What do you do when the subject of your long-term portrait project asks you for $30 to buy heroin? That was the question Tony Fouhse faced from Stephanie, a sometimes prostitute, all-the-time addict whose downfall and eventual recovery Fouhse documented in photographs over the course of eight months.

Fouhse had spent four years photographing the addicts who gathered on a single block in Ottawa before he encountered Stephanie, a thin 23-year-old with a shocking intensity in her eyes. He took a few frames, and when he returned the next day to give her some prints, he took a few more. Each found something in the other—for him, an extraordinary subject, and for her, a man who was interested in her for something outside of paid sex. But as they grew closer, the project and the friendship merged, and the moral dilemmas began to pile up.

The Day I Met Stephanie, Ottawa, June 15, 2010

In the car that morning, with Stephanie sick from withdrawal in the passenger seat, Fouhse figured the situation boiled down to three choices. He could give her the money, and she would use it to buy heroin and feel better, perpetuating the addiction cycle. He could deny her the money, knowing well that she would find it in another, more dangerous way, most likely prostitution. Or he could abandon the project—and Stephanie—entirely.

“Over and over, this project put me into a place where anything I decided was wrong, and I had to choose between the least of three evils,” Fouhse says. “Not a day went by when I didn’t wonder if what I was doing was for the project or for her.”

These sorts of moral challenges are uniquely faced when photographers choose their own intimate relationships as subjects or when relationships grow out of long-term projects. But for artists hoping to explore the depths of human intimacy, there is no other way but to photograph it from within.

Elinor Carucci has made intimate relationships the focus of most of her photographic career. Her first major monograph, _Closer _(Chronicle Books, 2002), documented her early twenties both in her native Israel and in her adopted home of New York. The photographs focused on her now husband, Eran, as well as her parents and grandparents. Selections from her series Mother (Prestel, 2013)—a culmination of nine years spent photographing the birth and life of her twin children, Emmanuelle and Eden—is being exhibited in London this fall. As in any relationship, give and take between Carucci and her family/subjects is central, a dynamic that simultaneously colors the work and feeds back into the relationships themselves.

“The people I photograph in my personal work are the people I’ll die for,” Carucci says. “It’s the few people that I can’t give more to—my children, husband, mother, father. It’s another way of communicating, and another way for them to see themselves—it shows them something at the same time. But ultimately it’s something I do for myself.”

Bath, 2006

Alessandra Sanguinetti’s relationship with children is at the center of her work, too, although the children are not her own. Her series The Adventures of Guille & Belinda began in 1999, when she first photographed the cousins, ages 9 and 10, in rural Argentina, where she had gone to take pictures of their grandmother Juana’s animals. They were frequent fixtures at Juana’s, and eventually, “instead of shooing them away, I started photographing them,” Sanguinetti says. “I was shooting them without even thinking it was work. My first idea was to just do a single story trying to figure out what they imagined life to be, just so I could get into their world.”

After four months of making these pictures, a project took shape that continues today. At first, Sanguinetti would give prompts based on what the girls were talking about as they played, or sometimes she’d act like a director in an improvised play, giving them cues and letting them unfold the rest. “It was always a particular kind of collaboration and play between the three of us,” she says.

The Couple, 1999

Like Sanguinetti, Doug DuBois began photographing his immediate family for reasons more practical than artistic. His mother and father, his younger brother Luke, and his sister Lise and her son, Spencer, were a captive, patient audience DuBois could depend on as he refined his early photographic technique. DuBois’s family portraits, which he has pursued for nearly three decades since, are striking in their color, composition, form, and candid appearance. Yet DuBois has avoided a decisive-moment approach, instead preferring to set up his camera (he typically uses medium-format) and lights for carefully composed sittings with his family. For DuBois, such controlled conditions often have yielded the most revealing images.

