I have been fascinated by Elena Helfrecht’s work since seeing her MA project Plexus. She has the ability to make enigmatic and beautiful black and white photographs that evoke complex personal and collective histories. With her new ongoing series Unternächte she goes back to her native Bavaria to explore themes like death, family, rituals and female clairvoyance. The photos are evocative, powerful and unsettlingly gothic.

Eric Kunsman’s Felicific Calculus: Technology as a Social Marker of Race, Class, & Economics in Rochester, NY, documents the ongoing presence of a technology that is obsolete for many: public payphones. Kunsman’s photographs speak thoughtfully about the relationship between a city’s resources, and those who are impacted most deeply as public services vanish. The strength of the photographs lies in how they evoke an entire social and political landscape, one that affects people deeply through the geometry and forms of the space.

What I appreciate most about Gloria’s piece is her attempt to capture school life. Each scene, photographed eloquently, shows the hierarchy and social dynamics that occur between the students — which transcends cultures and countries.

I was moved by the strength of these women who traveled across boundaries and against great odds to find work that propelled their lives (and those who they love) forward. As a whole, this series exhibits stories of great resilience and the reality of many in our universal system of inequality: the need to leave the place they call home behind, and migrate for survival.

As an outsider who does not understand the context of British wilderness, it is difficult to fully grasp the meaning buried underneath; however, I am attracted to the worldview created by the photographer which owes its success to a choice of black and white. Viewers are invited to a mystical journey that is constructed by fragments of motifs. For those of us who live in cities, the city has somehow become a natural environment and the forest has turned into a heretical existence. In Japan there is an idiom called "On ko chi shin," meaning "He who would know what shall be, must consider what has been." The artist's attempt in this work echoes our subconscious mind as we try to figure out how to live in the future.

I choose Matthew Barbarino — not because his images necessarily are the best, but because they are honest, they are real. His friends are heroin addicts and he shows us their desperation, but also their love. The pictures are taken from an insider’s point of view, so we avoid any kind of voyeurism. We are right there with them, we are one of them. To me that’s what it’s all about — to connect the subject and the audience in a natural and humanistic way.

These portraits by Niv Shimshon stop me every time I see them. They are simple, direct, uncluttered, honest. Each of the people pictured here seems to project a sense of serenity and “belonging” right where they are — which says as much about the photographer himself as well as the subjects. There is a relaxed but solemn air to these “formal” 4x5 portraits filled with natural light and tack-sharp focus on the humanity of the people.