NYC-based photographer Robert Caplin shot a male stripping class called Boylesque 101 in Brooklyn for the New York Times.

About a month ago I was on a shoot and received a phone call from my editor pal at the New York Times Styles Desk about an assignment the following day. Given that I was in the middle of another shoot, the call was quick and all I really remembered was the words “burlesque class tomorrow in Williamsburg”. I said, “sure, send me the info.”

The next morning I took a more detailed look at the assignment slip and realized it was a little different than I’d envisioned:

Instructions: The rise of “Boylesque” — that’s burlesque dancing for guys. There’s a class happening this Sunday in Williamsburg. Need scenes from the class, there will be 8 pupils. ***Please creatively frame the photos so that there is no blatant nudity.****

Ohhh…. BOYlesque, not BURlesque! And avoid blatant male nudity? Oh my, what did I get myself into?

Continue reading and see more photos on Robert’s blog.

Brooklyn-based photographer Tristan Wheelock shares photos from the Brooklyn Invitational Custom Motorcycle Show.

Last weekend was the Brooklyn Invitational. Lots of folks wrapped in leather and bikes covered in chrome.

The folks that gather are equally as interesting as the bikes they ride in on, sometimes more so. For me the scene is what gets me out to an event like this.

All types and styles were represented. I saw a great XS650 bobber and a nice classic Indian in my favorite color, turquoise.

It’s always inspiring to see what other people are putting together. Motivates me to get out there and wrench on my old scoot.

See more photos on Tristan’s blog.

Street photographer David Lykes Keenan, based in Austin and Brooklyn, announces the availability of his first book of photographs entitled “In The Gutter”.

In The Gutter is a small, quirky book of black & white photographs that points a sharp stick at one of the cardinal rules of photo books. Published by ZDTravis Books, In The Gutter is 8×8″ square, includes 13 photographs and something resembling a poem describing them, all spanning 32 pages. And we do mean spanning.

The gutter area of a book is generally avoided in photo books but it is used as a creative element in In The Gutter. The photographs assembled for the book exploit this unusual layout.

Learn more about the book on in-the-gutter.info and see more of David’s work on his website.

By Alex Federowicz

Michael Rubenstein is an editorial and commercial photographer represented by Jennifer Hutz in Brooklyn, New York. After working in campaign strategy and development within the environmental movement for eight years, he began his career as a photographer in Portland, Oregon in 2004. Michael began work on a Masters of Visual Communication at Ohio University in 2005 and began working as a photojournalist at the Oregonian in 2006 and 2007. Since his time at the newspaper, Michael covered South Asia from Mumbai for three years and is now back home in Brooklyn trying to find decent pani puri and photographing the city his family has lived in since 1880. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, Time, Fortune, The Atlantic, BusinessWeek, German Vanity Fair, GQ India, Vogue India, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Respect Magazine, Inked, Institutional Investor, Marie Claire India, SLAM, Le Monde, People and AARP among others.

Photo by Alex Federowicz

Itʼs been a long road to recovery for Michael Rubenstein who, just over three months ago, was t-boned by an SUV while riding his motorcycle in rural Maryland. While his life was spared the accident still left him with a collapsed lung, 8 broken ribs, a broken ankle, broken nose and a shattered shoulder. Last week, while still working through injuries, I was grateful for the chance to accompany Michael on his first shoot back getting in the swing of day to day life…ironically making pictures of a custom motorcycle built by master fabricator Walt Siegl.

“Eleanor Friedberger” for Merge Records

Rubenstein hadnʼt always been a photographer. His life prior to photography involved organizing work for environmental NGOʼs including Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace, work that he attributes to shaping his vision as a photographer. When asked about how his early experiences as a child running around with a camera shaped him, Rubenstein replied, “They donʼt…I think that [environmental work] more than anything shaped who I am as a photographer. Iʼve always been interested in stories about the underdog or the oppressed. Things like that come from my activist career.”

“Adonis Thomas and Coach” for Slam Magazine

Rubenstein continued to refine his work, “I worked harder, I looked at other peopleʼs work, I thought a little bit more about what I was doing. It was really just practice and some really nice people that helped me out along the way.” Michael recalled Stephen Voss and Mike Davis as especially memorable figures in his development as a photographer. Still the path towards becoming a pro would continue to prove wrought with potholes. After applying to and being rejected from seven MFA programs, one of which actually wrote back requesting that he not apply again, he found a home at Ohio Universityʼs School of Visual Communication. After an internship fell through at the end of his first year at Ohio, Rubenstein credits Bruce Strong in connecting him with director of photography at The Oregonian, Patty Reksten, who hired him on as a contractor to fill in for some others who had left for the summer.

