It’s a near universal reflex… First, the tension—every muscle in your body contracts and spasms as you try to ward off your attacker. Limbs kick, swat, and flail about. Eventually, you hunch over, thinking that might help. Then come the fits of laughter. It’s nervous laughter, loud laughter, hooting-howling-squealing laughter, and laughter that, like everything else, you just can’t seem to control.

Yep, being ticklish is an innately uncomfortable phenomenon that afflicts many of us—and one that the Brooklyn-based photographer Jonathan Grassi has set out to document quite poignantly. Grassi captures his subjects mid-spasm, mid-swat, mid-laugh as they react to an unseen tickler. The results are captivating. Cropped just so, Grassi shows the body in full reaction mode, stretching, twisting, and contorting as someone else, even just momentarily, assumes its control.

Photos: © 2010 Jonathan Grassi – www.JonathanGrassi.com

Photographers have long excelled at making the private public—showing us what we don’t (or, in many cases, can’t) necessarily see; taking us somewhere new, somewhere strange, somewhere that is perhaps off-limits. S. Billie Mandle quietly elegant series “Reconciliation” does exactly that. The Brooklyn-based shutterbug has photographed dozens of Catholic Church confessionals, showing us the various places where devotees bear all to a presumably patient (albeit unseen) priest on the other side of a wall, screen, or window. The imagery is stunning, but Mandle’s confessional photographs go far beyond religious imagery. They are about communication—the perforated walls and thick screens that divide the confessor from the priest, the clinical nature of some of these sacred spaces, and the sort of separate-togetherness fostered within.

Photos: © 2010 Billie Mandle – www.BillieMandle.com

We just can’t get enough of these lo-fi special effects… The New York-based photographer Brendan Austin uses paint, crinkly paper, and deft craftsmanship to build miniature crags and rugged cliffs. He then photographs his creations—to alarming realistic effects. The resulting series, titled “Paper Mountains,” succeeds on so many levels. Austin shows us the intricacy that lies within the sort of things we see, make, and discard on a daily basis; he reminds us of the tremendous aesthetic potential of basic art-making tools (i.e. paper, paint, cameras); and he proves that you don’t necessarily need Photoshop (or a helicopter, for that matter) to compose a good shot.

Photos: © 2010 Brendan Austin – www.BrendanAustin.com

San Francisco-based photographer Christina Seely wants to bring things back down to Earth. Her “Lux” series starts with NASA composite imagery of the entire planet at night. It’s sort of the inverse of looking up at the stars—flickers of light denote people as the most densely-populated regions of the world correlate with those bearing the most artificial light. Seely traveled to these flickering locales (Las Vegas, Tokyo, and Madrid among them), taking portraits of these manmade urban centers that are so big, so bright, that they’re recognizable even from space. Seely frames much of her work with elements of the natural landscapes (trees, mountains, craggy cliffs)—a reminder, perhaps, that if we learn to keep our consumption in check we can, just maybe, have it both ways.

Photos: © 2010 Christina Seely – www.ChristinaSeely.com