Feature Shoot spotlighted Mahesh Shantaram’s photos of “the colorful remains of over the top Indian weddings.” Excerpt: “I have been documenting wedding sets and little associated details at weddings because I find them to be fascinating metaphors of my country’s penchant for order and chaos; colour and noise; and the peculiar sense of taste and design or the lack thereof.”

Link: http://www.featureshoot.com/2011/09/mahesh-shantaram-photographs-the-colorful-remains-of-over-the-top-indian-weddings/

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La Lettre de la Photographie reviewed the book Proud Flesh, a collection of Sally Mann’s photographs of her husband, who suffers from muscular dystrophy. Excerpt: “Sally Mann has had her husband Larry pose for her for six years, documenting at the same time the evolution of his illness, a dystrophy brought about by the progressive weakening of the patient’s muscular cells until they die. In these elliptic compositions, each part of his body appears: a back and a hand, a seated bottom, puny thighs, a sex, an imperial torso, a dangling arm, a quiet face which evokes that of someone who has died. It seems that Sally Mann wanted to immortalize the charms of each of his members before the illness took them away.”

Link: http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/4135/sally-mann-proud-flesh

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Conscientious showcased Andrew Emond’s photos of defunct industrial facilities in Canada and the U.S. The images, though of bleak subject matter, are quite beautiful.

Link: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/10/andrew_emond/

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Bryan Formhals of LPV Magazine, an online and print magazine featuring contemporary documentary and fine-art photography, posted my photo essay about my grandmother’s struggle with dementia. He noted that it’s a difficult subject, and he’s right: It is. Painful, too.

Link: http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/09/kristina-feliciano-claudina/#1

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Savannah Spirit, who writes the blog for the New York chapter of the ASMP, posted this terrific bit of advice from Dorothea Lange: “One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.”

Link: http://sharpernewyork.blogspot.com/2011/10/one-should-really-use-camera-as-though.html

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Though he is not strictly a fashion photographer, Erik has collaborated with many important designers, including Giambattista Valli, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Valentino, Rodarte, Haider Ackermann, and Jean Paul Gaultier, of whom he once produced a series of 24-karat-gold-leaf portraits at Gaultier’s Paris atelier. For January to August, Erik compiled eight new bodies of work created during the corresponding months of 2011. In addition to documentary images from his childhood (“Chisholm, Minnesota”) and his portraits of contemporary artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Gabriel Orozco, and Kiki Smith, the book also includes the new landscape series “A Return to Giverny” and Erik’s recent German works, “Tremblant Vielfache.”

And for all you night owls, there’s an afterparty at the Soho Grand from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. It’s sure to be fabulous. Make sure you get that disco nap in!

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Julie Grahame at aCurator featured Leland Bobbé’s gritty b&w photos of “New York City’s Seamy 70s”—specifically, of the Bowery and Times Square. The images had been tucked away in Bobbé’s archives and are, writes Julie, “virtually unseen.”

“The Bowery was the end of the line for many,” Bobbé says in the blog post. “Some of these shots were taken shooting from the hip, pre-focused to 6′, with a 28mm lens without looking through the viewfinder so I wouldn’t be noticed. My intention was to capture the grit and personality of a unique period in New York City history.”

Link: http://www.acurator.com/blog/2011/07/leland-bobbe-new-york-citys-seamy-70s.html

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LIFE.com posted a gallery that looks back at the early days of Betty White.

Link: http://www.life.com/gallery/62931/betty-white-back-in-the-day?xid=liferss#index/0

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Joerg Colberg announced the latest Conscientious Portfolio Competition.

Link: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/07/announcing_conscientious_portfolio_competition_2011

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Britain’s The Telegraph reports that the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is adding a photo gallery that “will chronicle the history of photography from its invention in 1839 up to the 1960s. It will be refreshed every 18 months with emphasis on different themes each time. Photographs Gallery launches this autumn with two exhibitions, one will trace the career of Victorian portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron and the other will show the significant works of street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8647528/VandA-to-open-photography-gallery.html

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Feature Shoot presented selections from Bronx Boys, a new monograph by Stephen Shames. Published as a “photo ebook” by FotoEvidence, it features Shames’ photos, taken from 1977 to 2000, of a group of boys growing up in a tough NYC neighborhood.

Link: http://www.featureshoot.com/2011/07/stephen-shames-bronx-boys/

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Aperture’s Exposures blog reports that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art named Zoe Crosher one of its Art Here and Now artists and has acquired nine images from the LA-based photographer’s “The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois.” Each year, LACMA chooses two artists for this prestigious prize. This year, Mark Flores was also chosen.

Aperture link: http://www.aperture.org/exposures/?p=11242

LACMA’s blog, Unframed: http://lacma.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/art-here-and-now-new-acquisitions-by-zoe-crosher-and-mark-flores/

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PhotoShelter wrote about “Social Media for Photographers.” An excerpt: “After interviewing about 30 photographers about their social media use over the past year or so, I’ve noticed that there are two camps: people who use it effectively and are seeing real results, and people who don’t really know why they’re wasting so much time on something that doesn’t seem to be working.”

One photog, for example, uses Twitter “to connect mainly with publishers and other photographers. Facebook is a place where he initiates dialogs with people with the goal of establishing a trusting relationship with existing and potential clients. LinkedIn, he says, is a regular source of assignment work.”

Link: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2011/07/social-media-for-photographers-lets-get-real-for-a.html

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Inside Facebook is not a photo blog but is still worth a look, if only for fun. This week, for instance, it listed “The 25 Most Liked Pages on Facebook, Summer 2011” and Vin Diesel not only made the list but ranked higher than Beyoncé (!).

Link: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/07/20/the-25-most-liked-pages-on-facebook-summer-2011/

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Alison Zavos, the photo editor of Feature Shoot, has posted a selection of photos by our own Fulvio Bonavia, who, as she notes, was named Photographer of the Year for 2010 by the Mobius Awards. You can read her post here.

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A purse that would go great with a little ranch dressing. Photo by Fulvio Bonavia.

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Nirrimi Hakanson is just a normal 16-year-old with big dreams. Really big dreams. This young Australian wants to be shooting for Vogue before she reaches adulthood. “Photography took my hands and led me to a personal paradise at age thirteen, and I’ve been self-taught and seeing life through a lens since,” she tells Alison Zavos at Feature Shoot. (I kind of had a Heavenly Creatures moment when I read that quote, but in a good way.)

The site has posted a bunch of Nirrimi’s photos, and I should warn you that if you have any inclinations toward feeling like an underachiever, you definitely do not want to see more of her work here.

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Photo by Nirrimi Hakanson. Who is 16 years old.

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In December of 2006, photographer Tim Mantoani began making portraits of renowned photographers holding one of their best-known images. It was a personal project times two: personal for him and for the photographer he was shooting. As he explains in a recent interview with Feature Shoot, “In some cases it is obvious which image the photographer would bring. For the most part, I leave it up to the photographer sitting for the portrait as to the image and the size of the photo. It can be very telling of how they see themselves as an artist. The images are career defining, iconic or images which they feel the most proud of creating.”

Mantoani started with Jim Marshall and Michael Zegaris and has since produced portraits of Walter Iooss, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Timothy White, Doug Menuez, Pete Turner, Mary Ellen Mark, and Elliott Erwitt, among others. All of the portraits are shot with a 20×24 Polaroid. “…The 20×24 format is magical and every photographer finds the process interesting,” he tells Feature Shoot founder Alison Zavos. “I don’t think I would have had the success I have in getting people to sit for me if I was shooting digital.”

Below, some samples from the Mantoani’s series. There are many more at his website.

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