Best Modern Photographers of June 2022

In Vanishing Points, Michael Sherwin locates and photographs significant sites of indigenous American presence, including sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites and contested battlegrounds. The sites he chooses to visit are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. They are also actual archaeological sites where the sparse evidence of a culture's once vibrant existence has all but disappeared. While visiting these sites, Sherwin reflects on the monuments modern culture will leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our civilization will reveal about our time on Earth.

Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, The Day May Break is the first part of a global series by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt, portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. The people in these photographs were all affected by climate change, displaced by cyclones and years-long droughts. Photographed at five sanctuaries, the animals were rescues that can never be rewilded. As a result, it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed so close to them, within the same frame. The fog on location is the unifying visual motif, conveying the sense of an ever-increasing limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, despite their respective losses, these people and animals have survived, and therein lies possibility and hope.

This Peanut Portfolio Book includes one signed and numbered original photograph and one signed and numbered hardcover book, 40 pages, 18 color plates.

Aline Smithson's award-winning portraiture has been shown in numerous exhibitions and publications internationally and is held in many public and private collections. Smithson has also exhibited her portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London and was commissioned to create a series of portraits for the Smithsonian Art and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Fugue State asks us to think about the permanence of photographs. Both digital and analog images can be destroyed by time, and here, Smithson hastens the process herself. When has destruction been so beautiful?

If Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment reflects a situation perfectly in tune with the photographer's intuition, flawlessly combining the elements of composition and timing, then Ed Kashi's abandoned moment is the result of an imprecise instant of surrender.

This collection of photographs, made over a 40-year period, reveals imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy – the chaos of everyday life. Embodying photography's intrinsic power, they preserve moments that can never occur again in exactly the same time and space. When geometry, mood, and possibility unite to unintentionally create something new, the magical and fictional qualities of still photography capture the unplanned essence of existence.

In contrast to my journalistic approach of deep personal connection and keen observation, this work is about capturing the untamed energy of a moment with abandon.