You can’t help but feel like you’re the last person on the face of the Earth when you look at the blurry, skewed and foreboding work by American  photographer Todd Hido. Well known for his photographs of houses at night, Hido’s landscapes are categorically different from his best hits; instead of a voyeur, you’re the lost soul. Take the leap to see more. Hido captures that inner mood of the sometimes depressing and surreal landscape contained in the northern states. I can always feel nostalgic about cold weather and the pleasant variety of loneliness the winter brings. If you see that moment, forget the tripod mounted cam- shoot through the windshield and give photographic impressionism a try.

But no, really, Matthew Yake’s series “237 Pieces of Trash Around the Bleachers” is anything but a trash collection. His photos are poignant, clear, and powerful. He’s got other equally awesome series including one of artists in their studios that holds it’s own against other interior powerhouse sites like “The Selby“.

New York-based photographer Alison Brady makes some pretty bizarre photos. Pretty and bizarre. The interesting and different perspective is what catches your eye; instead of a traditional beauty-in-the-person snap, these portraits give the car-accident-look- away urge while simultaneously pushing a strange narrative inside a beautiful anonmity. Take a look after the leap.

It’s worth mentioning that Alison Brady is also extremely accesible with regard to questioning her work. She encourages the viewer to infer their own titles/meanings and often will discuss her representation without any pretense.

Alison had a new book come out in November of last year entitled The Blind Barber. Having followed her work for years, it’s great to watch the progression from weird to weirder. In the world of the sometimes monotonous contemporary portrait, weird is great, and always will be.

The UK’s Matt Martin is a film photographer working out of Brighton. His work gives us a refreshingly intimate look at adventure, a subject that’s typically trampled to death by passionless snapshots, Matt shows us how to do it right. He’s also an extra hardworking and motivated young man, heading up The Photocopy Club, a series of DIY photography exhibitions aimed to take photography off of the screen and back into the hands of the people using one of the most accessible mediums – the photocopy. The next show opens in London on Feb. 3rd.
Much of this series of photos was taken from Matt Martin’s new double-zine Goodnight Neverland / Thank God I’m Forgiven published by No Fun Press.

Justin Clifford Rhody is the proprietor of Friends and Relatives Records, a Ypsilanti, Michigan-based music and zine label. I first became acquainted with Rhody through Smut, his powerviolence band, and through his eponymous acoustic project. He currently plays in (D)(B)(H) but has turned most of his creative energy toward photography. His photos capture the melancholy of declinist America; the decaying Fords in the moldering suburbs of the Rust Belt, the plastic-casts of statuary standing sentry over the overgrown lawn – the physical forms of our economic and spiritual malaise.

2012 looks to be busy for Rhody: a book of his photography, Sliding Glass Door, is slated to be published this spring by Bathetic Records,  a solo exhibition of Rhody’s photography opens at Skylab Gallery this March in Columbus, Ohio, and Rhody has an exhibit with the painter Peter Shear planned for the summer in Bloomington, Indiana.

In the meantime, Rhody plans to continue touring the states with his slideshow and to revisit Guatemala, the setting of a few of the photographs found after the jump.

Curtis Mann is a destroyer. In the world of contemporary photography, there are very few who venture into the realm of the beauty in destruction.  Mann’s technique involves bleaching C-Prints with certain areas masked out to avoid the manipulation of chemistry. Curtis finds thousands of photographs based on keywords of Middle Eastern wars, poverty and snapshots and tries to break the original photographer’s intention of conveying reality based recordings of events. While photojournalism has always yielded stoic and objective artforms, Mann reasserts the ability to place yourself in the middle of the chaos.

Light, shadow, and the human figure feature prominently in the recent works of photographer Dusdin Condren. Whether looking at an arm amputated by shadows or a woman posing Lee Miller-like in the striated light of a nearby window, there is a certain surreal, but serene viewing experience to be had with these photographs. The sometime use of black-and-white certainly increases this special effect.  

Delaney Allen‘s photographs seem like studies in transience, each snapshot capturing a split-second in the movement of some natural phenomenon. Smoke, fog, mist — these are the restless subjects that Allen looks at through the lens, as all the while they shift and transform rather than stay still for their respective portraits.