New York photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York next month called Assembled Realities. I just heard about it through CityLab.

Here’s a bit of background on his work:

Pushing the boundaries of traditional documentary photography, Liao (b. 1977) creates large-scale panoramas by combining multiple exposures of the same location taken over the course of several hours. The resulting composite photographs are often fantastical; complex, hyper-real views that no single shot—or the eye—could capture.

And here’s two more of his photos:

For higher resolution versions, click here.

I love how his photos begin to distort reality and how they focus your attention – in many cases – on New York’s vibrant street life. I thought you might all enjoy them as well.

Yesterday, I discovered a Jerusalem-based Italian photographer by the name of Vittoria Mentasti. She has an ongoing project called “A Woman With Two Names”, that’s exploring the identity of Canada’s Inuit community in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Click on the photo below to see the entire gallery.

Here’s her language on the project:

"Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is a city of 7000 people surrounded by tundra and the sea. The only way to get in or out of Iqaluit is from the air. I was interested in the cultural identity shift the Intuit community is experiencing and its consequences. The community, especially its younger members, are trapped between two worlds; they are losing touch with their past and are headed towards an uncertain future.

The process of forced assimilation carried out by the Canadian Government and the Church during the first half of the 20th century, deprived the Inuit of their social and spiritual customs. The transition away from their nomadic roots to modernized living has led to alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment; symptoms of a society that is floating between its past and present.

Photographing off-moments of everyday life, I was looking to depict the sense of isolation, their ancestral connection to a harsh land, and the feeling of not belonging to “The South”, the way Inuit refers to the rest of the world.”

As one of the most remote and sparsely populated regions in the world, it’s easy to overlook what’s happening here in our country. But there are real problems in our north. In 2011, the Globe and Mail published a Focus Feature on Nunavut where it asked: Is Nunavut a failure of Canadian nation building?

"The rate of violent crime per capita in Nunavut is nine times what it is in the rest of Canada. The homicide rate is around 1,000 per cent of the Canadian average."

I’m not an expert on this matter, but it seems like everybody is picking up on the same phenomenon. We’ve created an in-between society. A society that’s completely ill-equipped to compete in the modern world, but that’s too far removed from its roots to turn back now. They were nomads and now they’re not.

This is hugely problematic and it’s only going to get worse. Already we’re seeing rising income inequality within “The South.” The returns to being smart are being amplified and twenty somethings with a killer app are turning down billion dollar acquisition offers.

What do you think this does to the north? I’d bet it makes it much worse.

In light of my upcoming trip to Detroit, I thought I’d share a (photography) book that was recently recommended to me called The Ruins of Detroit. It’s by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. You can check out some of the photos here.

The imagery is absolutely incredible and I really like their description of the project. Here’s a part of it:

"Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city’s ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire."

I particularly like the last line: “…remnants of the passing of a great Empire.” When I look at their pictures, I like to try and imagine what those spaces would have been like teeming with people. Do you think anyone, at the time, could have possibly imagined that those good times were going to end? 

Clearly most did not, because look at the money that was spent on what are beautiful buildings. As derelict as those buildings are today, each one of them was presumably built with economics in mind. Developers were making money, tenants were paying rent and people were occupying the spaces. Now look at them.

There’s something really powerful about witnessing this kind of abandonment, particularly because it feels so recent. It’s one thing to look at relicts like the Coliseum and dismiss it as being eons ago. But this wasn’t that long ago. For me, it’s a stark reminder of how ephemeral things in life can be. Just because you’ve got it today doesn’t mean you’ll have it tomorrow.