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I can't quite believe, when I look through Jonas Bendiksen's Satellites (Aperture, $35), that this twenty-something photographer is a member of Magnum. It's not that I don't like the work in the book, which is on its surface a survey of the grim hinterlands of the late Soviet Union. (I think it's really good.) It's that Bendiksen's visual language is more akin to that of contemporary art photography than to any style I would once have associated with the venerable photo agency.

I'm particularly intrigued this week by Travis Ruse's and not only because I serendipitously met Travis while interviewing him about his recent promotion to Photo Editor of Inc. Magazine. The 50 prints in this Redux show have been culled from more than 600 Ruse has posted over the last two years to his photoblog, which chronicles his daily commute from Brooklyn's Park Slope to Midtown Manhattan. The site draws more than 20,000 hits a week and has been profiled in The New York Times.

Issue 5 of Daylight magazine, the little documentary photo journal that could, focuses on the human beings behind global commodities. Its topics range from the abundance of guns in Latin American gang and paramilitary culture (photographs by Heidi Schumann) to the torturous route of diamonds from African mining pits to Manhattan's Fifth Avenue (by Kadir van Lohuizen). Michael Wolf's photoessay on Chinese copy artists doesn't rake muck, but it says a lot about the globalization of visual culture and its attendant devaluation of intellectual property.

Slate's top story today dissects the ways that cellphone cameras have changed our collective lives for the better and for the worse—although mostly for the worse. Michael Agger's piece includes several insightful musings, although I wish a few of them had been drawn out into complete thoughts. Like this intriguing idea: The more difficult question, the one that lurks outside the media
glare, is how the cell phone camera is altering our private lives.