From the birth of the first modern nail parlor in 19th-century Paris to the rise of the Vietnamese nail industry in America after the fall of Saigon, nail beautification has always been connected to the world it adorns.

Author Tembe Denton-Hurst reminds us of this in her new book, Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the World. Setting the scene with her own experience of falling in love with manicures as a child in Brooklyn and a brief survey of the transformative history of nail embellishment throughout time, the book showcases 35 standout artists thriving today.

While basic sets remain timeless, there’s no doubt that in the 21st century, contemporary aesthetics have flourished in a subversive, powerful way. From birthday candle pedicures and maximalist jeweled acrylics to moss-covered fingertips and sculpted claws channeling cyber sigilism, Fresh Sets features 300 vibrant images highlighting ongoing innovations in the medium.

The democratization of nail art has allowed the creative form to flourish across time and space. Extravagant designs once only seen sauntering down the catwalk, for instance, are now within reach for daily wear. The rise of nail artists has uniquely blurred this line between luxury and everyday accessory, forging paths and connecting worlds.

One such artist featured in Fresh Sets is Lauren Michelle Pires. With a methodical precision, she approaches her practice as a designer, collecting extensive archives of color combinations and references images. Once a fashion student, Pires now works with designer brands such as Loewe, Diesel, Miu Miu, and more.

“I view being a nail artist as a very intricate and pristine job, and I definitely try to capture beauty in my work,” she explains. “But, over time, I’ve really learned how to experiment more and to lean into the awkwardness of beauty.”

As the realm of nail design continues to evolve in tremendous fashion, transforming one’s own fingernails as if they were ten tiny canvases—each a site for creating an extension of self, asserting identity, and even signifying resistance—has and always will be a deeply resonant gesture for many. As Denton-Hurst shares in the introduction, “long nails have become part of me, as identifiable as the brown of my skin or my loud laugh.”

You can find your own copy of Fresh Sets on Bookshop. See more from Tembe Denton-Hurst on Instagram.

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In February 2020, curator and gallery director Kathy Huang met artist Dominique Fung—a month before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. Their conversations, which continued throughout quarantine, served as an impetus for what would become Huang’s Wonder Women exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch.

During their chats, Huang and Fung lamented “the uptick in violence against Asian American communities, particularly against women and the elderly,” Huang says in the introduction to her forthcoming book, Wonder Women: Art of the Asian Diaspora.

The two also found it difficult to pinpoint when the last major exhibition had been staged that thoughtfully presented Asian artists, and neither could think of an instance where women and nonbinary artists had been the focus. Both of Huang’s exhibitions and her new book are the fruit of that desire to highlight the remarkable spectrum of figurative work being produced within the Asian diasporic community today.

A response to racism against Asians exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Huang conceived of the shows that went on view in 2022 in New York and Los Angeles as a means to highlight the incredible, groundbreaking work made especially by women and nonbinary artists.

Forthcoming from Rizzoli, Wonder Women shares a similar title to a poem by Genny Lim, which follows experiences of Asian women through the lens of a narrator who observes their everyday routines and considers how their lives relate to hers.

Huang expands on this view in her approach to showcasing the work of forty artists, each represented through at least four pieces and a personal statement. These artists “subvert stereotypes and assert their identities in places where they have historically been marginalized,” Rizzoli says.

Artists like Sasha Gordon or Nadia Waheed explore identity through sometimes fantastical self-portraiture, while others highlight family, community, and colonial or patriarchal systems in the West. Some address Asian myths, legends, and visual culture, like Fung’s exploration of antique objects or Shyama Golden’s otherworldly scenes in which hybrid human-animals interact with nature or urban spaces.

Wonder Women will be released on May 20. Order your copy from the Colossal Shop.

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In the 1985 film Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, a picturesque scene highlights the pair on a romantic picnic high above the sweeping Masai Mara National Reserve. Today, tourists are invited to recreate the iconic moment in a colonial-inspired, hillside champagne picnic experience for which “local Masaai tribesman are employed to provide picturesque authenticity to the experience,” photographer Zed Nelson says.

In his new book, The Anthropocene Illusion, Nelson takes us on a global journey that lifts the veil, so to speak, on what we think of as “wilderness” and our progressively uneasy relationship with the environment. “While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature—a reassuring spectacle, an illusion,” he says.

The Anthropocene defines the ever-evolving, rapid changes to the environment due to humans’ unyielding impact. Many scientists place the epoch’s origin during the Industrial Revolution, but some consider 1945—the year humans tested the atomic bomb—to be the true beginning. Yet others suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated even earlier, during the advent of agriculture.