“Shannon” – Inked Girls Magazine

It was another motorcycle accident that played a fateful role in Rubensteinʼs career. This time, however, it was Oregonian photojournalist Fred Joeʼs, which allowed Michael to stay on with the staff for several more months during Joeʼs recovery. The practice served him well and with some help from Mike Davis he came back east for a series of meetings in New York. One such meeting with Marcel Saba eventually led to representation by Redux and a three year stay in Mumbai covering South Asia for the agency. Now back in Brooklyn, New York Rubenstein is represented by Jennifer Hutz and focuses more on commercial work, leaving documentary projects for his personal endeavors. “For work Iʼm more interested in the advertising and commercial” Michael told me, “itʼs more collaborative, more money and itʼs a lot of fun…and I think in a lot of ways my work is more suited towards it.”

Monks in Temple, Bangkok

Solid business practices have been critical to Rubensteinʼs success as a professional, especially in an environment as competitive as New York. While heʼs always had an agent to help in the day to day business of finding work and getting paid he still has plenty to look out for on his own. Especially when faced with his recent accident that laid him up for three months. “I have a savings. I mean Iʼm 36 years old…at some point Iʼd like to retire so I save money…no oneʼs giving me a pension plan.” When asked about the future of our industry he didnʼt miss a beat, replying, “Whatever, thatʼs a silly question. Everyone freaks out about it. If youʼre good at what you do and you have the right business contacts then youʼll get work. If the business changes, change with it. If not, then do something else…I think itʼs absurd to think a business isnʼt going to change, things always change, business is never stable or stagnant…so figure it out.”

Itʼs been a long road for Michael to get where he is today and, especially given his most recent obstacle on it, itʼs not surprising that the best advice he could pass on is to never relent on your work ethic. “Thereʼs always going to be hard times and you just have to work through them if this is what you want to do.” Rubenstein also noted the importance of assisting and interning with those that have been in the business for a long time, and to find a mentor to help and look out for you.

And as far as another motorcycle goes? He bought a watch instead, so that every time he looks at it he can be reminded that heʼs living on time he probably shouldn’t have.

Photo by Alex Federowicz

VICE visited photographer Christopher Anderson at his studio in Brooklyn to talk about his past projects and what he thinks is exciting about photography.

If you can’t watch the video, please click here.

In this episode of Picture Perfect, VICE visits Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson at his studio in Brooklyn to talk about some of his past work and the life-changing experience of boarding a handmade boat that sank in the Caribbean. He tells us that his current project of photographing New York is part of his artistic growth and an effort to turn inward. As we follow him on assignment, Anderson explains that he’s not just focused on the task at hand, but also interested in the way his photographs build upon each other through the years.

For more from VICE’s Picture Perfect, including episodes featuring Ziyah Gafic, Patrick Brown, and James Mollison, go here: http://www.vice.com/picture-perfect

Brooklyn-based photographer Tristan Wheelock shares some photos from his recent trip to Costa Rica.

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of going to Costa Rica with my girlfriend. I didn’t want cheesy smiley peace sign photos. The landscapes were pretty enough but they needed a human element for scale and consistency.

Now let me bore you with my vacation photos. This feels like the new school version of sitting someone down in front of a projector screen and telling them how awesome I am minus the cool humming sound of the projector and the smell of burning dust on the lamp.

See more photos on Tristan’s blog.

Brooklyn-based photographer Tristan Wheelock shares some photos from Coney Island.

I took these photos last Sunday. It’s just starting to get warm enough in NYC to make coastal ventures. I love the nostalgic feel that Coney Island has. It’s iconic American kitsch and luckily for me the day I went it was all wrapped up in golden sunlight and topped with perfectly blue skies…

See more photos on Tristan’s blog.

Charles Ludeke is a New York-based freelance photographer whose work focuses on storytelling and relationships.
He got his bachelor’s degree in photojournalism at the University of Missouri. There, the essential tenets of his education were honest emotion and intimacy. He tries to build a relationship with the people he photographs. He loves getting to know new folks and learning about them.
 

Swimming has been a part of my life for longer than I can remember. Fortunately, I can reminisce with my mother about those days. Like when she took my brother and me to the local pool when I was three. While he wore floaties and wouldn’t get in past his knees, I would run over to the high dive, climb my way to the top and jump off in a graceful belly flop. Stomach red and mom visibly stressed, I would run back to do it all over again.

