In the early 1990s, digital photography was just beginning to make waves, and few companies had caught onto the massive sea change on the horizon. In those years, digital cameras were available mostly to professionals, commanding high prices ranging from $1000 to $30,000. Many established brands continued to focus their energies on film.

Even back then, however, a man by the name of Doug Vandekerkhove knew something major was about to happen. In 1993, he founded ACD Systems International Inc., an independent image editing company for the digital generation. The next year, the first version of ACDSee gave users the ability to view and manage their digital files in a way that was previously inconceivable.

Living in Kenya’s Mau and Mont Elgon Forests are the Ogiek — one of East Africa’s last hunter-gatherer populations. The name “Ogiek” means “caretaker of all plants and wild animals,” in acknowledgement of their way of life: hunting wild animals, collecting fruit, and practicing beekeeping in the trees for centuries.

Their ancestral homeland, the Mau Forest Complex, home to 30,000 Ogiek, is the main water catchment area for numerous rivers that drain into five major lakes including Lake Victoria, the third largest fresh water lake in the world. In recent decades, human encroachment for agriculture, tea plantations, charcoal, logging, illegal and poorly planned resettling of other tribes have devastated the forest complex, making the area vulnerable to soil erosion and flooding.

In 2017, after eight years, the African Court of Human and People’s Rights’ decision recognized that the Kenyan government had violated the Ogiek’s right to their ancestral land, and demanded that the community was appropriately compensated — but the government has done little to pay reparations for their violations.

In December 2018, Slovak/Hungarian photographer Diana Takacsova was introduced to the Ogiek, through Minority Rights Group International, an NGO that worked closely on the court case. Here Takacsova shares The Ogiek, a story of identity, culture, resistance, natural resources as a political struggle and an interconnected ecosystem that influences the life of millions.

Cody Bratt is a San Francisco-born photographer with an almost uncanny ability to capture the glamour of pain. He’s one of those artists, like Rimbaud. Bukowski, or Lana del Rey, that somehow, some way, are able to portray decadence and loss in an irresistibly alluring and cinematic way.

Bratt has exhibited his work internationally at the Berlin Art Week, Brighton Photo Fringe festival and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center among others.

Love We Leave Behind is Cody’s first monograph, a series that serves as an “emotional documentary” that revisits the memories of a fervent, formative relationship from the past.

The series is captured like a road movie, portraying the ups and lows of that kind of love that is so passionate and self-destructing it’s almost impossible to quit. The work is meant to be taken as a recollection of unreliable memories, a portrait of those moments of broken promises and intimate secrets that only walls keep.

The series was a finalist in the 2016 Duke University CDS/Honickman First Book Prize and was included in Photolucida’s 2018 Critical Mass Top 50.

“There was a real sense of no future… I wanted to do work that addressed this sense of despair that I felt,” wrote American photographer Mimi Plumb on her new book, Landfall – published by TBW Books. As a collection of photographs taken during the early 1980s, the series offers a jarring yet illuminating insight into an American dystopia and the anxieties of a world on the brink of devastation.

Kay, ex Green Beret, 1983.

Carrie being made up for a drag ball in Harlem, 1984. .

Harlem Drag Ball, 1984.

The many expressions of identity that exist on the gender spectrum is a subject of tremendous depth and breadth, though it has largely existed underground in realms secreted away from the masses. It has given birth to a culture so innovative and rich that, 50 years after Stonewall, the underground has emerged and center itself with impeccable aplomb.

Over the past half-century, artists like Mariette Pathy Allen have been deep in the trenches, using their work to fight for dignity, respect, and rights — taking on the tyranny of ignorance, bigotry, and oppression.

In celebration, The Museum of Sex presents Mariette Pathy Allen: Rites of Passage, 1978–2006, a stunning survey of the artist’s archive that includes photographs, interview transcripts, personal correspondence, and materials from her career working with trans, genderfluid, and intersex communities over the past four decades.

