PJL: March 2014 (Part 2)

Features and Essays

George Steinmetz: Frozen City (The New Yorker) Most New Yorkers spent this past winter complaining about the harsh weather. George Steinmetz took on a more ambitious project: photographing the snowbound city from the seat of a two-person piston-powered helicopter

Lucas Foglia: New Wild West (Financial Times Magazine) When the photographer went in search of America’s old frontier, he found a divided land where cowboys struggle to make a living amid industrial-scale mining

Lars Tunbjork: Going Mobile (New York Times Magazine) Mobile home communities in the U.S.

Jason Vaughn: Hide (Slate Behold) Project documenting Wisconsin deer stands

Peter van Agtmael: Hope on the horizon for Choctaw Nation (MSNBC) The Choctaw Nation is a sprawling area in southeastern Oklahoma that includes nearly 11 counties and more than 11,000 square miles of vast farm and timber lands, stretching north from the Red River and the Texas border.

Thomas Prior: Valley of Ashes (LightBox) Willets Point, Queens may be part of New York City, but it looks like a totally different world

Vincent Cianni: Out, and Serving (New York Times) Project documenting gays and lesbians who have served in the U.S. military

Robb Kendrick: Coal (National Geographic) Documenting coal industry and consumption in the U.S., China, and India

Walker Pickering: The Band Marches On (CNN Photos) As a musician from junior high through college, Pickering was in step with his marching band and a part of the camaraderie the group developed. As a photographer for the last 10 years, he focused his camera on high school and college marching bands and traveling drum corps in Texas.

Vittoria Mentasti: At the edge of the Western world (CNN Photos) Mentasti traveled to Iqaluit, the remote capital of Canada’s Nunavut territory in the Arctic North. The only way in and out of Iqaluit is by plane, and one of the only roads that lead away from the city is called Road to Nowhere.

Tim Fadek: The Anger in Caracas (Paris Match L’Instant) Fadek spent three weeks documenting the anti-government protests in Venezuela

Alvaro Ybarra Zavala: Venezuela Unrest (Reportage by Getty Images)

Dominic Nahr: Fukushima, Three Years Later (Magnum Photos) Three years since the Fukushima nuclear disaster which occurred after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan

Q. Sakamaki: Three years later, Fukushima struggles to rebuild (MSNBC)

Q. Sakamaki: Nuclear Winter (Paris Match L’Instant) Japan

Ian Teh: Bangkok — The Most Visited City in the World (Agence Vu)

Andrew Newey: Hunting Honey, and Trying to Hide (New York Times Lens blog) An ancient tradition of hunting honey on Nepalese cliffsides is in danger of vanishing from excessive tourism — and even photographers

Hossein Fatemi: Iranian Mystique (Foreign Policy) Behind closed doors, the Islamic Republic’s famously restrictive laws relax — and a more permissive world thrives

Kaveh Rostamkhani: The Double Lives of Iranian Youth (CNN Photos) Much of Iran’s youth are living a double life today, caught in the middle of a culture clash between the East and the West

Monique Jacques: Istanbul’s Islamic Fashion (Newsweek) Twice yearly, Istanbul’s Fashion Week draws a varied crowd—from the religiously conservative to social liberals. Recent trends highlighted versatility, allowing the wearer to tailor designer outfits to conservative tastes.

Fabio Bucciarelli: Rojava, Syria — in the Land of the Kurds (LightBox) Bucciarelli spent three-weeks in Kurdistan in October 2013, just days before Iraq closed its border with Syria. He spent most of his time in a Syrian section called Rojava, which two million Kurds call home and where a de facto Kurdish government was established just one month afterward.

Andrew Quilty: Suffering on two fronts in Qabaait, Lebanon Part 1 | Part 2 (Guardian) The sleepy mountain town of Qabaait in northern Lebanon is at the centre of the world’s worst refugee crisis in decades. As Syrian refugees cross the border to escape conflict, they place a heavy load on the town’s stretched resources. In 2013, 18 Qabaait residents left their town to seek a better life in Australia, but all perished when their boat sank off the Indonesian coast. Photographer Andrew Quilty travelled to Qabaait and met the families still grieving.

Mosa’ab Elshamy: Mahraganat: Egypt’s Musical Revolution (Rolling Stone) Mahraganat, informally known as electro chaabi, is an Egyptian socially-minded, electro-rap mash-up that echoes these hip-hop ideals, created by and for an uncertain youth in the wake of a tumultuous, post-Mubarak Egypt. Elshamy has documented mahraganet’s rise, from the wedding halls that house its most popular shows to the humble cities that birthed its stars.

