Tall Poppy Syndrome — an exhibition of photographs by Amy Stein and Stacy Arezou Mehrfar opening this week at ClampArt:

In 2010, American photographers Amy Stein and Stacy Arezou Mehrfar embarked on a month-long road trip throughout New South Wales—Australia’s most populous state. They were interested in investigating “Tall Poppy Syndrome.” Is the syndrome even real? Can it be documented or observed? Stein and Mehrfar set out to explore quintessential Australian life and find what evidence they could of the existence of this phenomenon. They spent their days meeting and photographing everyday Australians—from schoolchildren in their plaid uniforms to young surfers playing at the beach to grandmothers meeting at their social clubs—all the while learning about the relationship between the group and the individual within Australian society. The resulting photographs in “Tall Poppy Syndrome” present their findings.

The exhibition runs until February 16th — for more information about the show go to ClampArt’s website here.

Bejamin Lowy—Reportage by Getty Images for TIME

“Photography is my passion, my calling, and my means of livelihood. It is how I provide for my family and send my children to school. Now Instagram and Facebook want to take my hard earned imagery — imagery that at times, I and others have risked life and limb for — and use it to generate income for themselves.

What they have done is signal the end and failure of what could have been a revolutionary social media platform for visual communication. Now, I must take a step back and reassess my place on Instagram.”

—Benjamin Lowy

UNFILTERED: Photographers react to Instagram’s new terms of service.

Will you be staying on Instagram?

TONIGHT at the Standard, Miami: The American Dream: Exploring Perceptions — with Magnum photographers Gilles Peress, Bruce Gilden and Paolo Pellegrin.

A Cover for the Ages

Last week, during one of the worst storms in the city’s history, the staff at New York Magazine was relocated from their downtown offices, which had lost power, to a temporary office in midtown to produce its issue. At 3 p.m. on Tuesday, editor-in-chief Adam Moss called an emergency meeting to start brainstorming ideas to fill out a lineup for an issue that would go to press on Friday.

The challenge was to come up with an entire issue in 48 hours that would not only encompass different photographic approaches, but memorialize a moment in time. As director of photography Jody Quon and her team started brainstorming photographers—work by Jeff Liao, Pari Dukovic, Joseph Rodriguez, Christopher Griffith and others would ultimately appear in the issue—she knew there was one picture that had to be made.

“We needed to show New York from the air,” she said. “We had to make that picture: the delineation of the lights on and off.”

On Wednesday, Leonor Mamanna, a photo editor at New York Magazine, called the Dutch photographer Iwan Baan on the off chance that he’d be in New York. (He is based in Amsterdam). Baan is a superb photographer of urban architecture from all perspectives, including the air. Baan’s work first appeared in the magazine last year.
Mamanna and Baan connected around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. In an email from Haiti this morning, he wrote “Getting to the heliport and getting a car and gas was the most difficult! It was an hour flight to Manhattan, one hour over the city and another hour back, freezing cold, without doors in the heli.”

It takes superb skill to make a picture over the city, out of a helicopter in pitch blackness. How did he do it? “I’ve done this shot of Manhattan many times. So I knew how I wanted to show the two cities,” he wrote. “A pitch black Manhattan and a vivid and thriving city. At the bottom left you see the glowing Goldman Sachs building and WTC (a construction site with power where the rest of Manhattan doesn’t have it!) under construction. I think it shows what’s wrong with the country now also—a crumbling infrastructure and the place where, literally, the power is and who’s prepared”.

The resulting photograph, which came through to Quon and her team on Thursday morning, was magical. “We knew we had something to place in the cover template,” she said.

It’s rare to see a view of Manhattan that is so evocative and so new—a single image of the city that tells so many stories. This picture was taken in a moment of crisis for New York, but it will become one of the most iconic, most timeless photographs of the city.

—Kira Pollack Director of Photography, TIME, Nov. 5, 2012

Read more about the cover on NYMag.com.

Stephen Wilkes for TIME

Storm surges flood the streets during low tide in Milford, Conn. See more Instagram photos from Hurricane Sandy here.

Baby With Tractor at Sunset (vandalized Cerney/Sun Kim sculpture.) Phoenix, Arizona, 2009. (photo: Stephen Chalmers)

Andy Adams of FlakPhoto works almost exclusively in the virtual world of contemporary photography. Institutions like the RISD Museum of Art have taken notice of his work, calling upon him, to curate an installation and accompanying online exhibition to compliment its most recent show America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now.

See more photos here.

From Caleb Cain Marcus’s new monograph, A Portrait of Ice, to be released Sept. 30, 2012 by Damiani.

Loos-en-Gohelle #02607, 2009

A new retrospective of the work of Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on July 28, looks at vistas on the verge of change.

See more photos here.

benlowy:

Gharyan, Libya | July 23, 2012 In a dusty detention center, Illegal migrants from Niger wait to be processed and receive travel papers, enabling them to be repatriated via a UN chartered plane. Libyan authorities have been increasing hostile to African migrants and the threat of deportation includes transportation via a truck through the blisteringly hot Sahara. #iLibya #photography #photojournalism #documentary #hipstamatic #magnumfoundation #emergencyfund #libya #tripoli #migrants #african #detention (Taken with Instagram)

On July 24th, Antonio Bolfo’s opening of “IMPACT: Life on the Housing Beat,” will debut at The Half King.

Operation IMPACT is an NYPD program that takes the youngest, most untested officers in the department and ships them to the most violent and dangerous neighborhoods of New York City for a full-scale plunge into “The Job.” 

Part field training, part trial by fire, these officers confront some of the most vicious criminals in the country on a daily basis.  This photography project follows one IMPACT unit consisting of 30 rookies assigned to housing projects in the South Bronx, one of the poorest and most notorious neighborhoods in America.  They are supervised by newly-appointed rookie sergeants, who have at least 5 years of experience as police officers themselves. 

But with the current economic crisis forcing the NYPD to slash overall budgets – resulting in dwindling resources – IMPACT has been forced to recycle these demoralized officers, extending the remaining policemen in the unit indefinitely.  Because advancement is usually possible only after an IMPACT stint is finished, this situation further deteriorates already low morale.

Despite this, the brass at IMPACT have demanded an increase in arrests, asking discouraged officers to do more with less.  Regardless of their raw status and conflicting responsibilities, these rookie officers have caused crime to plummet to record lows, leading the precinct with arrests and summonses.  Many criminologists directly attribute Operation IMPACT to New York City’s 21st century revival.  But the focus on arrests comes at a price: sacrificing community policing, which leads to a tense relationship between the neighborhood’s beleaguered residents and the over strained cops.

Pictured: Officer Olivero walks across two Patterson project buildings June 2009 in Mott Haven neighborhood located in South Bronx, New York City.  The ledge is extremely narrow and the slightest misstep could cause her to plummet to her death.

Read more here.