“The person has to give, and as the photographer, you have to put them in a position where they feel generous enough to offer a view of themselves,” DuBois says. “Whether it’s ‘true’ or not is a different story, but that generosity has to be there.”

DuBois’s portraits span traumatic times. Shortly after the project began, his father fell from the walkway between cars on a commuter train and spent the next two years recovering. And with the added responsibility of caring for her husband, DuBois’s mother had a nervous breakdown. In his book, _All the Days and Nights _(Aperture, 2009), these stories are present just beneath the surface.

“I don’t try to tell stories explicitly, but I want to evoke stories,” DuBois says. “I want to evoke experiences so people can project their own desires and hopes onto the image. It plays with fiction, but I generally use the stuff of life—my life—to create more general narratives,” DuBois says. “They’re truthful, but I’m not sure they’re authentic.”

Regardless of their specific content, the stories embedded within such intimate portraits have two tellers. Many portraits are inherently collaborative, but when the subject-photographer relationship is an intimate one, the nature of this collaboration becomes central to the work. As viewers, we not only see the emotion transmitted by the sitter’s face, body, and surroundings, but we also sense the face of the photographer, unseen but equally present, shaping the moment further.

My Mother and Father At The Bar , London, 1990

Frequent and unfettered access to their subjects also allows these photographers to include a third subject in their portraits: time. For Sanguinetti, the cousins’ passage from youth to adulthood became central to the series. “I find following someone through time fascinating,” she says. “You can step back after a few years and see patterns that are impossible to see in the moment.”

DuBois’s work has been punctuated by long gaps in which he hasn’t taken any photographs of his family—either because they weren’t nearby or because they all needed a break from the camera’s scrutiny. But as his mother faces the inevitable challenges of old age, he continues to photograph her. And Carucci says that being a mother will always be part of who she is as a photographer and an artist.

Among these photographers, only Fouhse feels as if his project has an end, as Stephanie slowly progresses through recovery. Last year, Fouhse released Live Through This (Straylight Press, 2012) a book of the portraits he co-authored with Stephanie. Fouhse still photographs her for his blog when they get together to speak at the occasional gallery show or book promotion, but even so, “the project feels over,” he says.

“It’s kind of strange—there is certainly a drama deficit in my life now,” Fouhse says. “I’m not sure I miss it all the time, but I definitely miss it some of the time. It was a once-in-a-lifetime story.”

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Sometimes I like to view the internet as one big, infinitely-faceted image filter. Photos enter at one end, as light turned into bits by a digital sensor. From there, the number of transformations that can happen before output, when the image, (again in the form of light) enters the eyeballs of the viewer and gets soaked up by the brain, is seemingly limitless. (It’s still shocking to me sometimes to stop and think about how incredibly similar the mechanics of digital photography are to our own biological sense of sight). Contexts can be added or taken away as images make their journey through the web, taking on different meanings and tones at every turn. On the excellent Rhizome blog today (by way of the Tumblr Prosthetic Knowledge), I came across the work of painter Enda O’Donoghue, and it got me thinking of all the layers of information a photographic image can carry today, and what happens to them when they take shape in another medium entirety.

Why would we be talking about a painter on American Photo? Because photography is arguably more important to O’Donoghue’s work than painting itself. Yes, Chuck Close and his grid paintings based on photographs seem like an influence or inspiration. But where Close used photography as a starting point to do interesting things with painting, O’Donoghue, to me, is using painting to say interesting things about photography, even though oil and canvas is the output medium of choice.

His sources are a wide variety of images usually seen only in digital contexts, including mirror self-portraits, shots of foods about to be eaten, and scenes from public transportation resembling security camera footage. The images are rendered on canvas in a way that recreates digital-only signifiers like jaggy low-resolution edges and squares of distorted colors from JPEG compression—all the signs of digital glitch that are often lumped under the term “new aesthetic.” While I always hesitate to jump on a lumped-in term’s bandwagon, I find myself repeatedly fascinated by work that looks closely at the moment digital signals begin to degrade.

