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"Like most photographers, I’m fascinated by people in everyday situations,” said Steve McCurry, a photojournalist, to Publishing Perspectives. “The work I do is mostly wandering and observing human nature and human activity, working and playing and leisure time. As you’re walking around the streets of China, India, New York, wherever—it is fun to photograph people simply doing things.”

One of his long-term projects has been photographing people as they are reading. This week he published these images on his blog (Part I and Part II), and they are beautiful, quietly powerful for their cumulative heft. Mr McCurry captures hushed, personal moments—an old woman hunched over a little black book, some lovers on a park bench gazing at the same page, a man reading amid wreckage in Kuwait in 1991—revealing a universal intimacy. Reading "is a common link in our shared humanity," Mr McCurry observed, "a thing we all do that is regardless of where we are economically or socially.”

On Mr McCurry's own blog, he quotes Susan Sontag: "'The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality…' The same can be said for reading books."

Steve McCurry’s next book, "The Iconic Photographs", will be published in America by Phaidon in November

We just learned that Tim Flach, the photographer behind our wonderful "Extreme Dogs" photo essay, has been tapped to join the panel of judges for this year's Kennel Club Dog Photographer of the Year competition. With a modest submission fee of £3.50, donated to the Kennel Club Charitable Trust, anyone can enter (deadline: August 31st).

There are four categories to enter: Dogs at Work; Dogs at Play; Dog Portrait; Man’s Best Friend. Cute.

Speaking of dogs, if you have never heard the segment on "This American Life" about a man's brilliant idea for a cable channel devoted solely to puppies (no people, no talking, no plots; just puppies), then you should probably listen to it right now. Classic.

Over 15,000 people are still missing following the conflict that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s. In a video below Nick Danziger, a photographer, narrates a slide show of his images that document the work of recovering and identifying bodies and the families who are still seeking answers. In these photographs of skeletons, morgues and memorabilia, Mr Danziger chronicles the sad slog of making sense of what is incomprehensible.

 "Missing Lives", an exhibition of Mr Danziger's photographs, came about from a commission by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been working to trace missing men and women in the region since 1991. The show was in London in July, and goes on to Belgrade, Sarajevo, Pristina, Mostar, Strasbourg, Banja Luka, Brussels and Zagreb between August and November. In 2011 it moves to Switzerland, Canada and America. Dewi Lewis Publishing has also come out with an accompanying book of the same name.

Johnnie Shand Kydd started his photography career by taking documentary pictures of his friends, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sam Taylor Wood. Shot before these Young British Artists became famous, his observational black-and-white portraits went on to make his name. Forty-two of his works are now owned by London’s National Portrait Gallery, testament to his skill.

Over the past decade Shand Kydd’s cinematographic eye has roved further afield. A three-month visit to Naples in 2000 was the start of a long-term project to photograph the “siren city”, which cast a powerful spell over him. Fifty of the pictures that resulted have just gone on show at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London.

Founded in the 8th century BC as a Greek colony named after the siren Parthenope, Naples is a place of contradictions—grimy backstreets join stylish boulevards, crumbling buildings conceal elegant ballrooms. As famous for its pizza, pasta and rich cultural heritage as it is for the camorra, the secretive, mafia-like crime clan, Naples is a place where paganism sits alongside Catholicism, where darkness of mood and lightness of spirit go hand-in-hand, and where the passion of its residents make for theatre.  read more »

When I say they were beauties, I don’t mean the tall, super-slim, super-cool models on the catwalk at Frieda Weyer’s fashion show at Berlin Fashion Week last Wednesday. Weyer’s bridal and evening dresses were indeed superb, and a pleasant change from the usual casual street clothing Berliners’ wear on all occasions (even to the opera). But my fascination is for “Sibylle – Modefotografien 1962-1994”, a new book of fashion photography from the former East Germany, released with an accompanying Berlin exhibition just in time for fashion week. The women in these photographs captured a vision of the country that allowed for independent, emancipated, self-possessed and, yes, beautiful women (many of them models plucked from the street). It was a magazine that hinted at a world of possibility beyond the one that we knew.

Named for the prophetess in Greek mythology, Sibylle was an up-market magazine of art and fashion, published six times a year for decades. It was a trend-setter, the "Vogue of the East", despite its modest circulation of 200,000. Copies were limited in part because of the country’s shortage of raw materials, including paper, and the fact that its contents were considered somewhat provocative and avant garde, and so were politically suppressed. But the magazine's rarity had the effect of making it more precious. My mother managed to get a subscription, and I would proudly brandish copies of Sibylle on my train journeys from home to East Berlin, where I was a student in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  read more »

“Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art through March 2011, presents photography’s 170-year history through the lens of its female practitioners. Viewers are led through six chronologically curated galleries; one enters in 1850, traces the medium’s developments and finishes in the present. The show includes 200 works by 120 women artists of vastly different renown and practice culled from the museum’s private collection. Mostly forgotten photographers of historical import are shown next to some of the most famous artists of the 20th century. The scale is striking, the scope stunning. The exhibition’s curators—Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister and Eva Respini—spoke with More Intelligent Life about their curatorial vision.

