Tyler Mitchell, a 24-year-old photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, aims to revitalize and elevate the Black body in his work by representing people in his own community as joyful and proud. Characterized by a use of natural light and candy-color palettes, his work visualizes a Black utopia contrasting with representations and experiences of reality, while offering a powerful and hopeful counter narrative.

The Lower East Side, one of the most densely populated, multiethnic, and modern places in the country, has been mined by photographers for more than 100 years. While late 19th-century social reformers attempted to show “how the other half lives,” later photographers had a different, and often more personal, relationship with the neighborhood.

Kate Petley’s image-making process is guided by a will to transform. Assemblages of cardboard, tape and other castaway materials are carefully placed into intensely lit arrangements and photographed. Images of recognizable patterns of corrugation and pitted surfaces undergo a startling shift when the photograph is transferred to larger canvases.

Contact proofs, or contact sheets, were vital to the practice of photography until digital technology made them obsolete. Photographers who used roll film first saw positive images of contact sheet, chose which frames to enlarge and kept the sheet as a record. A new and special exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art Special features rare photographs of iconic celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles and Groucho Marx, as well as historical moments.

The Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco currently presents “Michael Wolf: Life in Cities”, a survey celebrating Michael Wolf’s life and work. For over four decades Wolf, who died in April 2019, examined the layered urban landscape, addressing juxtapositions of public and private space, and anonymity and individuality in relation to history and modern development.

“Lost and Found,” a new exhibition of Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden’s work, is the result of a happy accident: the rediscovery of some 2000-odd rolls of 35mm film from Bruce Gilden’s early days photographing New York City, spanning from 1978 to 1984. The film had been relegated to filing cabinets at the time, yet in the summer of 2017, after a house move, Gilden found it again. These pictures are almost all made without the use of flash, which would become his trademark. As Gilden himself explains, “It’s Bruce Gilden before he really became the known Bruce Gilden.”

Through photos, words and multimedia, an exhibition on view at Bronx Documentary Center in New York, entited “Trump Revolution: Immigration”, documents the current U.S. president’s overturning of decades of American immigration policy and law, and its profound effects on American society and the lives of millions of immigrants.

E.J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949) remains an ambiguous figure in history. Following his death in 1949, eighty-nine glass plate negatives of portraits of female prostitutes from New Orleans’ Storyville district were found in his desk. All of the images were taken circa 1912 by Bellocq, who was a commercial photographer practicing in New Orleans. They’re currently on view at Deborah Bell Photographs in New York.

For almost forty years, French artist Sophie Calle has made work that exposes intimate experience to public view, using still images, video, film, books, performance and text. Her work has often drawn from difficult moments in her personal life. “In the process of turning these experiences into art, they somehow become a type of fiction,” she has said.

“Nocturne”, on view at New York gallery Edwynn Houk, marks the debut of several series of portraiture that artist Sebastiaan Bremer has been developing over the course of the past two years, culminating in the monumental triptych, “Storm Breaking Over a Valley, 2020”. Each unique image in the exhibition is characterized by Bremer’s meticulously hand painted white pointillist dots, however these three new series are distinct in the evolution of the techniques used, as he continues to push the bounds of his hybrid creative process.