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"Double Tide", Sharon Lockhart's 2009 film about the arduous process of clam digging in Maine is a meditative look at landscape and physical labor. The film, comprised of two 45 minute shots, one at sunrise and the other at sunset, observes the lone ritual of a young woman searching for clams in a murky tide, part of a slowly disappearing tradition. Shot entirely from the same angle, we watch as the woman slowly moves across the screen gathering shells -- often with difficulty -- while following the recessing tide. During the 90 minutes of the film, we are drawn into an encapsulated landscape and one person's relationship to it, bringing to mind both a tradition of early American Romantic painting as well as performance art from the 60's and 70's. Sharon's work often focuses on the sensitivity of human relationships, and here we see her exploring that relation with nature. Demanding us to observe a single picture over the course of the film, we're brought into a state of contemplation not only regarding the representation of nature but also what it means to wield it. Throughout the film the demands of the woman's labor remains checked by the sense that natural processes remain beyond our control. The woman's work unfolds only as her body and the tide will allow it. On occasion we hear the sounds of jet planes passing overhead or motor boats going by, and even though they indicate humanity's broad presence in the most remote places of the world, within the context of the film these noises feel like dwarfed, futile attempts to preside over the natural forces. What really stands out about Lockhart's work, however, is that she keenly observes simple actions and induces reflection about these scenes as individual images. While many photographers attempt this, she succeeds by asking the viewer to pause and consider every moment as its own. By doing so, we begin to examine what it is that we are really seeing.

Just opened on November 19th: Invisible: The Crisis of LGBT Youth Homelessness by photojournalist Samantha Box The Sanctuary for Independent Media Upstate in Troy, New York From the Sanctuary's website: Samantha Box, a photographer based in New York City, was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1977. Having worked for many years in the media - first at the New York Post, a daily newspaper, and later at Contact Press Images, an international photojournalism agency - she decided to attend the International Center of Photography in 2005, where she pursued a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies. For the past 4 years, she has dedicated herself to photographing homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth in New York City. Box says: "In 2005, disturbed by the silence surrounding this issue and seeking to put a face on this little-known crisis, I began photographing the residents of Sylvia's Place (MCCNY Homeless Youth Services: Sylvia's Place), New York City's only emergency shelter for homeless LGBT youth; its 30 beds comprise over half of the shelter space specifically designated for the upwards of 8,000 homeless young LGBT people in New York City. Using the shelter as a “home base”, I have spent countless hours with these young people, bearing witness to hidden and intimate aspects of their existence: working as a prostitute on “the stroll”; crying at the grave of the mother that left them too soon; kissing their new boyfriend; spending a last Mother's Day with children that they will never see again; moments of introspection." The Sanctuary for Independent Media is in an historic former church at 3361 6th Avenue in north Troy, NY (next to Albany) (The Sanctuary hosts screening, production and performance facilities, training in media production and a meeting space for artists, activists and independent media makers of all kinds. Call (518) 272-2390, email info@MediaSanctuary.org, or visitwww.MediaSanctuary.org for directions, hours and more information.)

This Wednesday, Japanese born, New York based photographer Yuichi Hibi will be lecturing at the International Center of Photography as part of the School's ongoing Photographers Lecture Series. Whether its New York, Shanghai, or his native Japan, Hibi's photographs conjure the isolation of urban spaces at night and grapple with the alienation of an outsider. His black and white images key up contrasts of light and dark and illuminate unnerving corners and silhouette mysterious strangers. Hibi's work has the lingering qualities of some of his Japanese predecessors, Yoshiyuki Kohei, Daido Moriyama, and Takuma Nakahira, who worked in the Are-Bure-Boke (grainy, blurry, out of focus) style. But Hibi's images also take root in his cinema background. They evoke the mood of film noir and recall the seedy environs of New York from Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and John Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy." The lecture will be held at the School at ICP, 1114 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036 on Wednesday, December 1st at 7 p.m. If you cannot attend the lecture in person, ICP will be streaming the event live online at http://lectures.icp.edu/live/ For directions or more information visit: http://www.icp.org/events/2010/december/01/photographers-lecture-series-... To see more of Yuichi Hibi's work please visit his website: http://www.yuichi-hibi.com/

