Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth, APhotoEditor and many others track Magnum’s latest expedition, “House of Photos,” an archival collaboration by photographers Martin Parr, Alex Webb, Larry Towell, Bruce Gilden, Jim Goldberg, Alec Soth and five others, similar to their recent “Postcards From America” series.  Eleven Magnum photographers have been exploring Rochester, NY, the birthplace of Kodak on the eve of the company’s demise, each in their own particular style, posting regular updates to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. Find more background on the project in a Q&A with Martin Parr.
• Photo District News reminds us all about worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, which falls on this Sunday, April 29, 2012, and shares a selection of seven pinhole camera-made images, encouraging readers to submit their own. Grab an empty oatmeal can and learn how to make your own pinhole camera from Kodak.
• This week, PhotoShelter Blog compiles a list of “The 40+ Items Every Photography Assistant Needs Now,” including some not so obvious ones like Tums, a blow drier, and Tylenol. The article is just one small part of their new 44-page downloadable Photo Assistant’s Handbook which covers among other things, “12 Problems that Photo Assistants are Expected to Solve.”
• The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi investigates the sudden disappearance of Vogue’s highly controversial profile of Syria’s first lady from the Conde Naste publication’s website; a profile accompanied by images shot by war photographer James Nachtwey.
• On Tuesday, the NYC Department of Records announced the official debut of a public online archive containing an astounding 870,000 photographs of New York City. Unfortunately, “due to overwhelming demand,” and server maintenance, we didn’t get to see the images just yet, but Associated Press did. The Atlantic‘s Alan Taylor did too, and culled through the archive posting 53 of their favorites. While they work out the kinks in their system, you can still check out the work of Eugene de Salignac in New York Rises (2007), a copublication with the Municipal Archives (now part of the Department of Records). This book offers a peek into one small part of the City’s amazing archive — a selection of images de Salignac shot while working for NYC’s Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures from 1906 – 1934.
• Time‘s LightBox announce the 2012 Overseas Press Club Award winners André Liohn, David Guttenfelder, and Pete Muller with a slideshow of 50 images, and a profile for each. They also post an exclusive on the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards winner, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs by Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis, from Getty Publications.
• Fototazo opens up an extensive two-day conversation on “The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography.” An image from Richard Mosse’s Infra was among the many used to illustrate.  The monograph (Aperture 2011/12) was also included in The New York Times‘ round-up of “Vivid Guides to Unfamiliar Landscapes” and was nominated by Rob Hornstra as one of the best books of this past year at the International Photobook Festival.

All photography is a kind of step away from reality. Few photographers within the documentary genre have gone further to embrace this notion than Richard Mosse, whose current photo project exploring armed conflict in the eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Richard Mosse: Infra, opens today at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

“Documentary photography is now at the moment where it has to change,” says Mosse. “It is behind the times – the forms of modern conflict are profoundly complex; their narratives are impossibly difficult to convey.”

Investigating a fresh form to represent the continued hostilities surrounding the deadliest war in human history—a very old and ongoing conflict that had gone stale in popular consciousness—Mosse toured eastern Congo between 2010-11, armed with two cameras and a supply of Kodachrome film, rendering the characters of this war in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. The tension between the hot pink-tinted worlds rendered on film and the devastating subject of the photography is what makes Mosse’s work so compelling. In taking a step away from the standard visual language of photojournalism, Mosse is producing unimaginable images that effectively underscore the truly unimaginable reality of the conflict they capture, a modern conflict too opaque for standard methods of representation.

»Read Richard Mosse’s interview with Liverpool Daily Post on his Infra series and exhibition
»Watch Richard Mosse discuss the stories behind Infra, and preview the Open Eye Gallery installation

Richard Mosse: Infra will be on view March 30 through June 10, 2012

Open Eye Gallery
Liverpool, United Kingdom
+44 (0) 151 236 6768

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Also consider Richard Mosse’s first book, Infra: Photographs by Richard Mosse (Aperture 2012), or a limited edition print from the Infra series, “Debris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011″

Richard Mosse is also featured in Aperture Magazine # 203, “Richard Mosse: Sublime Proximity interview with Aaron Schuman”

Join us on Monday, March 5, 2012 at 6:30 pm at Aperture Gallery for an artist talk with photographer Richard Mosse , followed by a book signing and reception for his new book Infra.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Over the course of two years, Mosse documented the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo using a discontinued type of color infrared surveillance film called Kodak Aerochrome to offer a stunning and radical rethinking of how to depict a complex and intractable conflict.  With film that is extra sensitive to green light, he renders the rich typography of the country as well as the camouflage of the Congolese army and combative rebel groups in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.

This is Mosse’s first monograph, co-published by Aperture and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.  These improbably colored images underline the growing tension between art, fiction, and traditional photojournalism as a way of portraying and communicating the impact of war. Mosse states that the collection works “through shocks to the imagination,” using photography’s unique ability “to make visible what cannot be perceived.”

Select large format prints from the collection are currently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC through April 15, organized by Xandra Eden, Curator of Exhibitions.

Weatherspoon Art Museum
500 Tate St
Greensboro, NC 27412
336-334-5770

Mosse’s limited edition print “Débris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo,” is also now available for purchase at Aperture. Mosse calls the ethereal shot a “surprising” double-exposure that came about by accident in March 2011. “‘Débris ‘pushed me to embrace failure and let go of certain ways of seeing.”

Photographs by Richard Mosse have been featured on the cover of Aperture magazine #203.