The art of order is imperative to the human condition. We appreciate the beauty and simplicity of everyday life: rows of trees and pots placed in unison; pastel-hued doors and shutters built in perfect form; white walls, white gates and white fences guarding our homes and the contents within.

James Van Der Zee, Eve’s Daughter, c.1920
Gelatin silver print; printed c.1920, 6 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches

James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey with George O. Marke
and Prince Kojo Tovalou-Houénou, 1924
Gelatin silver print; printed c.1924, 5 x 7 inches

Picture it: Harlem, 1918. James Van Der Zee, 32, opens Guarantee Photo Studio on 135 Street just as the Harlem Renaissance was coming into bloom during the first wave of the Great Migration.

As northern Manhattan became the Mecca for Black America, Van Der Zee was there to record it all inside his studio and on the streets. James Van Der Zee: Studio, recently on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery, is a portal into the past, into a time when Black society thrived and set the pace for music, art, poetry, literature, dance — well, you name it.

Van Der Zee was no exception. He set himself apart by using painted backdrops and luxurious props in the studio to create elaborate tableaux for his subjects, and bathed them in sumptuous lighting to evoke a painterly touch, imbuing each photograph with the hand of the artist.

We’re thrilled to announce the Print Swap summer exhibition will open at the esteemed FOLEY Gallery in New York City’s Lower East Side in July! Launched in 2016, The Print Swap is a global project connecting photographers far and wide. Here’s how it works: all photographers are welcome to submit photos via Instagram by tagging #theprintswap. Our team of curators selects the best images to be part of the swap, and every participating photographer gives a print and receives one too. During our fixed judging periods, Print Swap photographers are also considered for our offline exhibitions. Submissions are open for the NYC show now through June 20th.

The renowned gallerist Michael Foley will curate the show, and the final exhibition will include twenty-five and thirty photographs from The Print Swap. Foley has been a leading figure in the fine art photography world for thirty years, serving at some of New York and San Francisco’s most prominent galleries for fourteen years before opening the FOLEY Gallery in 2004 with a focus on photography. As the “United Nations of the art world,” the FOLEY gallery now represents groundbreaking artists working across media and continents–photography, collage, drawing, cut paper, sculpture and more. Throughout his career, Foley has kept a keen eye on rising and emerging talents, fostering new generations of artists as an educator at School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography and as the co-founder of The Exhibition Lab, a study space for fine art photographers.

As a reminder, we invite all photographers to submit to The Print Swap by tagging #theprintswap on Instagram, but you can also email your submissions to [email protected] It’s free to submit, and selected photographers pay just $40 per image to participate. This covers printing and shipping in full. We’re also pleased to announce that going forward, photographers will be able to choose their prints. While it’s been exciting and fun mailing out your prints randomly over the last few years, we’ve decided to change things up and have you choose the photo you’d like to receive! To learn more, please visit our website, and follow along at @theprintswap for updates!

Man with the Black Hat, 2016
Archival print mounted between dibond aluminum and anti-reflective acrylic glass
59 x 59 inches (150 x 150 cm)

Etienne Rougery-Herbaut Harlem Twins, 2018
Archival print mounted between dibond aluminum and anti-reflective acrylic glass
31.5 x 31.5 inches (80 x 80 cm)

French photographer Etienne Rougery-Herbaut marks his U.S. debut with Cornerstone, a selection of photographs made on the streets of New York that present a timeless portrait of the people who embody the spirit and soul of the city.

As the country’s most epic point of immigration with no less than the Statue of Liberty to welcome new arrivals to these shores, New York has long been the point of entry for people from all around the globe. As ethnic enclaves generations deep have nestled throughout the five boroughs for centuries, a new scourge presents itself in the form of gentrification.

The systemic whitewashing of New York has had a devastating effect but as Rougery-Herbaut’s portraits attest, they preserve perhaps simply because they are New York. In Cornerstone, the inaugural exhibition at Brannan Mason Gallery in Los Angeles, Rougery-Herbaut paid tribute to the people who represent the heart and soul of the city, despite all efforts to eradicate their presence.

Here, Rougery-Herbaut shares his journey with us.