Herbert Weber is interested in dismantling some traditional codes of lecture and to reveal the unsettling factor that pervades our perception of a photographic image. Like an outstanding disciple of G.K. Chesterton, Weber creates sophisticated parodies related to some of the most conventional aspects of the photographic act. The most obvious: undermine the certainty with which we tend to differentiate between documentary and staged photography. In Weber’s work, both converge in a cheerful and unusual way.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 30, 2010

This series of images accompanied by text is part of a larger installation called “Je suis la frontière” (I am the border) which encompasses a growing archive of audio and visual documents that explore the complexity of living in the US – Mexico borderland. The whole archive constitutes a personal cartography of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, two cities that are at the same contiguous but divided by four international bridges. In her work, Vera seeks to challenge the limited and biased information that the media gives us about certain places in the world. She believes in approaching those places by listening to individuals, following their steps, and walking on the streets. She thus hopes to create a personal cartography of a place and to give presence to the voices and life stories behind the sometimes overwhelming statistics.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 27, 2010

Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010

Acapulco is a place where you can’t say no. Elvis Presley said it this way in a song dating back to 1963 that had become popular a year earlier after the release of the movie Fun in Acapulco. In this installation project, the Mexican artist Pablo López Luz not only sheds light upon the topographic vision of different architectural structures and urban landscape but also to the classical imagery of a place full of glamour that has been vividly immortalized by the cinema and advertising industries.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 15, 2010

Two photo series from Iraq by Julie Adnan. The first, Born In Prison, shows women with their young children, photographed in prison in Erbil, Iraq. The second shows installations made with survivors of the 1988 gassing of Halabja, using photographs of their deceased family members.

Selected by Yumi Goto on July 9, 2010

Khumbu, also known as the Everest region, is one of the three sub-regions of Sherpa settlement in the Himalayas. The region attracts visitors from around the globe; mountaineering and tourism has now replaced traditional trade and farming to become the backbone of the Khumbu economy and culture. The high Himalayan and inner Asian ranges have the largest areas covered by glaciers and permafrost outside the polar regions. The ice and snow provides important short and long-term water storage that serves more than 1.3 billion people in the downstream basin areas of ten large Asian rivers that originate in the mountains. Imja glacial lake, created only in the last century by a prodigious retreat of the glacier, is cited by researchers as a potential disaster for Khumbu: An outburst would sweep away many a downstream settlement, destroy infrastructures and jeopardize communities, and forever destroy parts of an ancient culture. There is very little documentation of the human aspect: How do Khumbu people perceive this threat? What change in climate have they experienced? What alarms them most?

Selected by Yumi Goto on July 5, 2010

I have photographed in rural Rajasthan for ten years now, in villages. Over the years I developed a relationship with the NGO Urmul Setu Sansthan, in Lunkaransar town, where I knew I could always stay when I was passing through. In 2003 they organised a Balika Mela – or fair for girls, attended by almost fifteen hundred adolescent girls from 70 odd villages. At the Mela, I created a photo-stall for people to come in and have their portraits taken, and then buy at a subsidised rate. I had a few basic props and backdrops – whatever we could get from the local town on our limited budget, but it was fairly minimal, and since it’s dusty and out in the desert everything would keep getting blown around anyway. Some of the girls who posed for these pictures also went on to learn photography in the workshops that we started in May of that year, and two years later they documented the fair themselves.

Selected by Yumi Goto on July 2, 2010