Last year, I stood in Arthur Roger Gallery, the prominent commercial venue on New Orleans’s Julia Street where Birch has exhibited since 1993, observing his drawings of the Seventh Ward, acrylic-and-charcoal works on paper in velvety grisaille. I recognized familiar anti-monuments—a watering hose coiled against peeling clapboard, a forlorn pair of tennis shoes flung over an electric wire—from the artist’s historically black, working-class neighborhood, located only five miles from the gallery, but seemingly a world away.

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STARTING IN THE 1990S, advances in digital technology made it easier for photographers to print their work at previously unimaginable sizes. The result was a golden age of vast pictures—typified by the work of artists such as Andreas Gursky—with the kind of impact previously limited to painting or films. But in these social-media–saturated times, when we’re constantly thumbing through palm-size images shared freely on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, is there still a meaningful place for photographs measured in feet? For Edward Burtynsky and Robert Polidori, two of today’s most esteemed practitioners of large-scale photography, the answer is unequivocally yes.

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Jacqueline Bishop Lecture: Flora, Fauna and the Human Kind at the Albrecht Kemper Museum of Art | Jacqueline Bishop’s landscape-issued paintings and works on paper explore the complex connections between climate change, species extinction and migration.

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George Dureau was born in 1930, raised and, for the most part, stayed in New Orleans his entire life – leaving only to serve in the army and also to briefly study architecture. He began drawing when he was young, encouraged by his mother to capture courtyard scenes and magnolias. As an adult, he moved to the French Quarter and lived as one might have in Paris at the same time.

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New Orleans sculptor Lin Emery’s career began on a whim as feather-light as the movement of the dancing metal sculptures that can be seen across the world. At 23, she wandered into a famous sculptor’s Paris studio and asked about lessons. He took her on as a demonstration to show his more advanced students how to teach total neophytes.

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Natural Discourse and the Los Angeles County Arboretum present a spectacular evening of animation, light and sound in the garden. A group of acclaimed contemporary artists have been invited to project their work onto the rich canvas of the botanical garden. With themes as diverse as invasive exotics, natural pigments, plant tropism and an ancient Chinese poem, these digital and video works explore the intersection of horticulture and technology.

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Two years after his death, George Dureau is finally getting the recognition he deserved but never really pursued. For an art photographer, having an Aperture Foundation large-format monograph devoted to your work is the gold standard of recognition, and when Aperture published George Dureau, The Photographs last month, it assured his place in photography’s pantheon, a position further enhanced by his inclusion in upcoming museum symposiums at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere.

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