‘Reservoir’ by Michael Walker. Buy now.

‘Dogs of Teotihuacán’ by Michelle Loren. Buy now.

Feature Shoot has opened a photography store! After a decade of showcasing thousands of emerging and established photographers, we’ve launched Superfine Prints, a growing collection of imagery from some of the most popular and pioneering artists featured on our platform. We’ve always cared about preserving the value of physical prints, and we’re thrilled to make this step from your screens into your homes.

“We often confuse it (melancholia) with nostalgia but it is in fact altogether different,” explains photographer Sebastien Zanella. “Melancholia is a suspended state where we are able to observe the world from a distance. Not too happy, not too sad, just as it is. A moment where we are struck by the immensity of what is in front of us, and our inability to change any of it.”

For the last three decades Dr. Floarea Ciupitu has been a family doctor in Gangiova, a village in south-west Romania. Bucharest based photographer Ioana Moldovan followed her through her daily life, and her photo series A Country Doctor and Her Calling is both an inspiring example of a doctor’s devotion to her profession and a means to raise awareness of the challenges doctors face when working in rural communities in Romania.

Frida, adopted

Sula, available for adoption at AZK9 Rescue

Rumple, available for adoption at Animal Haven

When the photographer Sophie Gamand first pitched her Pit Bull Flower Power book to publishers, she faced resistance. One suggested, “Nobody cares about pit bulls.” Gamand is familiar with this sentiment. Over the four years she’s spent photographing the misunderstood dogs, she’s learned some painful facts: about one million pit bull type dogs die in shelters each year because they do not find homes. Approximately one out of every six hundred is adopted. In the United States, a pit bull is euthanized every thirty seconds, due in large part to an unwarranted stigma fed by biased and negative press. Abuse and neglect effect hundreds of thousands of individual animals. But at the same time, Gamand has also discovered another truth: families around the world have pit bulls they love and cherish.

When the Australian photographer Kasia Sykus traveled to New Zealand for two weeks, she chose 35mm infrared color film in part because of its rarity and unpredictability, traits they share with the feral landscape. “I felt little a tiny speck in a giant, open wilderness,” the artist remembers. Even when she happened upon the occasional farm animals, they skittered away, leaving her behind in the vast, sprawling terrain.

Coots

Underbelly

Wave No. 1

According to an old Cheyenne Native American myth, the world began with only water and animals. Most of the animals lived in the sea; however, the birds took to the sky. Unable to land, the winged creatures grew weary and plunged to the sea floor in hopes of finding solid ground. Finally, the courageous coot brought a bit of mud to the surface.That mud expanded and widened until, at last, it became the Earth.

Coots also appear in the works of Seattle photographer Jessica Cantlin. Her pictures recall that time before time, leaving space only for the essentials: water, wind, snow, rain, and fog. In dark and dreary surroundings, she finds singular moments, hidden from the hustle and bustle of human life. And while everyone else stays indoors for fear of “bad” weather, she’s out searching. “Often I have my kids in tow, and they are yelling at me to get back in the car or move on,” she admits. “I have to tune it all out: my children yelling at me from the car window and the anxiousness that stirs up inside me when I am cold and wet and want to give in. When I can separate myself from the elements emotionally, that is when I get the shot.”

Claire Rosen. Imperial Moth Caterpillar with Imperial Blue No. 5043, 2017.

Claire Rosen. The Budgie Feast, 2014.

Claire Rosen. Still Life Study in Lismore Gold.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” no less than Albert Einstein observed. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, and giving birth to evolution.”

Imagination holds the key to possibility, the very impetus that has made humankind a miraculous species. Within the infinite expanses of the mind exists anything we can dream up at any time. It is here, in this netherworld that we take flight, creating something out of nothing, and potentially bringing it to life.

In her exhibition, Imaginarium, at United Photo Industries, Brooklyn, earlier this year, American photographer Claire Rosen reminded us of just how vast our ingenious flights of fancy can be. Combining a selection of images and installations from the series Fantastical Feasts, Birds of Feather, Nostalgia: A Study in Color, The Traveling Mouse, and Persephone’s Feast, Rosen took us into a storybook world that we won’t soon forget.

Malick Sidibé. Un jeune gentleman, 1978.

Malick Sidibé. Nuit de Noel, 1963.

Malick Sidibé. Mon chapeau et pattes d’eléphant, 1974.

Malick Sidibé (1935–2016) was a master of the form, a singular visionary whose photographs tell the story of the liberation, self-determination, beauty, dignity, and pride of his native Mali in the heart of West Africa.

Born in the village of Soloba when Mali was still a colony of France, Sidibé hailed from a family of herders who worked the land. His natural propensity for art made him the first member of his family to attend school: the Institut National des Arts de Bamako, in the nation’s capital in 1952.

In 1955, be began an apprenticeship with photographer Gérard Guillat-Guignard; he opened Studio Malick in 1958. His timing could not have been more fortuitous for Sidibé and Mali were coming into their very own at the same time. As a member of the Mali Federation, which included Sengal and the French Sudan, the nations achieved independence from France on June 20, 1060, after a period of negotiations. On September 22, Mali left the Federation and was on its own.

The spirit of freedom is evident throughout Sidibé’s work. Honing in on the youth culture of the times, he captured the joyous energy of the first generation of liberated Malians on the beach, in the clubs, at sporting events, and in his studio. In every photograph he created he found the heart and the soul of his people and the result was nothing short of beautiful.

A rickshawala, with the help of his daughter, tried to cross a flooded road in Ramu.

“I am documenting what’s around me not only as a photojournalist, but also as a victim,” Jashim Salam says. In Chittagong, Bangladesh, where he lives and works, rising water levels during monsoon season have left houses and places of business below water. “It started very slowly, six or seven years ago,” he tells me. “The water is rising year by year.” Water World is his ongoing record of the people and lives affected by the floods.