The Rhizome post also points to two other artists recreating digital imagery in analogue mediums. Check them out and give them a follow if you don’t already—great stuff.

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Rinko Kawauchi’s 2011 book Illuminance made her one of Japan’s best known photographers. The softly brilliant colors she brought to the book’s close examinations of everyday moments showed a mastery of transforming the mundane into something breathtakingly new.

It’s interesting, then, to see her perspective shifting dramatically outward in Ametsuchi, her latest book and exhibition opening at New York’s Aperture gallery this week. Ametsuchi is concerned with the greater natural world, and our relatively infintesimal place in it. The primary subject matter are burning fields, shown cycling through the traditional process of nokayi in which controlled burns done at specific times keep farms fertile for periods spanning decades and generations. Interspersed are views of the stars, looking straight up, and depictions of religious rituals back on Earth. Woven together, the work presents a dramatic story of regeneration and rebirth.

In the book, the images are presented with careful consideration to narrative. We see large full-spread images of burning hills, interspersed with smaller views. One perfectly rounded hilltop is seen through the changing seasons and agricultural cycles, like Monet’s piles of hay. Humans play a supporting role, but they are never far away. I’m interested to see how this narrative approach translates to the exhibition space.

Ametsuchi is up in New York’s Aperture gallery until November 21, 2013. The Book, also published by Aperture, is available now.

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Two years ago, we published a piece that all of us remain extremely proud of. Marking the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Joel Johnson and Matt Buchanan sat down with the photographers—pros and amateurs alike—who risked their lives to bring back the indelible images of that day. Woven together by Scott Alexander, their stories and images merge into a singular portrait of that powerful day—a difficult, enduring reminder of the photojournalist’s role in crisis.

You can read the oral history in four parts beginning here. If you have an iPad, you can download an expanded edition with additional images and audio clips from iTunes. In exchange we encourage a donation to one of several charities serving the first responders and victims of September 11.

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Did Walker Evans know, when he put the finishing touches on his seminal book American Photographs in 1938, that he’d just completed something that would go on to define the very notion of a photo book, in form and in content, for decades to come?

The answer being “yes” is not unlikely—at a time when books were an afterthought for many artists and photographers, Evans paid close attention to the details. He carefully selected the paper, cover material (a specific Bible cloth), typography, and most importantly, the sequential flow of the images. American Photographs was printed as the catalog to his 1938 MoMA show of the same name—the museum’s first dedicated to the work of a single photographer—yet the book contained a smaller subset of the work that hung in New York. The plates were presented without titles or any accompanying text on the right-hand pages of the book, with the facing pages remaining blank. They were divided into two thematic sections, and directions for their consumption appeared on the inner jacket: “The reproductions presented in this book are intended to be looked at in their given sequence.”

All of which may sound commonplace today, but in 1938, it was groundbreaking.

“Evans set out to make something really quite unique,” says Jeff Ladd, whose Errata Editions published a study of American Photographs in 2011. “Even though the book doesn’t look all that different to us now, it tried to make photography into poetry. Instead of just pictures that you’re looking at and recognizing, he was trying to create this greater metaphor.”

Errata’s “Books on Books” series reproduces rare or out-of-print books along with essays that place the work in historical context. But they’re not reprints—the books are presented in their first editions, with each page photographed exactly as in the original edition. The goal is to make important books that are either too rare or too expensive accessible for further study, always with the full permission of the original photographer.

And for Ladd, American Photographs was a natural, fit for the project. The most recent official edition was published in 1988, on the work’s 50th anniversary, and has long been out of print. Prior to that, only two other editions had been printed (one by MoMA in 1962, on the work’s 25th anniversary, and another in paperback form in 1975. Both were printed with alternate covers, typography, and overall presentation).