At that point, we entered into an increasingly uneasy relationship with the natural world, relying on ever-more extractive processes, heavy manufacturing, plastics, and advancing technology—all of which depend on the earth’s resources. Our societies’ colonialist tendencies also apply to nature just as much as other human-occupied territories.

We’re depleting entire aquifurs, forever altering the composition of the land, and irretrievably damaging delicate ecosystems. All the while, Nelson shows, we subscribe to a nostalgic view of untamed wilderness while at the same time expecting it to mold to our lifestyles.

In Kenyan national parks like Masai Mara, wildlife is provided sanctuary, “but the animals living within them are allowed to survive essentially for human entertainment and reassurance,” Nelson says. “These animals become, in effect, performers for paying tourists eager to see a nostalgic picture book image of the natural world.”

Nelson’s illuminating series taps into the absurdities of the illusion that nature is still thriving as it once was. Artificial snow shot from a cannon in the Italian Dolomites, for example, nods to warmer winters. A result of the climate crisis, leading to little snow, the powder is manufactured so holidaymakers can ski.

From vine-draped brutalist buildings to overcrowded national park lookouts to half-tame lions walked out like entertainers during a safari, he shares moments that feel skewed and incongruous, indicating looming and ultimately inescapable problems behind the veneer.

The Anthropocene Illusion series took first place in the professional category of the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards, and the book, which comes out this month, is available for pre-order in the Guest Editions shop. Ten percent of profits will be donated to Friends of the Earth, an environmental justice nonprofit. See more on Nelson’s Instagram.

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Through her tireless research and advocacy for the protection of the world’s oceans, Cristina Mittermeier has emerged as one of the most prominent conservation photographers. Along with Paul Nicklen, she co-founded SeaLegacy to focus on the impact of communication through art and science, confronting critical issues like endangered biodiversity and the climate crisis. She also founded the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), a professional community focused environmental issues.

Acknowledging the negative and potentially disastrous effects of indifference, skepticism, and inaction, Mittermeier posits that one thing remains as important as ever. “HOPE may not be a plan or a strategy, but it is vital for our survival,” she says in an introductory note for her new book. “I ferociously reject apathy, cynicism, and fear, and with tenacity and determination, I choose kindness and Hope.”

Published by Hemeria, HOPE is organized into six chapters that highlight the myriad ways humanity and nature are fundamentally intertwined. The first, “Indigenous Wisdom,” features the knowledge and traditions of communities who tap into ancient ways of connecting with the earth. Additional chapters focus on the oceans, arctic realms, the afterlife, future generations, and how all of these elements are interwoven. Throughout, Mittermeier’s bold photographs of wildlife, remarkable landscapes, tribal rituals, and family bonds serve as reminders of incredible beauty, resilience, and determination.

Mittermeier travels the world, visiting remote communities, attending significant ceremonial events, and documenting fragile ecosystems. “Images can help us understand the urgency many photographers feel to protect wild places,” she says in a statement. She continues:

My work is about building a greater awareness of the responsibility of what it means to be human. It is about understanding that the history of every living thing that has ever existed on this planet also lives within us. It is about the ethical imperative—the urgent reminder that we are linked to all other species on this planet and that we have a duty to act as the keepers of our fellow life forms.

HOPE is available for purchase now in Hemeria’s shop and will be available widely in other retail locations this October. Dive into more of Mittermeier’s work on her website and Instagram.

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During the Soviet era, modernist architecture rose to popularity as a means to express power, prestige, and views toward the future following World War II. Across Eastern Europe, asymmetric details, geometric rooflines, circular footprints, monumental murals, and blocky brutalist structures rose in defiance of pre-war classical and vernacular styles.

In Ukrainian Modernism, Kyiv-based photographer and researcher Dmytro Soloviov’s first book, the nation’s under-recognized mid-20th-century built heritage takes center stage.

“Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognised,” says a statement from FUEL, which will release the book later this month.

Soloviov chronicles a buildings that are often stigmatized for their inception during the Soviet era and subsequent neglect and redevelopment over time. In the face of the nation’s struggle to overcome Russia’s ongoing incursion, war continues to threaten historic buildings. Ukrainian Modernism combines Soloviov’s contemporary photos with archival images, exploring the breadth of the region’s architectural marvels.

Preorder your copy on FUEL’s website.

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From aerial views of modern-day Venice to a 15th-century caravanserai in Kyrgyzstan, Christopher Wilton-Steer’s awe-inspiring photographs capture contemporary views of life along a series of 1,500-year-old trade routes. An extraordinary historical, cultural, and archaeological phenomenon, the Silk Road connected China in the East to Rome and the Mediterranean in the West.

