Should we give it another try? © Beth Lilly

Some people use Tarot cards, or the I Ching, or tea leaves to try to predict the future. Psychic photographer Beth Lilly uses her cell phone camera to make her readings — and the results are, well, unpredictable and often uncanny answers to the unasked questions of the people who seek a reading with her.

Learn more about her practice, and see 18 previous "readings" here in Lens Culture.

She definitely has a sense of humor as well as a sixth sense. With a tip of her hat to the original Oracle at Delphi, she calls her service the Oracle @ WiFi.

Naked, from the series Until the Cows Come Home, by Dan Nelken

New York photographer Dan Nelken has documented the people, animals and activities of American County Fairs for several years now. His rich body of work is filled with warm color and light. It captures a bit of humor and some delightful quirky things. It also conveys a genuine sense of un-self-conscious personal pride that is essential to the whole County Fair mentality.

I watched the reactions of people who saw his photographs for the first time at a big exhibition in Houston recently. Without exception, people were smiling, pointing with gleeful recognition at this bit here, or that expression there. People get engaged when they see these photos, and they want to share their delight and enthusiasm.

Indeed, they are all endearing photos, made in a straightforward masterly manner (with a hand-held medium format camera, using only available light). The girl holding her prize-winning rabbit looks so comfortable and happy and completely in the moment, with the blue-ribbon tied to the open rabbit's cage behind her.

It's sometimes interesting to imagine how different photographers might photograph the same subject matter in wildly different ways. It would be so easy to stray into the "too-sweet" genre with all of this innocent feel-good stuff. And it would be just as easy to go the other way. I wonder what Diane Arbus would have done here, or Avedon, or Martin Parr? Would these happy and content people look like freaks under the glare of Weegee's flash?

Edelgard Clavey, age: 67, born: 29th June 1936
first portrait taken: 5th December 2003
died: 4th January 2004, at Helenenstift Hospice, Hamburg
Photos copyright by Walter Schels

Photography allows us to vicariously "experience" people, places, events and phenomena that we may never have the opportunity to experience directly. This series is a remarkable example: portraits made of people who knew they were dying, and who gave their permission to be photographed shortly before — and immediately after — they died.

Photographer Walter Schels and editor Beate Lakotta have documented these profound final moments with the utmost compassion. They have titled this body of work noch mal leben, or Life before Death

The results — literally and figuratively — force us to look death squarely in the face and contemplate mortality. To see this work in an exhibition space, each portrait slightly larger than life-size, is to experience an emotional blow that makes an indelible impression in one's consciousness.

I first saw this work just last week while participating in the City of Hamburg's Phototriennale. After returning home, it was the one body of work that I could not stop thinking about. My friend, photographer Elaine Duigenan, just saw the exhibition in London (where it is appearing at the same time), and wrote to me:

"I have just seen the show 'Life Before Death' here as it is at the Wellcome Collection - I am not surprised that you are headlining with it - phenomenal, truly amazing! What was most strange was the 'quietness' in the space where people view the images - a truly important and emotive experience unlike any other..."

Lens Culture is honored to be able to present six of the portraits here, accompanied with brief and compelling texts that give us some personal insight about each of the subjects.

Don't miss it.

Please add your own comments about this work below.

Fox, from the series Menagerie, © 2007 by Rachel Graves

Women around the world are harassed every day with derogatory terms. In the UK these names are usually associated with animals: bitch, bird, fox... UK photographer Rachel Graves decided to explore these ideas through a series of self-portraits. The portraits consist of before and after photos of herself: one made-up to look like the animal in question, the other just before all of the make-up is removed.

Lens Culture features the whole series so far, along with a short text by the artist.

From the series Drifting Away, printed glass, 60x35,2" © Erika Diettes

There is a saying that the rivers of Colombia are the world's biggest graveyard.

Colombian artist Erika Diettes is creating a light-filled memorial to the many thousands of the "disappeared" who are dead or missing as a result of armed conflicts in Colombia. Personal objects or clothing from people who have disappeared are photographed in turbulent water.

The photographs are printed larger than life on 5-feet tall sheets of glass, and displayed upright in heavy gray frames. When installed in long rows of upright images, the photos look like tombstones in a cemetery. Visitors who walk through the installation get the feeling that they too are floating in the river.

See several images from the series here in Lens Culture, and also listen to the artist talk about this work in a 7-1/2 minute audio interview.

Installation view, from the series Drifting Away, printed glass, 60x35,2" © Erika Diettes

Soldier: Claxton — 120 Days in Afghanistan © Suzanne Opton

These are very intimate portraits of young American soldiers who are in between tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes they look like the heads of fallen statues.

