Link: It’s Nice That : Illustrator Andrew Groves does weird, charming, fun things for some big names

Recurring motifs include the outdoors, tree stumps, magic and strange little men and there’s just the right mix of charm and weirdness which keeps his work fresh and interesting

Link: Maggie Steber’s 25-Year Quest to Photograph Haiti’s Beauty – NYTimes.com

To much of the outside world, the image of Haiti — when it pops up at all — is one of catastrophes, both natural and man-made. Violence, grinding poverty, flood, earthquakes all leave a lingering image of a benighted nation bereft of tender moments.

Maggie Steber thinks that’s nonsense — and she has the pictures to prove it.

Don’t be misled, they aren’t all tender quiet moments, the photos are…

1. a funeral
2. pilgrims
3. dancing
4. looting
5. a slum resident weeping
6. a presidential inauguration
7. a voodoo spirit of death ceremony
8. crying mourners at funeral
9. a schoolgirl
10. a dead man in an alcove
11. a country market
12. “when the man reached the shore, another policeman shot him in the head, and his body was thrown into the back of a truck.”
13. cart pullers resting
14. market day
15. homeless boys in voodoo temple
16. a boy
17. Haitians searching the rubble for valuables
18. residents of a state-run home for the aged, whose dormitory collapsed

Link: L E N S C R A T C H: Carl Corey

We are a country of entrepreneurs, self-starters, and determined individuals that make up the core of our American dream.  Long before the Fortune 500′s, there were mom and pop day-to-day desires to carve out a living, and a life on one’s own terms.  Carl Corey takes a look at those self-starters who have created family businesses in Wisconsin and have managed to stay afloat for 50 years or more.

Link: New York – Tokyo-Ga : Ensemble c’est tout | La Lettre de la Photographie

In solidarity with the recent events that have shaken Japan, the curator Naoko Ohta has conceived a large-scale photography project. One hundred photographers roamed the streets of Tokyo to take the pulse of this bustling metropolis turned gathering place.

Link: Raw File

Using tiny props, the Carmichael Collective has built a series of small remembrances for dead bugs they found around their office and on the street. The “Bug Memorials” project documents these shrines in photos and a short YouTube video.

Link: Revolution Revisited

Revolution Revisited is a project by 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner photographer Kim Komenich, now a professor at San Jose State University. In 2011, Komenich began relocating the subjects from his spot news winning essay from the People’s Power Revolution which overthrew Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and put Corazon Aquino in power.

The website features then and now image pairs, a longer essay about the revolution, interviews with the photographer, video stories and a database of over 500 outtakes from his coverage, which Komenich hopes will help to relocate more subjects from his coverage in the mid-1980s.

The site was produced by a class of multimedia graduate students in the University of Miami’s School of Communication.

Link: La Lettre de la Photographie

In the summer of 1964, San Francisco was ground zero for a historic culture clash as the site of both the 28th Republican National Convention (the “Goldwater Convention”) and the launch of the Beatles’ first North American tour. The young photographer Arthur Tress arrived at this opportune moment in the city’s history and found himself in the midst of large-scale civil rights demonstrations and chaotic political pageantry. With a unique sensibility perfectly attuned to this quirky metropolis, he set about to capture the odd spectacle of San Francisco.

Link: Raw File

Photographer Bieke Depoorter has been traveling around Russia and the United States asking random people on the street if she can sleep at their homes on and off for the past three years.

The result is a series of eerily intimate photos that capture the inside lives of people and families throughout these two countries.

Link: La Lettre de la Photographie

For over three decades Contact Press Images has promoted and distributed the work of some of the finest award-winning photojournalists and documentarians in the world

Link: TED/YouTube

Chip Kidd doesn’t judge books by their cover, he creates covers that embody the book — and he does it with a wicked sense of humor. In one of the funniest talks from TED2012, he shows the art and deep thought of his cover designs

Link: LightBox

The Overseas Press Club of America has just announced the winners of its annual awards. LightBox presents the work of the photojournalists who were honored by the OPC, and who will be further recognized tonight at the organization’s gala.

Photo by André Liohn

Link: LightBox

Although he is accompanied by a guide wherever he goes and has to request in advance where he wants to go, the daily life photographs that he has taken—often one-off shots made on the way to or from an event—provide a stark contrast to the highly orchestrated government news-agency photos that are more commonly seen out of North Korea.

White South African teens wrestle with an uncertain identity. An extreme right-wing group is teaching young Afrikaners to eschew Nelson Mandela’s vision of a multicultural rainbow nation. The fringe group Kommandokorps organizes camps during school holidays where Afrikaner teenagers learn self-defense and how to combat a perceived black enemy. The group’s leader, self-proclaimed ‘Colonel’ Franz Jooste, served with the South African Defence Force under the old apartheid regime. The teenagers are taught (brainwashed might be a more accurate term) that they are their own people — not South Africans but Afrikaners — and that they shouldn’t integrate in the new democratic South Africa.

This disturbing multimedia production about the racist, right-wing organization was awarded 1st Prize in Multimedia by World Press Photo. The story was made by Dutch journalist/videographer Elles van Gelder & Dutch photojournalist Ilvy Njiokiktjien in conjunction with their production company froginatent.com.

Link: NYTimes.com

A lot of people know about Syd Greenberg in China. Mind you, he hadn’t been back there since the mid-1940s, when he was an Army Signal Corps photographer assigned to the China-Burma-India theater of operations, documenting how American and Chinese Nationalist troops fought the Japanese.

Link: La Lettre de la Photographie

Through June 15, the gallery Magasin de Jouets in Arles will welcome three talented young contemporary photographers who confront their worlds, attitudes and practices through complementary pieces of work. Ulrich Lebeuf, Stéphane C. and Olli Berry give us the world as they see it

Link: LightBox

Twenty-five years old with a single camera body and lens in hand, Steven Rubin hitched a ride in 1982 to rural Somerset County in northwestern Maine and embarked on a project that would continue for more than 30 years.

Link: It’s Nice That

“I’ve always been attracted by the night, because it is the time when the most fascinating things can happen,” Alejandro said and that fascination is certainly evident in the cinematic feel of the final photos.

Link: LightBox

Columbia University has announced the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners—and they include Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini, whose picture of a girl reacting to a suicide bombing took the title in the category of breaking news photography.

Link: La Lettre de la Photographie

What better city than New York to exhibit a photographic essay on the citizens of these “megalopolises” where the population numbers in the millions. Martin Roemers decided to look beyond the urban West to Asian and Middle Eastern cities like Karachi, Cairo and Istanbul. Through these images, the viewer discovers that these bustling cities are also home to men.

Link: La Lettre de la Photographie

The final selection included JP Lopez ’ reportage on starving children in Guatemala, Colin Delfosse on military sites in Kazakhstan, and Misha Freidman on the tuberculosis epidemic in former Soviet states. Their work will be exhibited at the Bar Floréal in Paris in September 2012.