“You’d be hard pressed to find many photographers of the documentary style that wouldn’t reference American Photographs as an important book,” Ladd says. “So It’s a little shocking that one of the most important photo books in the world had been out of print at this point for 20 years.”

But now, in association with their 75th-anniversary exhibition of American Photographs, the Museum of Modern Art has published a new edition, taking great care to match all of Evans’s original attention to detail. The cover, typography, sequencing, and accompanying texts (save for an additional essay on the restoration of the new volume) are presented exactly as they were in 1938. It’s also the first edition of the book to be produced in the era of digital publishing. Evans was not an obsessive or meticulous keeper of his own archive; many of the negatives for the works that appeared in American Photographs were physically cropped or otherwise altered, and over the course of 75 years, the exhibitions original prints have scattered or begun to deteriorate. For MoMA’s new edition, several images are presented as seamless composites of multiple negatives in prints, pieced together to match the exact presentation of the originals.

Holding this book in your hands, its amazing to think that it is 75 years old. It feels distinctively modern, and its influence on the other great photo books of the 20th century is unmistakable. Robert Frank’s The Americans, first published in 1958, mirrors Evans’s presentation closely.

“[American Photographs] wasn’t just about the individual pictures,” says Ladd. “I think that’s the one thing that a lot of photographers who came to this book in the 1950s and ’60s really responded to. It used the language of photography they were familiar with, but it was something that spoke to them in a matter that few books had.”

And now it’s back in print, beautifully restored, for $35

“As a guy who taught photography for 12 years, I’m very happy the new edition came out,” Ladd says. “It’s an important book that students should be able to see.”

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In just a few short years, Pieter Hugo’s African portraiture has made him one of the biggest names in photography today. His study of salvagers in Ghana’s burning electronics dumps, Permanent Error, was one of our favorite photo books of 2011. He immediately followed that with a career-spanning monograph, This Must Be The Place, which made our list last year. His vision of Africa is one of complexity and nuance, his portraits political while remaining distinctly human.

Which makes his latest project “Kin,” which debuts at Yossi Milo gallery in New York this week, especially exciting. It is his first major work to focus exclusively on his personal experience in his native South Africa, a place defined by centuries of political, cultural, and racial tensions and contradictions.

Hugo, who is white, was born in Johannesburg and raised in Cape Town. He describes “Kin” as “an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment, and my sense of being ‘colonial driftwood’.”

Ann Sallies, who worked for my parents and helped raise their children, Douglas, 2013

“How does one live in this society?,” Hugo continues. “How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent does one have to? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing.”

Hugo explores these questions via portraiture, starting close to home with his family’s long-time caretaker in Cape Town, his pregnant wife, and his newborn daughter. Then he expands outward, capturing the arresting gaze of a homeless man on the streets of Johannesburg, a couple whose marriage this year was reported as “Africa’s first traditional gay wedding,” and more of the strikingly diverse faces and landscapes that define the South African experience today.

“I have deeply mixed feelings about being here,” Hugo says. It’s an internal conflict that’s been palpable in all his images, but is now firmly front and center.

“Kin” opens at Yossi Milo gallery on Friday, September 6, and is on display through October 19. Its debut will be followed by showings at Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg and Cape Town in October

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You don’t have to go too deep into the folds of the internet to find an obsessive fan base for just about anything. But to me, the bronies are singular. Their devotion is to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic—an animated TV show based on the popular 1980s toys. “Despite the target demographic of young girls, Friendship Is Magic has, in addition, gained a large following of older viewers, predominately teenagers and adults, largely male, who call themselves ‘bronies'” says Wikipedia.

For five years running, bronies of all ages, genders and persuasions have gathered at Bronycon, a three-day conference where fans and the show’s creators meet to socialize, share fan fictions, and generally have a great time. Notable panels include “Process and Procedure, the Art of Pony Art,” “Military Brony Meet Up,” and “100 Years of Narrative Art and Culture: From Peter Pan to My Little Pony.”

