By Claire O'Neill

Although public figures like Michelle Obama are striving to increase awareness about obesity in America, we rarely think about the issue of hunger, which also plagues our backyard.

For the past five years, photographer Michael Nye has been consumed with this issue. His exhibition "About Hunger and Resilience" includes images and audio of 50 people from across the country -- either recalling or currently feeling the pangs of real hunger. The exhibition is currently on display at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and will tour other locations throughout the South. To learn more about Nye's campaign against hunger, see this profile by independent producer Mary Beth Kirchner.

The Picture Show did a brief Q&A with the photographer.

Picture Show: Have you always been a photographer?

Michael Nye: I practiced law for 10 years before pursuing photography full time. ... My transition from law to photography was gradual. I remember seeing a photography exhibit in Houston, Texas, while I was in law school -- photography of Imogen Cunningham and Paul Strand. I walked away very curious and excited about what I saw and felt. This excitement has never subsided. I am self-taught using Ansel Adams' technical books as a guide. ... I took a one-year sabbatical that turned out to be permanent.

Read more after the jump!

Continue reading "The Many Faces Of Hunger" >

By Steve Goff

I am a gardener - pure and simple. Almost everything about my garden delights me, and that is why I am so intrigued with this body of work that I have explored for more than a decade. I am striving to convey my experience of the garden that is rich with a luminous light, an earthy smell, a vast range of delicate sounds, and an absolute sense of serenity. The soft dreamy mood in these images invites the viewer to drift with me into serene, spiritual places surrounded by the magic and beauty of nature.

Steve Goff is a Professor and Chair of Photography, Art and Mass Communication at Odessa College. He has been awarded the Aid to Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council and the Fellowship Award in Photography, from the Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts. He is on the Board of Directors of the Texas Photographic Society. These photographs are all Type-C prints made with the Diana camera.

"100 Words" is a series in which photographers describe their work--in their words. What makes them tick? What makes a great photo? Film or digital? Positive or negative? Find out here. Curated by Graham Letorney

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By Claire O'Neill

In 1941, Ansel Adams was commissioned for a special project. Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior at the time (i.e., the federal department responsible for the management of federal land), asked the photographer to produce large-format murals of areas controlled by the department.

The project was cut short with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Adams' 200-plus photographs were shelved and forgotten. Now, almost 70 years later, the Department of the Interior has resurrected these murals in a 26-print exhibition in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, you'll have to make a reservation to see these big prints of the American West in person. But fortunately you can take a peek here! See more on the DOI Web site.

And tune in to Weekend Edition Saturday to hear Brian Naylor report on the exhibition.

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By Claire O'Neill

Almost exactly a year ago, we presented a series by photographer Daniel Shea that documents mountaintop removal -- a destructive process, namely in Appalachia, in which entire mountaintops are razed in the mining of coal. Since then, Shea has been working on a follow-up series called "Plume," which follows the coal up to Ohio, where it's burned to generate electricity.

As the first image denotes, coal-burning, in some cases, has proven so toxic that entire towns have been abandoned. In the case of Cheshire, Ohio, where Shea photographed, health threats were so great that American Electric Power bought out the entire town -- leaving it a virtual ghost town.

"My mom thinks I'm crazy," Shea writes in his blog, "for spending all my money and time traveling to what is otherwise perceived to be 'really terrible and boring places,' but these trips, coupled with cumulative days worth of time behind viewfinders and ground glass arranging elements in a landscape, provide perspectives that have profound impacts on the way I process information."

Considering the content, it feels a bit weird to say that Shea's work is beautiful. But there's a quiet, contemplative underpinning to his photography -- and a subtle yet powerful commentary, an inquisition, that smudges the line between art and politics. In a good way. You can see more of Shea's work on his Web site.

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Renowned rock and roll photographer Jim Marshall died Wednesday night at age 74. NPR's Felix Contreras has this remembrance. Listen to the radio story here.

By Felix Contreras

Jerry Garcia's grin, Carlos Santana's grimace, Jimi Hendrix's flamboyance and Duane Allman's intense gaze of concentration. Jim Marshall seemed to sense when it was coming and knew the exact instant when he should click the shutter.

It was usually because he shot from the stage, as close to the music as the members of the band, completely in tune with the glances and head nods that make up the wordless communication between musicians in the moment.