More Intelligent Life: Was it obvious from the beginning that the exhibition would be arranged chronologically? Did you work this way, seeking out earlier works and moving forward in time?

MoMA: As with each of our collection installations, we consider many different options before settling on an organisational structure. In that photography is perhaps the only modern medium where it is possible to tell its history exclusively with work by women, we were fairly certain we wanted to do that from the start.  We did work on the galleries simultaneously, because what you do in one inevitably has an impact on what comes before and after.  read more »

“Smash His Camera” is a show of photographs by Ron Galella, a legendary paparazzo, at Clic Gallery in downtown Manhattan. Galella, the author of many books of photography and the subject of a recent HBO documentary, has been snapping celebrity pictures since the 1960s. The subjects gathered for this modest show include Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Lauren Hutton and others. Some of these snapshots are immediately recognisable.

Since most of the prints are affixed with a price sticker, it’s tempting to wander around the gallery for a crass game of price-comparison. A print of a senior Mick Jagger in summer whites goes for $1,800, for example, while $3,500 will net Andy Warhol posing with his camera. Prices for a Madonna or a Michael Jackson fall in between, at around $2,300. Woe to the celebs whose prints fall well short of an image of the elderly Jagger.

Galella clearly belongs to the old school of paparazzo. His photographs are candid but their intention is mainly to flatter. Images of Jerry Hall caught mid-sentence and Catherine Deneuve exiting a car make their subjects look casually glamorous, not pedestrian or invaded. If today’s paparazzi photos work to explode the idea that stars are a different species by showing them sloppily drunk, taking out the trash, or smashing a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella, Galella’s work takes the opposite tack. It burnishes the myth.  read more »

Foreign Policy has published a fine slideshow of pictures taken by teenagers in Kabul. These images are full of small pleasures, mundane exchanges and devilish smiles. They add depth and richness to a landscape otherwise viewed as a military map. In their ordinary humanity, they make life in Afghanistan less abstract, and remind us all of what's at stake.

The students of Afghanistan's Marefat School worked in partnership with picture-taking teenagers from Philadelphia's Constitution High School. An exhibition with work from both schools, “Being ‘We the People’: Afghanistan, America and the Minority Imprint”, is on display through September at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center and the National Museum of Afghanistan. An online component that launches later this summer will allow visitors to comment and make their own photo pairings (see www.constitutioncenter.org).

Leon Levinstein was a photographer's photographer, otherwise forgotten by time. But a new show of his black-and-white street pictures at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, deliciously called “Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players”, may help to revive is name. His photographs, according to The Economist, "are raw and energetic, with rubbish-strewn streets, stooped old men, fat painted ladies and posturing youths in tight jeans....These 44 images chronicle life as it is lived in the city: kinetic and rough, with little beauty but plenty of pride. Levinstein, who died in 1988, often shot his subjects up close and at odd angles. The result is often unflattering but affectionate, full of the small pleasures of the day-to-day. The gallery seems fragrant with cigarette smoke, cheap perfume and fried chicken."

Read this interview with Jem Cohen for Levinstein's own insight into his work, which includes such goodies as:

Well, it’s sort of a vicarious experience when you photograph. Because you’re always on the outside. They’re having a good time there, maybe a family, or a couple families, having a picnic, eating this fried chicken and potato salad and all that junk. And you’re on the outside, you know, trying to sneak a picture.

And:  read more »

The ability to control acts of "public disorder"—everything from a peaceful protest to more hostile civilian riots or even an act of terrorism—has been a concern of public officials across centuries, societies and cultures. But as security tightens once again in the wake of the attempted car bomb in New York's Times Square, we return to the inevitable question: is there ever an effective way for people to prepare for the unpredictable?

For Sarah Pickering, a London-based photographer who made her exhibition debut at the Tate Britain in 2007, the futility of trying to anticipate trauma is at the core of her work. In "Explosions, Fires, and Public Order" (Aperture, £25), a new book of work from 2002 to the present, Pickering offers a four-part chronicle of the meticulous planning involved when soldiers, firefighters and law-enforcement officials attempt to simulate scenarios of chaotic events.  read more »