Around 4,000 miles long in its entirety and comprising numerous linking routes—some of which still exist as highways today—the network was used to transport valuable silks from China westward while sending wool and precious metals east. Travelers also transmitted global news, religious beliefs, and disease—most famously The Black Death in the 14th century—along the storied route.

In The Silk Road: A Living History, forthcoming from Hemeria, Wilton-Steer traces the trade artery from Italy through the Balkans and into Turkey, wending through Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and India, before continuing through the breadth of China.

Starting in London, the photographer traveled nearly 25,000 miles across Europe and Asia, detouring to visit nearby cities and cultural centers, mountains, deserts, remote communities, and spectacular architecture. He captures elaborate mosaic ceilings like those of the Tash Hauli Palace in Khiva, Uzbekistan, or the Shrine of Fatima Masumeh in Qom, Iran. And traces of medieval cities, like Ani in Turkey, sit timelessly in vast landscapes.

“When we fly somewhere, we arrive at the destination and most aspects of life of different,” Wilton-Steer says in a foreword. “Traveling overland, I wanted to experience the transitions between different cultures and gain a deeper understanding of what connects us.”

In our increasingly integrated world, trade is facilitated through elaborate pan-global shipping networks shaped by modern technologies. Yet the system is volatile, and the impacts of a global pandemic, accidents, or tariffs can usher in waves of disruption.

As China embarks on the world’s largest-ever infrastructure project through its Belt and Road Initiative, the legacy of the Silk Road is front-and-center as the endeavor aims to connect more than 60 percent of the global population.

Wilton-Steer is interested in the juxtapositions of contemporary life with ancient traditions, cultures, and historical narratives. Just as the Silk Road helped shape European and Asian civilizations hundreds of years ago, the route’s legacy underpins the region’s contemporary social, economic, and cultural spheres.

The Silk Road: A Living History will be released on May 20, and you can order your copy in Hemeria’s shop. Wilton-Steer is donating proceeds from the book to the Aga Khan Foundation, which addresses root causes of poverty and works to improve the quality of life in a number of countries along the Silk Road and further afield.

You might also enjoy Fatemeh Hosein Aghaei’s stunning photographs of historic Iranian mosques and palaces.

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In the second half of the 20th century, “brutalism and the shall-we-call-it ‘marketplace modernism’…when it appeared in the East, was always about spectacle,” Zupagrafika founders David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka say in a blog post about Eastern Bloc suburbia.

Brutalist housing estates and public buildings of the post-war Soviet era were built on a massive scale, often from concrete and prefabricated panels, to accommodate growing populations and to demonstrate power, socialist values, and modernity. Sometimes blocked in color or complemented by murals, these hulking structures largely emphasized monolithic forms, an unmissable PR message about communist ideology.

Brutalism is a study in contrasts—heaviness juxtaposed with balance; concrete set into the natural landscape. Eastern Blocks II, Navarro and Sobecka’s new book, captures some of these stark scenes, with expansive residential units rising above bucolic meadows or framed by nothing but snow. Functionality takes precedence over aesthetics.

Navarro and Sobecka have traveled the width and breadth of Eastern Europe, photographing the region’s unique architecture and expanding on the first volume published in 2019. Along with local photographers Alexander Veryovkin and Kseniya Lokotko, who captured views of Kaliningrad and Minsk, the authors chronicle a total of ten cities from Chișinău to Riga to Prague in more than 180 photos.

Find your copy on the publisher’s website. You might also enjoy Zupagrafika’s Kiosk, a survey of Eastern Europe’s disappearing tiny shops.

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“In 2012, I found a piece of material in a rock pool that changed my life,” artist Mandy Barker says. “Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next ten years.”

Barker is known for her photographic practice that takes a deep dive into marine debris. Her work has been featured in publications like National Geographic, The Guardian, VOGUE, and many more. Often collaborating with scientists to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the earth’s oceans, she eloquently highlights its harmful impacts on marine habitats, wildlife, and all of us who depend on the ocean for sustenance.

Forthcoming from GOST Books, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections surveys the unexpected and out-of-place along British shores. At first glance, each specimen appears like a fragment of a leaf or a scatter of organic material, but upon closer inspection, the subjects of Barker’s images reveal details of unraveled polyester or scraps of nylon tights.

Barker hopes to raise awareness of the damaging effects of fast fashion, synthetic clothing, and the increasing amounts of microfibers in the oceans. The fashion industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all international flights and container ships combined and is also the second-largest consumer of water, requiring about 2,000 gallons of water to produce a single pair of jeans.