Jim Marshall's photographs were the reason my high school photojournalism class turned into a concert photography workshop as I spent hours in the dark room experimenting with my own manipulation of shadow and light trying to elicit the same excitement I saw in Marshall's shots. Those Marshall photographs made music come alive for me. Which is a funny thing to say since the music itself should make that happen.

Jim Marshall with his iconic image of Johnny Cash. (Courtesy of Tim Mantoani)

But I think I experienced those images like that because I was young, the music was new and the musicians played with an infectious sense of discovery. And Jim Marshall was there with his camera as witness.

While Marshall continued to snap photos throughout his career, I'm always drawn back to his work from the late 1960s and early '70s.

Looking back at his photographs from that era on news of his passing, I now understand that I had to live an additional 35 years to really grasp what is in them: not just the now-iconic images of rock stars that I saw as a high school music-lover.

I now see intimate portraits of young men and women celebrating the simple joys of being an age when we could still look at life with wonder and imagine the infinite possibilities of our dreams and aspirations.

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By Priscilla Villarreal

Whenever I hear about the discovery of a new fossil or dinosaur bone, the duration of my existence is thrown into perspective. That's the exact response that artist Rachel Sussman is hoping to prompt with her collection of the "Oldest Living Things In the World."

"My main driver for doing this work is really to have to think about sort of bigger-picture things -- everything from environment to existentialism," Sussman said over the phone.

She got the idea for this series during a trip to Japan five years ago. "I had gone to Japan with no real agenda -- just knowing that I wanted to photograph. And ... people kept telling me, 'You have to go visit this tree that's called Jomon Sugi that's 7,000 years old.' "

After a two-day hike, Sussman found the tree. When she relayed the story to friends back home she realized that if she combined her interests of photography and art with nature and science it would make a great series.

She usually contacts researchers and finds new subjects to photograph on her own, but sometimes she learns of them by chance encounters. At a New Year's Eve party, for example, she once met a biologist who had been on a team that discovered a certain bacterium. This biologist connected Sussman to another biologist, who told her about a lichen in Greenland, and suddenly Sussman had a series in the works.

"It sort of felt more like traveling back in time than just going up north," she said about Greenland. "The remoteness of it and the landscape there is so primal."

Traveling across the world can be a time- and money-consuming endeavor. When she is not living out of a suitcase, Sussman concentrates on her artwork or does professional work to pay for future trips.

She notes that many of the subjects in her photographs are smaller than what the viewer might think. For example, the Armillaria fungus is actually the world's largest living organism. But since it is mostly underground, it does not appear that way in the picture. Some of her subjects are found in fringe environments where almost nothing else grows. The Welwitschia, for example, is uniquely adapted to the Namibian desert and gets its moisture only from the adjacent sea. She finds a certain poetic quality in the subjects' ability to adjust to extreme environments.

At times Sussman has had permission to touch the plants, especially if they are in a public area. But occasionally, the locations of these plants are so secretive she has to convince scientists that she will be professional. In her blog, she notes that she had to promise the biologist connected with the clonal spruce in Sweden that she would not reveal its location and that she would take extra care while photographing it.

She hopes to photograph about nine or 10 more subjects for her series (unless, of course, there is a new discovery). She plans to photograph 5,000-year-old moss in Antarctica; to capture sea grass colonies in Spain that date back almost 100,000 years; and to document clonal shrubs in Australia and Tasmania.

Sussman's series is part of the "31 Women in Art Photography" exhibit in New York City. The exhibition celebrates 31 of the most inventive women in new art photography and can be viewed through April 10. You can see more of Sussman's work on her Web site.

Priscilla is an illustrious intern in NPR's multimedia department.

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By Claire O'Neill

I may be way behind the cool times, but this technique is way cool -- and news to me. It's called "through the viewfinder" photography, and it involves two cameras (both a twin- and a single-lens reflex) and a long tube. Reader Ninotchka Beavers wrote in with a link to her portfolio, which contains a lot of what she calls "TtV."

The photographer's contraption

You're basically using one camera to capture the world as it appears through the viewfinder of another camera. And, if you've ever peered through the viewfinder of a twin-lens reflex, you'll understand why it's worthy of a picture. It's like a filter that renders the scene distressed and vintage-y. But in order to take a picture of the viewfinder, you basically have to look at it through a tube -- with another camera.

