american photo

In April 2005, Aaron Huey drove into Manderson, South Dakota, the roughest town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and started knocking on doors. "Hey wasichu (white boy), what are you doing with that camera?" yelled a young Lakota man covered in tattoos.

German photographer Robert Voit has documented cell-phone towers disguised as huge trees since 2003, but he came upon the subject by accident. “I was working on a project about the Christmas season, and I was searching the Internet for production facilities for [fake] Christmas trees,” Voit recalls. “I had in my mind an overview of a plastic forest in one of those plants. But when I came across a picture of a mobile-phone tree online, I immediately left everything behind! I refocused and it turned into another story.”

At this very moment, John Isaac is probably somewhere in the brush of India’s Bandhavgarh National Park, waiting patiently for his beloved tigers to give him another photo op. He has lost count of the number of trips he has made in recent years from his home near New York City to the massive parks of his native India. But all those journeys will culminate in a monograph of Isaac’s tiger photographs to be published in late 2011.