That beginning turned into more than 13 years of competitive swimming: age group, high school, college and now, Masters (an organization for people 18 and older).

When I moved to New York, I knew I wanted to continue swimming. I had heard about the Gay Games and gay sports teams in college. Naturally, I married the two and with a quick Google search found my new community, Team New York Aquatics.

Joining the team immediately thrust me into a different world. I started working out a few times a week and made countless new friends (particularly important having moved to a new city where I knew only a handful of people).

My calendar quickly started filling with new events: hosting a local swim meet, marching in the New York Pride Parade and raising money for local gay organizations like swimming as far as I can in one hour or swimming 6K across the Great South Bay, to name a few.

The International Gay & Lesbian Aquatics definitely win for best event. We traveled to Honolulu for our annual meet last summer. In addition to a week filled of competing in swimming, diving, water polo and synchronized swimming, I made friends from California, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, D.C. and Paris. It was like gay summer camp! We spent our off time floating under the waves at Makapu’u Beach, zip lining 2.5 miles through the West Maui Mountains and watching the sun set sipping Mai Tai’s on a boat tour.

In June our annual meet will take us to another great island adventure: Reykjavik, Iceland.

To say this team changed my life would be an understatement. I couldn’t imagine being an adult in New York without it. I highly encourage other photographers to find their own activity to join. It’s a great way to meet a group of people that you might not otherwise. And besides the obvious friend benefit, you can have a new potential source for picture making. What could be better?

Noah Devereaux is a photographer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University and upon graduation shot for a chain of community weekly newspapers in Northern Virginia before moving up to New York City. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Education Week, Edible Brooklyn and the Time Out New York. In addition, his personal work has been featured on blogs such as Conscientious, New Landscape Photography and The Photoletariat.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been one to do things the hard way, the hands on way, so it should be no surprise that I got sucked into cooking and eating as a consuming passion. I love to know how things work so it makes sense that I’d want to know about the food I’m putting into my body. I’ve found the best way to learn that is to make it myself.

Bucatini in bell pepper cream sauce

Passion for me has always started out with a sliver of curiosity. My interest in photography grew out of a curiosity about my dad’s old 70s Nikkormat camera when I was in elementary school and my first interest in making my own food started with an curiosity about my mom’s espresso machine when I was in high school. The photography took off in a big way and now it’s how I make my living but my passion for food took a little longer to take root. Now that I’ve turned one hobby into an occupation, I’m perfectly happy to have food as a hobby that’s not my job. And It doesn’t hurt that this hobby also keeps me well fed.

Squash blossom quesadilla at a street cart under the 7 Train in Jackson Heights, Queens

Growing up I was an incredibly picky eater. My diet consisted of about five things which I don’t care to list them here. After an eye opening experience at an Indian restaurant in Edinburgh, I realized that new experiences in food were something to be embraced rather than feared. Although my eating horizons broadened considerably, my skill in the kitchen was still pretty much limited to french toast, spaghetti with jarred tomato sauce, and the occasional foray into a boxed Pad Thai or heat and eat Indian meal. Somewhere along the line I developed a reputation for being good at cooking rice. But it wasn’t until after college when I entered the real world that I started thinking about food in any sort of serious way.

Fresh shucked Little Neck clams in Bronx Little Italy

My current bout of food obsession was unintentionally kick-started when I moved from Washington DC to New York in 2009 to be with my girlfriend at the time who was a vegan. I’ve pretty much always been a vegetarian but having to take into consideration the dietary needs of a vegan forced me to think more about what goes into food. Although veganized American food like veggie dogs and fake cheese products are off-putting, there is no shortage of vegan-friendly food from around the world based on grains, legumes and vegetables that doesn’t need to be dressed up anything else. There’s even a long tradition of veganism among Hindus and Buddhists with fully developed cuisines free of milk, eggs, meat or seafood. My curiosity was piqued and I set about to figure out how to make vegan food at home that wasn’t pretending to be anything besides good food. My interests cycled from Indian to Thai to Chinese to rough interpretations of what I thought was Mexican or Italian food. I got pretty good at turning tofu into a rough approximation of eggs and cheese in certain contexts. The direction of my cooking took a major turn about the time that the relationship with the vegan girl found its end and I bought my first proper cookbook; Rick Bayless’ Mexican Kitchen.