Much like other experimental techniques -- such as lomography or pinhole-ography* -- this seems to be a pretty popular way of photographing. There are online tutorials that show you how to do it, and Flickr groups for sharing photos. I, for one, am delighted to have another way to geek out in my spare time -- and a new use for my dad's finicky, old TLR. You should try it and add your results to our Flickr group.

* A term coined this very second, all rights theoretically reserved by The Picture Show.

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By Ken Lamug

In a transient city such as Las Vegas, one thing is for sure: things change. If you've lived here most of your life, you know that Las Vegas is known for imploding the old, making way for the new. In many ways, this has affected how I view the city and how I try to capture its essence in my photographs. I walk endless hours down the Strip and in many of the "abandoned" areas of the city to capture moments, scenes, and invisible characters. I hope that one day, even if the city has once again transformed itself, that my images will remind us of who we once were.

Kenneth Kit Lamug, born in Manila, Philippines, is a photographer based in Las Vegas. He taught himself photography starting with a simple digital point and shoot and transitioned his way to film cameras. You can see more of his photography on his Web site.

"100 Words" is a series in which photographers describe their work--in their words. What makes them tick? What makes a great photo? Film or digital? Positive or negative? Find out here. Curated by Graham Letorney

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By Claire O'Neill

Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West would be the perfect illustrations to a Cormac McCarthy book. They have a surreal beauty and poetic emptiness that border on the fictional. It's as if this isn't the real West, but the West of tall tales and American dreams.

It's nice to think that there are still photographic mavericks out there, lugging around equipment of yore and carefully, slowly composing each frame. Varjabedian uses a large-format view camera, which heightens the romantic quality of his work. The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum thought so, too; it recently recognized his sixth and newest book, Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby, with the Western Heritage Award for "Outstanding Photography Book" of 2009. An exhibition of the photos was recently at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and will continue to travel nationally to select museums.

The series was made on a vast stretch of territory called Ghost Ranch, located 13 miles northwest of Abiquiu, N.M. The land has a long history and has seen dinosaurs, Pueblo American Indians, the Navajo and Apache, colonial Spanish ranchers, American wranglers and the Presbyterian Church.

Today, the 21,000-acre, 32-square-mile spread is a center for outdoor education and spiritual retreat, run by the Presbyterian Church. It was opened as a guest ranch in 1935 and has been a popular site for Hollywood films and artistic residence -- most famously the home of Georgia O'Keeffe. Later, under the direction of Arthur Pack, a pioneer of the conservation movement, it was treated as a working ranch but also a retreat that needed protection.

Varjabedian, a fine-art photographer of 35 years and director of Eloquent Light Photography Workshops, in Santa Fe, has been photographing the American West for some time. The Ghost Ranch (both the place and the series), with its evocative name and long history, encapsulates an ideal of the American West that is just as majestic on film as it is in fiction.

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By Claire O'Neill

In a 2006 lecture, photographer John Stanmeyer recounted a memory from Bali. He was eating breakfast on the beach with his wife, he explained, when a group of parents walked toward the water, carrying their children. In traditional Balinese culture, a baby's feet are not to touch the ground for the first few months of their lives. In this baptism ritual, parents lowered their children into the ocean tide, allowing their feet to touch the earth for the first time.

From Bali to Birmingham, the ceremonial use of water is something that can be seen all over the world -- because water is not only a physical life source, but also a spiritual one. It's the topic of Stanmeyer's latest photo series in National Geographic's special water-themed April issue.

It seems like a dream job, I told Stanmeyer over the phone, to travel the world for months on end, photographing religious ceremonies. But he reminded me that it's still work. "I feel the enormity of what I'm having to do," he said, "which is ... to show to 30 million or more readers the weight and measure of our human existence together on this planet interacting spiritually with water."

The April magazine is devoted entirely to the topic of fresh water -- environmental concerns and humanitarian threats, but also, as Stanmeyer explained, its cultural significance. It's a timely release, coinciding with World Water Day. Look for more photos from this issue in the coming weeks, including the works of Edward Burtynsky and Paolo Pellegrin. And if you're in Los Angeles, check out an exhibition of photographs from the April issue at The Annenberg Space for Photography.

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