act older too quickly.

The Poms series garnered supportive press from outlets such as the Huffington Post and is currently showing in the Circulations festival in Paris through March 16.

Above Photo: The Sun City Poms cheerleading squad, photographed by Todd Antony. See more of Antony’s work at toddantony.com.

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With this image, shot for an Australian fashion magazine, photographer Thierry Van Biesen does more than create a unique showcase for shoes. He takes us into a fantasy. The models, captured near the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island, seem like exotic, wildly colored animals on the African savanna or animated, psychedelic flowers in some magician’s garden. But take note: These whimsical stems arise from darkness.

As a child in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war, Van Biesen became accustomed to seeing atrocity and violence. “Life was difficult because I was close to death all the time,” he says.

In 1976, when he was 11, Van Biesen’s beloved great uncle, who worked as a photographer in the 1920s and was a major creative influence, was accidentally killed by soldiers on his way home from a party. In his devastation, Van Biesen vowed to change his outlook: “I made an oath to myself that none of this would touch me. I suppressed everything.” With this powerful new coping tool, he found an enhanced beauty in the horror, telling himself that he saw fire-works over his home instead of falling bombs.

Van Biesen began taking pictures while study-ing to become a math teacher at the Ameri-can University of Beirut. After graduating and then teach-ing in Abu Dhabi, he was moved to pursue 
a more creative career, so in 1989 he went to New York, where he assisted prestigious photographers such as Duane Michals and Arthur Elgort.

Now based in Brooklyn, Van Biesen has man-aged to shed the repressed vision of his youth—
“I began experiencing everything around me like a newborn,” he says—but still relishes a dreamy visual language. His enduring optimism and fearlessness are revealed in his images as bold colors and movement.

The vibrant image above started with a walk along the marshes and turned into a visual pun: “Lines Between the Reeds.” Van Biesen adores the freedom of digital photography but did only minimal retouching here. He used mirrors during the shoot to create reflections and texture.

And while Van Biesen may have a clearer way of looking at the world today, his goal is the same as ever: “I still want to say life is beautiful.”

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Yakutsk: coldest city in the world

Geneva-based Steeve Iuncker set himself a personal project that would send him traveling the world. The photographer, who is a member of Agence VU, is capturing urban “mosts”—the richest city, the most populated, the most violent. His first destination: the coldest.

Yakutsk, in northern Russia, experiences punishing daily winter temperatures averaging -40 degrees Fahrenheit. During the day, heavy fog covers the town and very little light gets through, giving Yakutsk a surrealistic aura of ice, mist, and shadows.

Iuncker stayed with a family there for 10 days. On his tour of the city, he says, when any of the 270,000 residents appeared, they were heavily wrapped, looking like distant ghosts.

While shooting, Iuncker’s hands would go numb almost immediately, and within 15 minutes his frost-covered cameras would jam. He’d have to go back inside to warm himself and his equipment. It was on just such a break, while having tea in a shop, that Iuncker spotted a Ferris wheel through the window. Struck by the gap between the expected liveliness of an amusement park and the stillness caused by the extraordinary chill, he created this haunting photograph.

See more of Iuncker’s work at iuncker.ch.

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Eric Kruszewski worked as an engineer in Central Asia for more than five years and never felt like he belonged. The residents of the former Soviet Union were not always warm to foreigners, and Kruszewski did not fit in.

While vacationing in Tibet and Mongolia, he fell in love with photography and not long after returning to the United States in 2010, Kruszewski realized that he wanted to shoot full time. But, ironically, he found he missed the feeling of being an outsider.

With this in mind, he began seeking out alternative cultures to photograph near Richland, Washington, where he was living at the time. He began shooting local rodeos, and at one event he met the owner of a traveling carnival. “I wondered what life behind the Ferris wheel would be like,” Kruszewski says. In 2012 he resigned from his job and went on the road with the carnies.

Carnival life was exciting—and exhausting.

A team of 60 workers were on the clock from noon to midnight and then would break down rides, game stalls, and food courts minutes after the last customer left. It was a hot summer, and the crew members were constantly on their feet. The work was democratic—everyone did everything. Kruszewski followed the troop in a truck, and when not photographing and conducting interviews, he lent a hand. The carnies were fiercely proud of living outside the norm—the owners went back four generations, but many of the workers (including a race car mechanic and a chef from a famous Las Vegas resort) were adventure seekers like Kruszewski.

After three months of traveling around the Pacific Northwest, the carnival crew dropped him on the side of the road and headed back to their base in Nevada. Craving stability after so much wandering, Kruszewski settled in Washington, D.C.; he is now documenting the closing of a local steel mill.

See more of his work here.