At this year’s Bronycon earlier this month, New York magazine’s style blog The Cut sent photographer Amy Lombard to capture the proceedings. I am fascinated by the bronies, so I was immediately drawn to find out more.

Have you done much fashion stuff before this? How did it compare? Or did you even approach this as a fashion assignment at all?

I have done a handful of stories for The Cut—from a dog fashion show, the steampunk world’s fair, to ladies at a Giants game. The reoccurring theme is that they all have to do with how a group of people presents themselves. On a visual level, the photographs from Bronycon are so much about what the person is wearing, so I guess you could argue it is about the fashion—but I see it as more than that. I approach it more as I am documenting what I’m seeing.

What is the irony to sincerity ratio we’re dealing with here? I am still baffled as to how or if this is an ACTUAL thing, or something people just have fun mocking on the internet.

The majority of bronies I met were dead serious. People were coming from all over the world, which I don’t think anyone would do for the sake of being ironic, you know? I’m sure some think the cosplay/elaborate hats/etc. are goofy or fun, but from what I gathered it’s genuinely a way of life. At the convention there were various panels about My Little Pony, one of them was with a brony psychologist. (Apparently it’s a thing—there was also a brony curator). The psychologist equated the fandom similar to Trekkies—I had never compared those levels of fandom but thought was sort of interesting.

A brony psychologist?

Mhhm. The brony psychologists basically dedicate their studies to examining why adults are drawn to the show. They didn’t provide much insight as to what exactly they studied, but instead had bronies line up and ask them questions. To give you a sense of the amount of people, the room was completely at capacity. They ranged from questions about what will happen to this fandom when or if the show gets cancelled, to personal questions regarding the show. The one question that pulled at my heartstrings a little bit was this one man who wanted advice on how to get his cousin, who has a brain tumor, to watch the show. His cousin was really depressed and angry at the world, and this man thought that watching the show would change his outlook on life and make him more positive.

Is there a sexual/fetish component present for any of these guys? That’s what I’ve always assumed.

It would be hard to make a generalization, but I’m sure with any sort of subculture/fandom like this, for some people there must be a sexual component. It definitely wasn’t addressed at the convention, though, and there wasn’t a single brony sex toy for sale. Though honestly that would have been sort of amazing.

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A few weeks ago, Erin Brethauer took over the New Yorker’s Instagram feed, posting iPhone images she took over two weeks from Camp Lakey Gap, a summer camp for people with autism in North Carolina. I was immediately drawn to her photos for their compassion, humor, and ability to almost effortlessly transcend the stereotypes surrounding autism.

Her work for the New Yorker was a continuation of “Autism Camp,” a project that began on a newspaper assignment and has since taken on many forms. I spoke with Brethauer via email to find out more.

How did this project begin and why? What was your experience being around people with autism before this project, if any?

The project began as a newspaper assignment back in 2008. That first week at camp was my first time really interacting with people with autism. A reporter and I followed a set of twins, Albert and Susanna, who were both six years old but on completely different ends of the autism spectrum as far as communication. Susanna was highly verbal. Her twin, Albert, was nonverbal, using more body language to express himself.

I thought this was really interesting, so I tried to figure out a way to visualize the spectrum with photographs. On the last day I made a series of pictures using a friend’s Hasselblad camera—I paired the portraits with the camper’s daily schedule. I liked how this pairing told a stronger story about the individual. You got to see their expressions, their faces, but you also learned a little bit about how they communicate because the schedules were either written or used image icons. They also conveyed a bit of the camper’s personality and the playfulness of camp.

How did the kids react to your presence and your photographs?

Many times if the campers are curious about me they ask, I explain and then they forget about me. It’s usually the counselors who are more interested in what I’m doing.

I do have a feeling that if this were a camp for neurotypical children, I would have to fight a bit harder to melt into the background. I imagine there would be more mugging for the camera and showing off.

