Photographer #455: Neil Krug

Neil Krug, 1983, USA, is a photographer and director based in Los Angeles. Together with his girlfriend, now wife, Joni Harbeck, he founded Pulp Art Book, a collection of photography and commercial work in limited edition prints, books and films. In 2011 he released the LP-sized Pulp Art Book: Volume One with images of Joni shot with polaroid film years past its sell-by date. The narrative photographs remind us of spaghetti westerns and the artistic expressions of the 60s and 70s in B-movies and on LP covers. Pulp Art Book: Volume Two is expected to be released in June of 2012. This time the Poliziotteschi films were a major influence. Neil has created a vast amount of CD / LP covers for bands as My Chemical Romance, Scissor Sisters, Ladytron and The Pierces. Among his commercial clients are Warner Bros. Records, Warp Records and Burton Snowboards. The following images come from the portfolios Ladytron - Gravity the Seducer, Pulp Art Book: Volume One and My Chemical Romance.

Website: www.neilkrug.com

Photographer #453: Deborah Luster

Deborah Luster, 1951, USA, is a photographer based in New Orleans, USA and Galway, Ireland. In 1988 her mother was murdered by a hired killer. In 1998 it led her to start the project entitled One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana in which she photographed inmates of three Louisiana prisons. The photographs were published in a monograph in 2003 together with texts from poet C.D. Wright. She photographed each person as they presented their very own selves. The entire archive consisted of tens of thousands of portraits and she has given +/- 25.000 wallet-sized prints back to the portrayed. Her recent body of work, Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, was released as a monograph in 2011. It consists of images that function as an archive of historical and contemporary homicide sites in New Orleans. She researched city police homicide reports and photographed the exact locations of the murders. "By approaching cityscapes through the disorienting context of homicide, the work disturbs the deep crust of stereotypical visual interpretations of New Orleans." Her work has been exhibited on numerous occasions, mainly in the USA. The following images come from the series Tooth for an Eye, One Big Self and Rosesucker Retablos.

Website: www.deborahluster.com

Photographer #448: Rania Matar

Rania Matar, 1964, Lebanon/USA, is a documentary photographer who was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the USA in 1984. Her career started as an architect before studying photography at the New England School of Photography. She concentrates mainly on women and women's issues as identity and religion both in the US as in the Middle East. In 2009 she released the book Ordinary Lives and this spring her second monograph, A Girl and her Room, will be coming out. This series, inspired by her eldest daughter, focuses on teenage girls within their own private spaces. Both the forthcoming book and her younger daughter were the inspirations for her latest body of work entitled L'Enfant-Femme (the Child-Women). She portrays young teens and pre-teens without giving them instructions apart from not smiling. Due to the freedom the girls have to pose in their own way; they portray an array of emotions and clues to their true self. The angst, confidence and/or body language reveal their sense of selfhood and the developing sense of womanhood. As the teenagers still fluctuate between being a child and a women, Rania asks herself whether "they are meant to see themselves as little girls, teenagers or as young women?" Since 2002 she has also been taking photographs of her four children showing the various stages of their lives. The following images come from the series L'Enfant-Femme, Christian Arabs and Family Moments.

Website: www.raniamatar.com