Torbjørn Rødland expertly navigates the possibilities of photography using film and traditional darkroom processing. He is well versed in the tropes of commercial photography and calls on them in his work to yield highly emotional, tactile, and unexpected images. The Ring typifies Rødland’s interest in visually juxtaposing opposites such as young/old, wet/dry, or dark/light. In this image, a white elderly woman’s hand wrestles with the hand of a younger, darker-skinned woman.

As a young boy growing up in the 1940s at Western Avenue and 90th Street in South Los Angeles, Pat O’Neill occasionally went to the dump with his father as a way to pass the time. In those years, Los Angeles was quickly modernizing and entering the boom of midcentury consumerism, becoming a place where Hollywood met the growing aerospace, music, and fashion industries. These themes are evident in Bump City.

Asha Schechter is interested in how objects are rendered photographically. He brought these specific items together because they represent a wide variety of materials—paper, rubber, cardboard, wood, metal—each with different textures and behavioral qualities. He provided a 3D modeler with an image and a “skin” for each item so the modeler could render them virtually in three dimensions. The final work represents a flattening of that modeling, a return from three to two dimensions: the work is output as a large-scale photographic sticker adhered directly to the wall.

David Buchan was a vital part of the free-spirited artistic scene centered in downtown Toronto during the mid-1970s and 1980s. He regularly appeared as his alter ego, Lamonte del Monte, in performances, photo-text works, videos, and installations before shifting his focus in the mid-1980s to produce Cibachrome prints and transparencies, often at a large scale.

The image-based magazine Toiletpaper is the brainchild of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. Toiletpaper made its debut in 2010, three years after Cattelan had ceased publishing the journal Permanent Food, which consisted of images torn from other magazines and republished. Cattelan teamed up with Ferrari—a commercial photographer whose background includes advertising work, branding campaigns, and Hollywood portraits—to ensure the images maintained a slick look and feel.