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As a pediatric emergency physician, Wendy Sacks photographed her young patients to clinically document their illnesses and as an emotional outlet for the stress and grief associated with her job. “I turned everything into pictures,” Sacks says. After a debilitating connective-tissue disease forced her to leave medicine, she started taking photos of her own children. While photographing them during bathtime, her own intense feelings about life, death, healing, and physical struggle emerged, and her series Immersed in Living Water was born.

Sacks showed some of her images to a photographer in January 2010; in March of the same year she was encouraged to take a leap of faith and brought her work to FotoFest in Houston. Positive response there and at other portfolio reviews was immediate and tremendous, and Sacks was soon having her work displayed and winning awards around the world.

Sacks photographs her young subjects in a stainless-steel tank at her home near Rochester, New York. She doesn’t use professional models—the boys in the photo above are the sons of a man Sacks met at a local festival. She feels strongly that each session is a profound experience and that her work captures and celebrates the fleeting nature of the moment. Yet she embraces her audience’s individual reactions to the images.

Immersed in Living Water will be released as a book by Contrejour, the publishing house of French photographer Claude Nori, in 2014. See more of Wendy’s work at WendySacks.Photoshelter.com.

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Five years ago, London-based photographer Jasper White went to a New Year’s Eve party held in a shed in rural Australia. His brother-in-law, Pete Walker, was from the area and explained that the sheds—large, freestanding units the size of a garage or guest cottage in the U.S.—were ubiquitous in many of the small towns in the outback.

Kept exclusively by men, the sheds are part of an old-fashioned, small-town Australian cultural tradition: the women have their space in the home, and the men keep a separate retreat to indulge their hobbies. Like an adolescent’s bedroom, sheds are deeply personal and intensely maintained.

Of course, similar man caves—in basements, spare rooms, and garages—are common all over the world. When the photographer was a child in the United Kingdom, his father, a scientist, had a shed; he blew it up while experimenting with rockets.

Because White’s work at home frequently explored the relationships people have with territories and space, these masculine structures fascinated him. “Each shed becomes an extreme focal point of human individuality in a barren wasteland,” he says. He began a long period of traveling to the Australian outback to meet the locals and photograph their various sheds. More than 80 of White’s shed images are now being collected into a book, and a small selection were shown at Gallery Nine5 in New York in 2012.

Depending on the township, Australian sheds might house steam engines, airplanes, full bars, even a dance club. The one shown here houses the prized possession of a car enthusiast named Rustin (who goes by his first name only): a beautifully maintained 1971 Bathurst RT Charger.

See more of Jasper’s work here.

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Ami Vitale travels almost constantly, only rarely staying in one place. The busy photojournalist grew up in Florida and spent many years in India, but now, after just three years in Montana, it feels like home. “It’s unlike anyplace I’ve ever lived,” she says. “The land taps into something really ancient, and the people have very deep relationships to the landscape.”

So Vitale was happy to finally work on some­thing close to her new home base of Missoula. Friends at The Nature Conservancy introduced her to a group at the J-L Ranch who are recreating the herding patterns of the bison whose hooves naturally tilled the soil thousands of years ago. Last year she started spending time with these and other ranchers, documenting their work, which included moving cattle over the plain at a glacial pace.

Unlike the herds of yesteryear, which traveled over a wide-open space, today’s cattle drives face obstacles such as fences and highways, and steering the beasts with great care is a slow, gentle, and surprisingly spiritual process. “These ranchers are great stewards of the landscape,” Vitale says, “and their constant refrain is ‘Don’t stress the cows!’ They were the happiest cows I’ve ever seen.”

And though the cattle are eventually slaugh­tered, Vitale was awed by the respect, care, and attention to detail shown during that part of the process.

Vitale has continued to spend time at the ranch whenever she’s at home. She says the cattle never show any fear when she approaches, like this group who posed together for a docile family portrait.

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Peter Yang has photographed lots of celebrities for clients like Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, but he was nervous when he had to shoot the stars of the celebrated TV drama Breaking Bad for Rolling Stone. “I was so into the show that there was a part of me that didn’t want to believe they weren’t those characters,” Yang says.

In June 2012, Yang arrived in Los Angeles with about 20 ideas for how to shoot the actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, who played the show’s antiheroes Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. The resulting portrait above was his favorite. It’s indicative of work that Yang likes best: The actors’ postures, minimal use of props, and an open environment tell a story—albeit one subject to many interpretations. It conveys a sense of coming upon a situation filled with conflict and a hint of danger, but it implies trust and serenity, too—and it’s ambiguous about which man is in power.

Rolling Stone chose a different image for the story’s opener, shown at right. Yang was not surprised: “No one else was feeling [the haircut] shot,” he says. But he was still happy with the magazine’s decision. The photo the editors chose still tells a story, but with more direct eye contact and physicality. “And it’s funnier than I remember,” he says.

Happily, Yang says he left the assignment relieved that his illusion had not been ruined. “It was the shoot I was most excited about that year. And after meeting them, I could still believe in Walt and Jesse.”

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