WILLIAM LAMSON takes a road trip every year in search of modern American landscapes, but, says the 28-year-old Brooklyn-based photographer, “you don’t always find things to shoot when you’re out driving around.” Which is why a series of “self-portraits,” in which Lamson figures more as prop than subject, seemed the perfect side project. “So much of photography is design–arranging objects in space,” he says. Using a cable release both to trip the shutter and divide the frame, Lamson made the images in this photo gallery with a Fuji six-by-nine rangefinder camera and Superia 100 print film. (“It’s like $1.79 a roll,” he says, “the cheapest Fuji makes.”).
Looking East, Portraits
Rinpoche boy, Bylakuppe, India, 2001. STEVE McCURRY has spent the past 25 years shooting documentary articles for publications including National Geographic, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. This month, Phaidon Press will publish Looking East, a selection of McCurry’s portraits, nine of which are presented in this gallery. Unlike most portrait photographers, who tend to rely on large-format cameras, McCurry travels light and fast, with a Nikon 35-millimeter. “It allows me to shoot quickly, in adverse conditions, when there is little time to work,” says the 56-year-old New York-based photographer. “And it’s much less obtrusive.” The effect is a lucid realism most famously seen in the jade stare of Sharbat Gula, who as a young Afghan girl appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985.