Anything Photography

Traveling America in Search of Community

In an age of increasing social media–driven isolation, what does community look like in America?

That’s the question photographer Alec Soth and writer Brad Zellar set out to answer when they started roaming the country in 2012. Over the next two years, the pair traveled together for weeks at a time, showing up at dances, festivals, and other intimate gatherings to look for signs of social life. In Soth’s exhibition and book, Songbook, which was published by Mack in December, he shows what they discovered—a mix of nostalgia and strangeness that feels distinctly American.

Mongolian Disco | Sven Zellner

Genghis Khan, the famed Mongolian ruler, and his many descendants once ruled over the largest contiguous empire in human history. Gifted with such large expanses of land, the Mongolian's nomadic tendencies remained in the people's cultural DNA for centuries. Even today, at its much reduced size, the country remains four times as large as Germany—and contains fewer than three million inhabitants. In today's cramped and crowded world, such ample space would seem to offer the hope of continuing these long-practiced customs.

Yet a boom in the mining industry—sparked by a rush for resources like coal and gold—have radically changed the economic and cultural complexion of this once traditional country. Over the past decade, Mongolia has been transformed into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Not surprisingly, this wild material growth has come with an attendant rise in inequality and even more strikingly, an increasingly urbanized lifestyle. Whether for those at the bottom, or those few at the top, Mongolia is no longer defined by its wide open expanses but by its dangerously dirty and crowded cities.

Portraits of 'Pretty Chickens' Highlight the Animal's Elegance

The chicken doesn’t have the best reputation. Even self-described animal lovers sometimes make an exception for the ordinary, obnoxious, strange-looking chicken. New York photographer Tamara Staples’ portraits of fabulous, elegant chickens help to give this bird the positive attention it deserves. In the same manner that fancy pigeons are often photographed, Staples presents a variety of chickens seemingly posing before her with magnificence, drama, and grace. The pictures are breathtakingly beautiful, with perfect lighting and rich, textured backgrounds.

“Distant Natures”

Sudden Flowers

In 1999, Eric Gottesman travelled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to photograph the experiences of children orphaned by AIDS. Sudden Flowers is the collective that he formed with an original group of six children. All of them were between the ages of eight and eighteen, and all of them had lost both parents toAIDS. None had been allowed to attend their parents’ funerals. “Each of them had horrible stories to tell, fantastically disturbing, like tragic fairy tales or Biblical fables,” Gottesman recalled.

Drawn By Light: Tracing the History of Photography

Exhibition at The London Science Museum

The Media Space at London's Science Museum hit the (photography) exhibition circuit at speed when it opened in 2014 with Only in England, featuring work by British great Tony Ray-Jones. Its pace and quality continues to impress with its latest offering: Drawn by Light, an exhibition celebrating some of the treasures from the world's oldest surviving photographic society.

The Royal Photographic Society, founded in 1853, has amassed over a quarter of a million images and 8,000 items of photographic equipment—and it continues to expand. The material of this wide-ranging exhibition is drawn solely from this immense archive, which reaches back to the very beginnings of photography. What makes Drawn by Light so remarkable is how it reveals the lines of continuity between contemporary photography and the earlier practitioners of the art. As this exhibition makes clear, the versatility, imagination and innovation that fuels today's photography have always been impulses shaping the medium's diversity of genres and applications.