I've just returned from sunny Santa Fe after an exciting weekend of reviewing portfolios and meeting with photographers from all over the world.Photo-Eye kicked off the event on Thursday night by setting up a delicious New Mexican buffet dinner for all of the photographers, reviewers and people in the Santa Fe community. The outdoor area was packed with photographers and reviewers mingling, while others perused the bookstore and Debbie Fleming Caffery's striking new exhibition(that opened the same night in the gallery).

While in the bookstore I asked some folks to share with us their favorite book of the moment. Here's what some said:

Norman Mauskopf – Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard. Norman says he likes it so much because, "Evans has a big postcard collection and so do I."

Maarten Schilt – Looking at the US. 1957 – 1986 by Wendy Watriss and Frederick C. Baldwin

Ferit Kuyas – Brian Finke's Flight Attendants

Darren Ching – James and the Other Apes by James Mollison with text by Jane Goodall

Debra Klomp Ching – Steve Pyke's: Post Partum and Post Mortem from the Nazraeli's picture books series

Carlan Tapp – Robert Frank's, The Americans

Laura Wzorek Pressley - Pitch Blackness by Hank Willis Thomas

Your studio portraits...

As a rule, when I was working in the studio, I did a lot of the positioning. As I have a background in drawing, I was able to set up certain positions in my portraits. I didn't want my subjects to look like mummies. I would give them positions that brought something alive in them.

When you look at my photos, you are seeing a photo that seems to move before your eyes. Those are the sort of poses I gave them. Not poses that were inert or lifeless. No. People who have life need to be positioned that way.

In '57, there was a young lady who wanted to be photographed. One day she came in and I placed her in front of the camera. I had a Semflex. I positioned her and said, "Right, let's take your photo."

The human face signals our emotions, suggests our cultural background. It is the naked part, that we present to the world; our faces speak realms about our identity. Our faces anchor us to our histories, our stories and the stories of our ancestors. Our faces change with time, our faces absorb the passage of time. We tell our stories through our faces: how we present ourselves, how we use this personal canvas to convey not only our emotions, but also histories and identities.-- Steve Pyke

JS: How do you think the process differs today from when you were establishing yourself in the 60's and 70's?
JM: Back in my day it was like laying bricks. Slow and steady and labor intensive. Probably today it's similar for those who believe in themselves and the medium, in that it always takes a deep personal commitment to the mystery and craft of this special system we love. But what is different today is the means at your disposal for transmitting the work that you do. In my time it was a one-on-one means of showing/sharing work and it had to be done in person so the person you showed it to could clearly see that you were a young, wet behind the ears, photographer. Now you can shoot a "slide" show to people across the globe and they don't know who you are and only have the work to deal with. But that's really a plus for all of you.

Jörg Colberg: A lot of your work so far has dealt with crime and punishment. You portrayed the conditions of prisons in South Africa, and your first book Beaufort West opens with an aerial shot of the little town, in whose very center there is a prison. How did you get interested in this subject matter?

Mikhael Subotzky: In 2004 we had our third democratic election in South Africa, and there was a prominent Constitutional Court case going on which was to decide whether prisoners could or couldn't vote. This question interested me in relationship to our history of disenfranchisement, but also in relation to the experience of living in South Africa at a time when crime levels were supposedly peaking.