1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair is one of the leading international art fairs dedicated to contemporary African art. It takes place at Somerset House, in London, until this Sunday October 8th, 2017.

American Christopher Rauschenberg is one of the heroes of contemporary photography. He is first and foremost a first-class artist, represented by the estimable Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon where he lives with his wife, Janet Stein. Stein is mentioned here because she is also a seemingly indefatigable second pair of eyes for Chris. Rauschenberg is the most generous fellow around, looking at any and every portfolio at the many reviews he attends. In Portland, he was one of the founders of The Blue Sky Gallery, a terrific not-for-profit space in The Pearl District.

After Une Ville Phantome, a series he continues to work on since 2013, French photographer Thiqbaut Derien presents his daughter Angèle discovering the “new world”.

Based on Japanese photographer Mikiko Hara’s recent book Change, this exhibition features twenty of her color photographs spanning over two decades from 1996 to 2009. Hara’s square color snapshots involve no noticeable high drama. Her portraits – men and women, adults, adolescents, and children are often alone hovering in the bay of everydayness: a schoolgirl at a train platform, mother and daughter asleep in a subway car, a middle-aged woman sternly looking off-camera. Although these scenes were shot in Tokyo and its suburbs, the settings and activities have an ambiguous quality, the images evoke emotion and mood through nuanced facial expressions and body language. Hara’s landscapes and still-lifes complement her portraits in an even more nonchalant style. They reflect the artist’s practice of accumulating fleeting moments in daily life.

When Elaine McMillion Sheldon was a young girl in Logan, West Virginia, her neighborhood was ripe with events that she would observe and write about. She loved writing, and wanted to be a journalist – journalism could be an avenue for her to go see the world, ultimately leaving West Virginia. She laughs at the irony – she resides in Charleston, West Virginia, now, with no want for leaving, and has done a lot of her work about and within the state, including Hollow, an interactive documentary about McDowell county, and most recently, Heroin(e), a Netflix original documentary of the opioid crisis in Huntington, West Virginia. Through her work, though, she reaches beyond the state, “The story of McDowell County is universal – anyone can relate to it.”

“We worry when you look hard at us, but we are also touchy about being overlooked,” then-Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson of Canada told a group of American students in 1963. The quote, reprinted in the June 10th issue of The New York Times of that year, still rings true today, especially as a Canadian like myself goes through thousands of images of Canada from the newspaper’s archives.

Robert’s focus on literacy goes back two decades as he has traveled throughout the United States “documenting hundreds of public libraries, large and small, old and new, urban and rural, in poor communities, and in wealthy ones”.  His book, The Public Library A Photographic Essay captures library across the country . As Bill Moyers notes in his forward, “Robert Dawson shows us in this collection what is at stake: when a library is open, no matter its size and shape, democracy is open, too.” The book includes a forward by Bill Moyers, an afterword by Ann Patchett, and essays, letters, and poetry celebrating libraries by Philip Levine, Anne Lamott, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, E.B. White, Isaac Asimov, Charles Simic, and others.