Barker’s new book is composed as an homage to the work of trailblazing botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who is thought to be the first woman to take a photograph and the first person to publish a book containing photographic illustrations. Her 1843 study, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, employed blue photograms to illustrate photosynthetic organisms and seaweeds.

Barker’s work serves as a kind of sibling or sequel to Atkins’ pioneering publication, presented in a similar style with handwritten names in Latin beneath each specimen.

In their updated versions, the titles take Atkins’ scientific names as a starting point and tweak them just slightly to conjure references to clothing or the human body. In the plate titled “Dichloris vestis,” for example, Barker draws on a real type of algae Atkins catalogued, Dichloria viridis, but “vestis” is instead a tongue-in-cheek reference to outerwear, often made of polyester or other synthetic materials. “Conferva tibia,” which portrays frayed tights, employs the Latin word for “leg.”

From John o’ Groats at the northernmost tip of Great Britain to Land’s End at its southernmost, Barker recovered specimens of clothing from more than 120 beaches. Her finds, ranging from parkas to wigs to sports jerseys, were pulled from the sand, tide pools, or directly from the sea. In Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections, Barker looks to the past to better understand how our actions in the present have both immediate impacts and will shape the future of the climate crisis.

Find your copy on GOST’s online store, where signed editions are also available, and explore more of Barker’s work on her website and Instagram.

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) knew how to appropriate most ardently. The renowned artist once said, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such a blatant thief.”

Next month, a major retrospective highlights Thiebaud’s six-decade career, featuring around 60 quintessential works spanning a range of subject matter. From his celebrated still-lifes of dessert displays and prosaic household objects to portraits, cityscapes, and expansive natural vistas, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art takes a deep dive into the artist’s engagement with art history.

Thiebaud spent time in the 1950s with abstract artists like Franz Kline and Elaine and Willem de Kooning in New York City, where he also met Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose mixed-media practices incorporated found objects in conceptual, proto-Pop Art paintings and assemblages. While in the city, Thiebaud made small paintings of food displayed on windows, which he further explored when he returned to California.

Thiebaud’s career originated with a focus on illustration and cartoons, which aligned with the emergence of Pop Art in the U.S. in the early 1960s. A response to the austerity of the First and Second World Wars, the movement celebrated bold colors, repetition, and everyday objects and commodities.

Art Comes from Art showcases how Thiebaud borrowed from the breadth of European and American masterworks, from Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn to Andrea Mantegna. “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else,” the artist said.

Thiebaud copied, reinterpreted, mashed up, and transformed art history into his own artistic vision, viewing other artists’ cumulative work as a kind of archive or repository—an encyclopedic “bureau of standards” that he could “steal” from while simultaneously paying tribute to titans of the Western art canon.

In oil paintings like “35 Cent Masterpieces,” Thiebaud renders a display of artwork reproductions evocative of postcards or bookshelves in a museum gift shop. And lighting redolent of Edward Hopper, also known for depicting everyday American scenes, contrasts the subjects of “Five Seated Figures.” Along with Thiebauld’s vibrant, buttery portrayals of meals and treats with characteristically glowing blue shadows, additional pieces reference Rembrandt, George Seurat, Édouard Manet, and many more.

Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art opens at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on March 22 and continues through August 17. The show is accompanied by a catalog published by UC Press slated for release in mid-April. Find your copy on Bookshop.

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In the world of photography, the color image has long held an inferior reputation to black-and-white, which connoisseurs historically deemed to be more dignified. Today, vibrant images are embraced in a wide range of fields, from fine art and fashion to advertising and journalism.

Championing the potential of the medium, artist Maurizio Cattelan and French Academy in Rome—Villa Medici director Sam Stourdzé curated Chromotherapia: The Feel-Good Color Photography.

Color therapy, though deemed a pseudoscience, has its roots in color theory, which focuses on interactions between hues and how they affect our moods and emotions.

Cattelan and Stourdzé emphasize ebullient hyperreality, humor, and the absurd through works like Juno Calypso’s “Chicken Dogs,” in which an anonymous figure lies face-down next to a can of hot dogs, or Walter Candoha’s expressive pets. And in “Toiletpaper,” by Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, who co-founded a magazine of the same name in 2010, a man sits on a tan couch, wearing a matching suit, covered in spaghetti.

In total, twenty artists explore a range of approaches in the exhibition, from portraits of people and animals to food and uncanny tableaux. “Many have freed themselves from the documentary function of the photographic medium to explore the common roots of the image and the imaginary, flirting with pop art, surrealism, bling, kitsch, and the baroque,” says a statement.

Chromotherapia opens February 28 and continues through June 9 in Rome, and an accompanying catalogue published by Damiani is slated for release in March in the U.K. and May in the U.S. Pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop.

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