Prior to the arrival of Zak Waters‘ Birdmen, I was wholly unaware of pigeon racing. My grandfather kept pigeons for awhile near the end of his life, and I feed dozens of pigeons who roost in the neighbor’s roof tiles and hang around my neighborhood for most of the year. And my mother in law looks at them and remarks what good eating they are, but racing them? I had no idea. Not that I remember, anyway.

In 1980, the Sunday Times Magazine sent Raymond Depardon to Glasgow, on an assignment to show the wealth disparity in Glasgow. After many years photographing in the desert—the Algerian war, liberation forces in Chad, the Nigerian desert, etc.—he found little interest in the discrete displays of wealth around the golf courses and fancy parts of town, and instead found himself drawn to the slums: children playing in the streets; drunks getting there or already passed out; proud, downtrodden women pushing prams; all of it against the backdrop of wide boulevards and solid buildings from Glasgow’s earlier boom.

The assignment was never published, and Depardon shoved the Kodachrome 64 slides in a box and forgot about them.

On April 18, 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police, residents took to the streets to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Devin Allen was there, with his camera, capturing life in his West Baltimore neighborhood before, during, and after the Baltimore Uprising, and A Beautiful Ghetto is the result.

David Freund‘s Gas Stop: the Gas Station in American Life and Landscape: 1978-1981 was a long time (and a lightning strike) in the making. He made the photographs over a 3 or 4 year period 40 years ago, and only a chance, fairy-tale-type meeting with Gerhard Steidl brought the project to light, in the form of an impressive four volume set, 574 photos over 720 pages, with short essays by Feund at the end of each, in the quality that we expect from Steidl productions. 

A Plain View is a new-ish body of large format photography from skateboarder cum actor cum photographer Jason Lee, shot over 3 months (25 days of shooting) on a 5000 mile tour of Texas. If information in Will Gillham’s Afterword, “On the other side of everywhere else,” is correct (and I have no reason to think it’s not), it looks like Lee started out at his home near Denton, took 287 northwest to 83 and wiggled around into Spearman, then south through Lubbock and Midland/Odessa and west to Van Horn, then Southeast to Victoria, and Northeast up to Liberty, TX, and then back up to Denton, sticking to small state highways and farm-to-market roads, exploring the small- and ghost-towns that dot the wide expanses of Texas.