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Analog: Multiple Exposure

For his very personal and intimate Joop Swart Masterclass Project, photographer Justin Maxon used in-camera multiple exposure of Kodachrome film. "This project is about my transition from a path of chaos to one of healing," Maxon says. "For the past decade, my life has been a blur of movement. The healthy parts of my life fell away, those that used to enrich it — family, friends, love. I found myself in a space between worlds, a visitor to everything around me, a stranger to my own life. I realized I had a crossroads approaching, a choice to make. I chose to thread those fractured parts of self back into my life piece by piece."

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Digital: Kickstarter

Krisanne Johnson looked to Kickstarter, an online funding platform, to successfully raise the money that enabled her to return to Swaziland to complete her long-term project on HIV/AIDS. "For the past four years," Johnson explains, "I have been documenting young women coming of age amidst the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Swaziland. A tiny African kingdom of 1 million, Swaziland reports the highest percentage of HIV-positive people in the world, with the hardest hit being young women. For every two young Swazi women, one is HIV-positive. It should come as no surprise that average life expectancy has dropped from 61 years to almost 31 years over the past decade."

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Surprise

"The subject of my work in eastern Congo is the conflict's intangibility and our blindness to it. The project seeks to challenge the ways in which Congo is typically represented. The project's goal is to provoke a dialogue surrounding the generic conventions of documentary photography in Congo, and more generally in Africa. The aim is to surprise the viewer to look again at a forgotten but very tragic conflict."

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Analog: Infrared Film

When working on his project in eastern Congo, photographer Richard Mosse chose to shoot with infrared film. "Kodak Aerochrome," Mosse explains, "is a recently discontinued military surveillance technology, developed during the Cold War with the primary objective of perceiving camouflaged enemy installations hidden in the landscape. The use of analog infrared film in eastern Congo evokes the specificity of that medium, its genesis as a military technology and its potential to reveal the invisible."

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Connection

"People who might normally ignore coverage of Afghanistan or ignore traditional photos from the war," Guttenfelder observes, "paid attention to these iPhone pictures because they use similar cameras every day to document their own lives. As a result, they were drawn into the story by these photos, a connection was made, and the photos got a lot of attention."

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Snapshots

"I wanted to make some pictures that had the look or mood of the keepsake shots that the Marines take themselves. I've noticed that the new generation of Marines and soldiers take a lot of photos and videos, even when they are in combat situations. Most use phones or point-and-shoot cameras and make gritty keepsake pictures to remember what their lives were like on the deployment and to post or show their friends and family back at home."

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Digital: iPhone Photography

During an embed with the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, in February, AP's David Guttenfelder used his iPhone to make images of the battle for Marjah in Afghanistan's Helmand province. "I was on assignment for the AP, so my priority was photographing hard news, but I also had my iPhone with me. I used it with the application ShakeItPhoto, which gives the image the look and feel of a Polaroid photo. Afghanistan, the front lines of a war, is one of the few remaining places that the public, with its consumer camera phones, does not go."

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Disappearing Culture

Asked what he envisioned for the last roll, McCurry says, "I wanted to photograph iconic places and people, places I had worked in. I live in New York, so I shot there. I also went to India, where I had previously worked, to find something equally iconic. The pictures show actors — a tribe of nomads whose way of life was disappearing. Their culture was fading away, just like Kodachrome was going to become part of the past, and there was a connection in that way."

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Iconic

"What was so special about it," says McCurry, "was its archival quality and longevity. Kodachrome retained its color. The color in pictures from the '50s is as true as when the picture was made. It had a wonderful color palette that interpreted what you saw in a true way. Other films were too vivid, too hyper. Kodachrome saw how my eye saw the scene."