I make it a point to try and blend into camp once it begins. I try to use body language that suggests it’s totally normal that I’m taking pictures and that you should just carry on and ignore me. This works well.

How did the New Yorker Instagram arrangement come about?

The New Yorker feed is scheduled so that different photographers are hosts for up to a week. When I first started following the feed, I loved the exposure to different work and felt that giving photographers that amount of time allowed work to unfold and build.

A friend of mine, Peter DiCampo, helped start an Instagram feed that I really like called @everydayafrica [We like it very much too—Eds.]. It features work from different photographers working in Africa. They had manned the New Yorker feed for a week so he told me about the process. From there, I made a pitch, including a link to my past work. I knew that I would be photographing two weeks of camp in July so I offered to make iPhone photos during that time. They liked the idea and gave me the green light.

How did your approach change shooting for Instagram with a phone, compared to the medium format film stuff you did before?

It was fun working with two very different cameras. The Hasselblad is beautiful because it asks you to slow down. This is what attracted me to it initially—the contrast it provided to my daily, digital work for the newspaper.

After so many years of shooting slowly with film at camp, shooting with the iPhone refreshed my eyes and allowed me to capture new things. The immediacy was great. Being able to shoot, tone [using the VSCO camera app], edit and post so quickly was really freeing.

Shooting with the iPhone also allowed me to get very close to people physically because it’s not as obtrusive. Being able to use a waterproof case and dunk it in water was also a really nice perk. I got in the pool for the first time ever this year to take pictures. It was so fun.

Did you form any particularly close bonds with any of your subjects?

I definitely had a few campers that I was really drawn to photograph, which you might notice by looking at the New Yorker posts.

The first week, I was really drawn to Bridget because she has this magic about her. I photographed her last year too. She’s constantly singing pop songs and twirling different colored Sharpies in her hand.

I also loved photographing Josh. I’m really fond of an image of him underwater, skimming the bottom of the pool. Josh doesn’t communicate as much verbally—more through body language and facial expressions—but there were moments when you could tell he was experiencing pure bliss.

There’s this stereotype that people with autism don’t make emotional connections with other people, but I watched many of these campers form very close bonds with their counselors and with each other. They may not express affection verbally or with obvious physical gestures, but it’s often tender and deep when it happens. Sometimes it’s just a fleeting moment, like when Spencer touched his counselor Laura’s hair. Or when Josh gently nuzzled Will, his fellow camper during the dance night. I tried to capture those little moments that challenge some of the preconceptions about autism. I wanted to try and translate the ways the campers were affectionate and find some sort of emotional thread through the images. The pictures needed to convey more than an individual camper displaying autistic behavior. I tried to show the relationships and richness of this summer camp.

What’s your overall goal for the project? When is it “finished”?

I’m so thankful that I was able to share the work through the Instagram feed. I feel like that helped me accomplish a goal I’d had of sharing the work with a bigger audience.

I’d like to create a book that includes both my film diptychs and the iPhone photos so I need to start learning about the book making process. I think that if I can pull that together, I’ll feel like the project has a finishing point.

Until then, I hope to continue documenting some of the returning campers as they grow up.

You can find Erin herself on Instagram at @erinbrethauer

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When you think early landscape photography, your mind inevitably leads to Ansel Adams, I bet. But if you were to go back in time and ask Ansel the same question, you would have undoubtedly heard the name Carleton Watkins.

Over 70 years before Adams was born, and just some 40 years after the dawn of photography itself, Watkins was one of the first to define what landscape photography meant as a genre. After moving west from upstate New York during the Gold Rush, Watkins lugged a massively primitive glass-plate negative rig into the Yosemite valley, where he photographed its majestic landscapes and mining scenes. These photographs were some of the earliest examples of conservation photography; the imagery Watkins captured help cement Yosemite’s status as a national park in 1864.

The clarity and technical perfection of these images is astounding, considering the limitations of mid-19th century photo technology.