Jeff Furticella eats dosa at the Ganesh Temple canteen in Flushing, Queens

I first saw Rick Bayless on Top Chef Masters and I was instantly intrigued by the different sorts unfamiliar Mexican food he was preparing on the show. Unmoored by my past relationship, I was now only cooking to fill my own stomach and to fulfil my own interests. Instead of bouncing around between different cuisines, I devoted my heart and my belly to a sort of Mexican cooking that isn’t as familiar on this side of the border. What really attracted me to Mexican was how honest it was – using very simple ingredients to make a wide range of deliciously flavored sauces ranging from the most simple raw tomato salsa to the most complicated moles and pipianes. Grocery shopping became not just an obligation to keep myself fed, but an excuse to visit new neighborhoods in New York in search of harder to find chiles or herbs called for in my cookbooks. Going shopping in Manhattan can be a miserable experience but out in the boroughs there are immigrants who cook and eat at home on a regular basis and stores that cater to their needs. There’s a real satisfaction in making food from scratch and knowing all that went into it.

Fruit on the street in Chinatown in Manhattan is some of the cheapest and ripest in the city

Lately I’ve been making up for my childhood as a picky eater by taking in all the exotic foods that the far flung parts of New York City’s outer boroughs have to offer. These quests have taken me to Flushing, Queens for South Indian rice and lentil pancakes called Dosas in the basement of a Hindu temple and to the Bronx Little Italy, where I slurped raw clams and oysters on the street outside a fish monger on Arthur Ave. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn I learned that Malaysian cuisine is a revelation laden with ingredients like pungent dried fish and shrimp, which taste so much better than they smell. At a Mexican street cart in Jackson Heights, Queens I’ve sampled the huitlachoche quesadilla; an oversized hand made corn tortilla filled with melted stringy cheese and an unsightly corn fungus that tastes much better than it looks. One of these days I’ll make it to Staten Island for Sri Lankan food.

Pumpkin tortelli in sage brown butter

As a photographer, the logical next step was to make the transition from making and eating food to photographing it. It’s a whole different experience photographing a dish with some knowledge of what goes into making it. To start out I offered my services to my wedding clients Ben Sandler and Jennifer Lim who had just opened a cafe and restaurant in Astoria, Queens called the Queens Kickshaw. Along with some amazing coffee and grilled cheese, I got a set of images that I was able to use to leverage my way onto the pages of publications like Edible Brooklyn and Time Out New York. One of my favorite things about being a photographer is getting to experience things that I would otherwise never think of doing and food photography has given me the opportunity to visit so many new places. The culture of food in New York City is so rich and diverse that I’ll take any excuse to explore it.

Seafood risotto with squid and baby octopus

This year my interest has shifted to Italian food. After flipping through the gigantic Silver Spoon book in a cookbook-only store in Seattle, I was inspired again to delve into a new cuisine. Something about the comforting simplicity of regional Italian cooking got my attention. These days my tortilla press is sitting idle but the pasta machine is being put to good use. Although I’ve always eaten things with eggs in them, it’s only recently that I’ve taken to eating them whole. Now every morning is an opportunity to make a better omelette or poached egg than I made the day before. And for the first time I’m cooking my own seafood. All of a sudden I’m tossing seafood in my risotto and finding delight in baby octopus legs crawling out from the rice. For Valentines Day I even went so far as buying and shucking my own oysters. It could have ended with a trip to the emergency room but I managed to make it through the evening without stabbing myself or getting food poisoning. Some of the greatest joys are the simplest like a perfectly ripe mango or avocado or a loaf of homemade bread made with only flour, water, yeast and salt.

Mushroom omelette with lightly dressed spring mix

It’s interesting to think where this hobby has left me today. The idea of eating real unprocessed food now comes so naturally to me that I sometimes forget that not everyone else eats the way I do. Ketchup makes me uncomfortable and I no longer crave the heat and eat Indian pouches or Chipotle burritos that I once subsisted on. Far from being a daily obligation, every meal is another opportunity to try something exceptional and learn something new.

The Food Bazaar in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn is a temple to Hispanic food

Brooklyn-based photographer Meg Wachter has been working on a project documenting public green space in Brooklyn.

596 acres is how much vacant public land existed in Brooklyn alone as of April 2010. It is also a public education project aimed at making communities aware of the land resources around them and helping neighbors form connections to the vacant lots in their lives. Find out more at 596acres.org.

See more photos on Meg’s website.