Mr. Moore’s Detroit photos are largely devoid of people, giving them an eerie, postapocalyptic feel. Evidence charts from a murder investigation are among files strewn across a shuttered police station. Beakers and test tubes line the shelves of a chemistry lab in a former school, waiting for students who will never come. Birch saplings sprout from rotting textbooks at a school book depository. A vacant home is swallowed whole by foliage. Once-bustling neighborhoods dissolve into urban prairie.

Artistically they’re very important in the way that they combine the almost romantic sense of horror with beauty.  That dissonance between the beauty and the sense of waste and destruction and decay leads you to really consider not just the situation of Detroit but to put them in a larger context of the rise and fall of civilizations, the relationship between human endeavors to build and nature’s ability to overwhelm and overcome.

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Last March’s tsunami devastated the coast here. If people didn’t lose their lives, they lost practically everything else — except, it turns out, many of their photos. Survivors found countless pictures strewn amid the mud and wreckage, many badly damaged by water.

Over the past several months, All Hands Volunteers, a Massachusetts-based, nonprofit, has done everything from repairing homes to cleaning drainage ditches along the coast. The organization has also hand-cleaned more than 55,000 photos. In some cases, professionals from around the globe have even restored images digitally.

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A unique look into New York City's still vibrant analog photography community.

“In this series of works I invited intimate friends over to tell me a secret as I took their portrait. However, my intention was not to hear their secret, but to capture the expressions of each one at the moment they revealed their secret. I also asked each one to choose a song for me to listen to in my ear phones while I photographed them. And, after the photo session, I asked each one if the secret had a color, and these are the colors the portraits carry. From this photo shooting session I chose 10 different portraits to cut and overlap.”

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Whether you’re on vacation or stay-cation this summer, chances are you’re taking pictures. Smartphones make picture-taking easier and more popular than ever. But in earlier years, photography was more of an event. At the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, an exhibition called “Little Pictures, Big Lives” shows snapshots from the 1920s through the ’60s. And many of the people in these photos happen to be some of this country’s greatest artists.

“The wonderful thing about looking at snapshots of artists is that it raises the stakes a little bit,” says Foresta. That a snapshot of a man holding daisies out to his love is a sweet picture, “but when you know that it’s Jackson Pollack [giving] daisies … to Lee Krasner, it becomes a different picture,” she says.

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