Photographer Suzanne Opton said, "I wanted to take a vulnerable picture of a soldier, which is quite the opposite of how we think of soldiers, usually. But they are vulnerable."

See more of her series, Soldier, here in Lens Culture. And listen to Opton talk about her project in a compelling 10-1/2 minute audio interview, too. Articulate, smart, thoughtful, provocative.

Co-founders of Houston's FotoFest, Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, have curated the best-ever show of photography from China.

When I returned home last month from reviewing portfolios at Houston's FotoFest, I was almost dizzy with delight. Not only did I meet a lot of very, very talented photographers, but I was stunned at the consistently super-high quality of the dozens and dozens of photo exhibitions that were organized throughout the city.

I returned with a lot of "discoveries" that I am eager to share with you over the next few weeks. And, just as important, I came away understanding how absolutely great a photo festival can be when the curators are brilliant, passionate, experienced and hard-working.

At the end of each day, everyone who had been participating in the intense and grueling review sessions, (imagine 14 interviews per day for four days straight), would climb onto a comfortable bus to be escorted through town to two or three massive exhibitions. It could have been exhausting, but it was completely energizing.

I was comparing notes with Chris Rauschenberg, who helps to run Blue Sky Gallery in Portland (among lots of other things he does), and he jotted off this report from his point of view. He nicely sums up how great the experience was. Here's what he had to say:

"One of the most amazing things about FotoFest is the fact that you always know that every year the Reviewers' Bus will take you to at least one exhibition by a photographer that you never heard of but who will turn out to be one of the greatest photographers in the world. You just take it for granted that it will happen every time - and it does. (Sometimes it can be awkward for the private party at the end of the Bus' itinerary, such as the year that the Bus brought us to the Pentti Sammallahti retrospective that was so magnificent that no one was willing to leave.) A mortal curator might hope to accomplish a feat like this once in their career, but Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin do it every time. (For comparison, imagine a baseball player who hits a grand slam home run every game he plays in.)

"This year the Bus took us to the unassumingly titled exhibition "Independent Documentary Photography 1985 - 2008" which featured the work of unknown photographers Lu Nan and Li Lang alongside Wu Jialin, who would have been unknown if Wendy and Fred hadn't already taken our breath away with a fabulous huge exhibition of his work at FotoFest 1996. Each of the three photographers in this show was represented by about 75 amazing images (three grand slams in one at bat? - my metaphor can't handle this level of curatorial greatness). We first entered the rooms of Wu Jialin's prints ("okay, I already knew this guy was incredible"), then moved on to Li Lang's work ("wait a minute - this guy is great too") and finally ended up in a state of absolute astonishment in Lu Nan's "The Forgotten People: the State of Chinese Psychiatric Wards." Chinese photographer Jimmy Chu (an indispensable part of this Chinese edition of FotoFest) translated Lu Nan's modest remarks and then passionately told us that he respected Lu Nan more highly than any other photographer and told us how Lu Nan spent 15 years as a fugitive on the run, making his pictures and smuggling them out of China under an assumed name while the government was hunting for him. To see a show this good is a once in a lifetime experience - but I know that Wendy and Fred will calmly step up to the plate and do it again two years from now."

Christopher Rauschenberg
Blue Sky Gallery

So, yes. Be sure to check back here at Lens Culture over the next few weeks as we dive deep into the discoveries from the portfolio reviews as well as the discoveries presented by FotoFest. And in the meantime, if you haven't checked it out already, take a look at this 60-image overview of Chinese Photography from 1934-2008.

Sandbox 3, © Trevor Traynor

Lens Culture is pleased to present the color photographs of two emerging artists who are working with similar subjects and similar ideas, but half a globe apart. Trevor Traynor turns in a poetic photo-essay about children's playgrounds in Moscow, just after a winter thaw. Douglas Rickhard documents the light and color and architecture of similarly empty places in his series, American Suburb. Both worth watching, I think.

De Ville 12, from the series American Suburb, © Douglas Rickhard

Clearing, Wakehurst Place, 18.5x16" Platinum Palladium © Beth Dow

Formal English gardens are trippy enough as they are, but when photographer Beth Dow turns her lens on them — and then creates immaculate and yummy platinum palladium prints — the results are almost surreal, and definitely stunning. Check out twenty of our favorite prints at Lens Culture, and be sure to click on the "slide show" button to view them at a nice large size on your monitor.

Night Park 1, © Susan Bein

Susan Bein's painterly night-time photos are romantic and mysterious and fun. We discovered her work when she became one of the finalists in this year's Critical Mass portfolio review competition. We chose just eight photos to introduce her work via Lens Culture. You can find more than 2,800 other photos on her flickr site.