Samuel Aranda: Journey to the Promised Land (Panos Pictures) 2013 saw an upsurge in the number of African immigrants trying to make their way into Europe over the border fences that ring Spain’s African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla

Mads Nissen: Crimea’s Uncertain Future (Panos Pictures)

Emine Ziyatdinova: An Uncertain Quiet for Crimean Tatars (New York Times Lens blog) More than 20 years after her family returned from decades of exile to their Crimean roots, Emine Ziyatdinova wonders if the upheaval in Crimea will again force Tatars from their homeland.

Tom Jamieson: The Brutal DIY Weapons of the Ukrainian Revolution (Wired Raw File) The protesters who filled Maidan Square to battle the Ukrainian army and topple President Yanukovych often fought with little more than sticks, bats and sledgehammers. Their nasty homemade weapons are the subject of a series of portraits by photographer Tom Jamieson, and show how determined protesters were to either damage or defend against government security forces, depending on your politics.

Pieter Ten Hoopen: Testimonies from the North Caucasus (Agence Vu) The Caucasus Mountains located near Sochi, Russia hosted part of the Winter Olympics of February 2014. The same mountain range is also home to the North Caucasus, the site of Europe’s deadliest conflict.

Donald Weber: Pink Panthers (VII) This is a story about diamonds, thieves and the Balkans. All across Europe, a spectacularly inventive and elusive gang of jewelry thieves known as the Pink Panthers — have pulled off some of the largest diamond heists in history. To find the heartland of the Panthers, there is just one place where one needs to look: Cetinje, Montenegro

Articles

Questions About News Photographers in Syria Arise After Freelancer’s Death (New York Times Lens blog) The death of an 18-year-old Syrian freelancing for Reuters has led to questions about the work of local activists the wire service employs there as photographers.

Reuters Denies Ethical Allegations, While Some Syria Photographs Still Questioned (NPPA)

U.N. Denies Syria Image Was Faked (New York Times) A United Nations photograph showing a sea of hungry Palestinians awaiting emergency food amid the detritus of their bomb-ravaged neighborhood near Damascus has been retweeted more than eight million times in the past few weeks, becoming such an arresting image of the Syrian civil war that some blogosphere skeptics have suggested that it was digitally faked.

The photographer Chris Hondros who gave his life to tell the truth about Gaddafi’s Libya | Testament by Chris Hondros — in pictures (Guardian) Award-winning photojournalist Chris Hondros was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while covering the Libyan conflict in 2011. As a book of his images and writing is published, Jonathan Klein, CEO of Getty Images, shares his memories

Collecting with the FT: Martin Parr (Financial Times) The British photographer is on a mission to revise the history of photography. He talks about some of the extraordinary finds among his 12,000 books

Book review: Going Home by Muge (Conscientious Photography Magazine)

Witness: Lynsey Addario on the Syrian Border (PROOF) “What really strikes home and conveys the urgency [of the situation] is the image of Syrians pouring out of Syria.”

Witness: Andrea Bruce in Damascus (PROOF) Bruce writes on her Damascus photos which were published in the March issue of the National Geographic magazine

Juan Barreto on documenting the protests in Venezuela (AFP Correspondent)

In Garry Winogrand’s photos, an America of perpetual motion and bottomless hunger (Washington Post) The retrospective of his photographs is on view at the National Gallery of Art, between Third and Ninth streets along Constitution Avenue NW, through June 8. For more info, go here

Beyond Cartier-Bresson: A History of a Master’s Early Work (LightBox) A new retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work at the Centre Pompidou allows us to look beyond the Frenchman’s famous concept of the “decisive moment”

A Mystery Woman’s Eye on the World (New York Times) A documentary looks at the photographer Vivian Maier

War correspondent in Crimea, 1854 – a picture from the past (Guardian) Roger Fenton’s portrait of Times of London correspondent William Howard Russell

An Inside View of Arab Photography (New York Times Lens blog) Samer Mohdad was once told that “Arab photography did not exist.” This week he is part of an ambitious showcase of contemporary Arab photography at Houston FotoFest.

Mira Mexico: Louie Palu’s Conceptual Project About the War on Drugs (PDN)

Paul Reas’s best shot: a dad buying army wallpaper for his son (Guardian) ‘The little boy became a soldier and went to Iraq. I wonder if it was because of the military wallpaper’

Featured photographer: Natalie Keyssar (Verve Photo) Keyssar is an American photographer based in New York

Featured photographer: Farhad Berahman (Verve Photo) Berahman is an Iranian documentary photographer based in the Middle East and the UK

Interviews and Talks

Lauren Steel on becoming a photo editor | Advice to young photographers (Columbia Visuals) Steel is the Managing Editor at Reportage by Getty Images

Peter diCampo (Africa is a Country) Instagramming Africa

Sara Naomi Lewkowicz (American Photo) An unflinching look at reality has led Lewkowicz to a bright future

Photography Editor Krishna Sheth talks about her career (rebeccalmcclelland.com)

Mikko Takkunen is an associate photo editor at TIME.com. Follow him on Twitter @photojournalism.