Photography has long held an intrinsic relationship with war. As early as the 1860s, photographers such as Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and George P. Barnard all directed their photographic efforts to memorializing — and often monumentalizing — the transitory scenes of the battlefield. So, shouldn't there be a natural, if not necessary, place for such a photographer at a modern-day war reenactment? London-based photographer Jim Naughten (b. 1969), whose exhibit "Re-enactors" is currently on view at Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, through December 18, 2010, proves that there is. For the past two years, he has followed some 20,000 re-enactors who gather annually in Southeast England. Using a small wedding tent as a portable studio, he took many of the attendee's portraits while also photographing the fantasized front-line mêlées.

Inspired by Richard Avedon's In The American West, Naughten's portraits present isolated figures taken out of their environment. As a result, the subjects and their attire provide the viewer with the only available visual cues and context. Each portrait subject takes on the appearance of yesteryear as they role-play British infantrymen, US Medics, civilians, and Schustzstaffel (SS) Officers, among others. This 1940s mystique is only heightened by Naughten's use of a muted color palette, which recalls the limited color gamut of Autochrome Lumière, an early color photography process. The titles of each subject, along with the details of his or her garb, become evidence to the scrupulous details that re-enactors go through to bring back the past. What serviceman, for example, would be without his spoon?

Naughten also documents the re-enactors' vehicular artillery in the field. Through post-processing, he is able to remove the external environments and enhance the shadows cast by each truck, tank, and automobile. Placed against a light white background, these objects once used for mass destruction are now shown for their aesthetic value—similar to the affect of Raphaël Dallaporta's Antipersonnel series.

Also included in the exhibition: one of Naughten's panoramic views of the battleground, full of glorified combatants, smoke, and pretend gunfire. This photograph and his other combat-zone panoramas can be seen as historical citations while also existing in the contemporary milieu. His subjects, in other words, are not actual militiamen but rather tableaux vivants. In another reference to the past, the print itself appears especially light, as if it were decades old and bleached by the sun.

During the past few years there has been an uptick in news media questioning the veracity of wartime images. (See: "New Doubts Raised Over Capa's 'Falling Soldier'" and "In an Iranian Image, a Missile Too Many") Given this, Naughten's intentionally staged photographs of re-imagined war become all the more timely. They may very well give new meaning to the term "theater of war."

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"Re-enactors" is on view at Klompching Gallery through December 18, 2010. Signed copies of the "Re-enactors" book are also available for purchase through the gallery.

The work of Peter Puklus gives a silent and thoroughly contemporary comment on one of the questions photography brought into discussion of visual media since its invention. Puklus' thinking and acting involves photography and video art's relation to the 'classic' arts like painting. With the miniaturisation of electronic devices the integration of digital cameras into mobile phones was archieved in 1995. Since then taking pictures became omnipresent in more situations than ever before. When using the camera phone consciously Peter Puklus has references to Dutch paintings on his mind.

He prefers classical motifs like the nude and still life and realsises them in the framework of the daily life with the closest friends, using the mobile phone as an unobtrusive imaging device. The resulting pictures of the New Paintings aeries are defined by the display of self confidence of the portrayed nude woman, subtle story-telling with the help of still life elements and the 'old-masterly' sombreness. Thanks to the low resolution and imperfections of the camera phones a vibrant grain structure in the blowups of Peter Puklus' pictures adds a reference to some of the early photographic printing techniques like the dry-plate process from the late 19th century and thus relates Puklus' work to those of Pictorialism. The photographer Peter Puklus demonstrate a very personal way to 'quote' from the history of painting as well as from analogue photography, but he uses 21st century digital technology to make contemporary statments about his perosnal envirment. Most of his pictures are accompanied by videos with the same subject set in the same interiors documenting the formation of his still pictures, thus adding another sophisticated level of refelction to his body of work and the ongoing debates about origins and references of the art of photography. Inga Schneider and Horst Kloever