Coast View off Mendocino, negative 1863; print about 1866, Albumen silver print

The J. Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles is a major holder of Watkins’s work—fitting, because his favorite subject was always California. So it is exciting that the museum has made 80 high-resolution Watkins images available online as part of their new Open Content initiative—more images than any other photographer. And according to the Getty, there’s much more to come.

You can dive into the nearly 600 photographs included in the first batch here.

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How does a photographer today say anything new about a place when every inch of the civilized world has been Instagrammed or Street Viewed to death?

That is a question that frames Irina Rozovsky’s work. Her personal projects have taken her to Israel, Cuba, her native Russia, and corners of her adopted hometown of New York City—cultures that carry the weight of history and well-trodden visual landscapes. Therein lies the challenge.

“You tell people you photograph in Cuba and they think you’re some National Geographic wannabe. Or you say Israel, and they assume you’re photographing Palestinian children or Israeli soldiers. In Russia they think you’re photographing post-Soviet decay,” says Rozovsky, who doesn’t think the “travel photog­raphy” moniker describes her either. “My photos are personal experiences of a place,” she says. “Because every place is so recognizable now, you probably know a location without my showing you landmarks,” she says. “We’re already on the same page, and that allows me to go beneath the surface. The place is secondary, but not inconsequential.”

From One to Nothing

Rozovksy began to hone this approach during a 2008 trip to visit cousins in Israel—a sojourn that became an intensive two-week photographic journey. “I got there and it just felt massive,” she says. She burned through 20 rolls of the medium-format film she’d packed, warranting an emergency resupply. A Tel Aviv shop called in a rush order from New York’s B&H photo shop; the film arrived in a few days. “I bought it on the spot for three times the price,” Rozovsky says. “I just knew.”

Her instincts proved correct. The dummy book layout she created from 90 rolls of exposures in Israel caught the attention of the German art book publisher Kehrer Verlag. With a book deal, Rozovsky returned to Israel two years later for another week of shooting. The result was One to Nothing, a 2011 monograph whose only reference to Israel’s turbulent political life is the sly joke of its title, framing the country’s history of conflict as a match whose score is deadlocked at 1-0.

The book offers a meditative look at everyday life in a country whose individuals are often overshadowed by the nationalities, races, and religions to which they belong. Rozovsky finds quiet moments where the country’s dramatic landscape, diverse humanity, and urban vitality come into focus. But it’s easy to miss anything that directly signifies “Israel.”

“My grandmother said, ‘You went to Israel and you couldn’t even photograph the Wailing Wall? You call yourself a photographer?!’” Rozovsky says.

The book was very well received; photographer Alec Soth named it one of the Top 20 Photobooks of 2011 in his year-end review.

Prior to her Israel trip, Rozovsky had set her sights on Russia, where she lived as a child before she moved to Massachusetts with her parents at age 8. When she returned as an adult, she didn’t find the rigid, crumbling, cold Soviet society her family had talked about—her photos from that unseasonably hot summer are sunny and youthful. Her next stop post-Israel was Cuba, another opportunity to explore her heritage from a new perspective. In Cuba, she notes, “political and social situations shaping people and their behavior felt like a tangible thing. Cuba’s a very unique place, so it felt like meeting someone you know from a previous life.”

Closer to home, Rozovsky has been working on In Plain Air, a series of portraits in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where she has pursued the same kinds of connections that underpin her work abroad. “To relate to another person, just for a second—that’s the only thing I’m really interested in,” she says. “Every photo I make that’s not of a person has something in the frame that’s standing in for a person.”

Sometimes she looks back at herself, alone in unfamiliar territory like Cuba, and marvels. “In the best scenarios you’re so taken by the photograph you forget everything else. You don’t think about danger—there were situations where I can’t believe I was by myself with a camera—because the moment is so powerful,” she says. “It’s a good feeling.”

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