The boys are subjected to grueling workouts in oppressive heat; their bodies endure brutal punishment; and they are trained to be ferocious and merciless. By the time they are in their early twenties, many of them will have compromised their physical and mental well being as a result of years of excessive training and countless savage bouts. All proceeds from their winning purses are used to maintain their squalid training camp and provide for meager sustenance.

I visited the camp every day for nearly a month before taking any photographs. As time passed, it became increasingly apparent these boys who reside at Thailand’s margins are at once admired and unwanted; savage and forlorn; innocent and jaded; cultivated and commodified. I was inspired to create this series to illuminate these contradictions.—Noah David Bau

Boston and Bangkok-based photographer Noah David Bau spent the last four years at a training camp in one of Bangkok’s most notorious slums to create This Is My Body, a series of portraits of young professional Muay Thai boxers. The boys Bau photographed had been orphaned or neglected, finding themselves at the mercy of their success in the ring as a means of survival. The powerful portraits teeter between man and boy, existing at “the intersection of adolescence, commerce, beauty, and brutality.”

Bau is Soho Photo Gallery’s 2013 National Competition winner.

Is the unclothed body still the desired body? How is the body revealed in the 21st century? This exhibition presents an anthropological survey of who we are and how we define, represent and see ourselves currently. With these works the body is revealed, re-interpreted, and given innumerable shapes by the artists who are defining new ways of representing the nude through contemporary photography.

Under My Skin—Nudes In Contemporary Photography is a group exhibition curated by internationally-renowned artist Mona Kuhn, featuring works by Adou, Jeff Bark, Polly Borland, Chris Bucklow, Ana Casas Broda, David Dawson, Maciek Jasik, Sarah Anne Johnson, Kim Joon, Nadav Kander, Bear Kirkpatrick, Mona Kuhn, Justine Kurland, Christophe Kutner, Deana Lawson, Glen Luchford, Malerie Marder, Geir Moseid, Mariah Robertson, Jenny Saville, Collier Schorr, Alec Soth, Bill Sullivan, Esther Teichmann, Spencer Tunick, and Shen Wei.

It opens at Flowers Gallery in New York this Thursday, June 20th, 2013 with an opening reception at 6pm.

Photo: Nadav Kander, Isley Standing (2010) / Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Photo: Shen Wei, Self-Portrait (Toes) (2011), Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Deana Lawson, Daughter (2007) / Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #10 (1995-1996) / Courtesy of the artists

Photo: Spencer Tunick, Montauk 2 (Surfers’ Beach), (2009) / Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Polly Borland, Bunny Nose (2009) / Courtesy of Other Criteria

Photo: Esther Teichmann, Untitled from Mythologies, (2013) / Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Bill Sullivan, Self Portrait with Mirror #56 (2010) / Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Alec Soth, Las Vegas (2011) / Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York

Photo: Collier Schorr, Day Dream (Sky) (2007) / Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Photo: Geir Moseid, Untitled (2012) / Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Photo: Justine Kurland, Mount Baker, Commanding View (2007) / Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash

The road shows what is going to be, or what hasn’t still become. It’s a mystery in itself. Like this, the path as humans’ fundamental “ignorance” has a deep symbolic meaning, we all seek to know and also to dream about what isn’t known. Another key idea is the road as a “means” for men to go through nature by way of domination of landscape, piercing and cutting it. Men, as a microcosm, need to create artificial pathways to allow them to move through the natural world. Faced with a powerful nature, the human being needs a shelter; they need the artificial to catch the natural.—Carla Andrade

Roads lie down before Carla Andrade’s lens. Based in Madrid, this Spanish photographer explores the possibilities of this simple tenet in landscapes across the globe—one road in a field, tearing into the distance. This is the purest example of one-point perspective, and the formal conceit of a line disappearing into space is used as grounds to examine the differences between the landscapes of this ubiquitous scene.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Matthew Leifheit is an independent writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City.

In Danish photographer Casper Balslev’s energetic series, the street photographs were taken on a visit to Sjinjuku, Tokyo’s financial district. Inspired by the faces and the characters in the area, Balslev snapped shots of people walking, biking and passing by. Asked if he was looking for specific subjects to shoot: “No, it was very spontaneously done. Most people never really noticed me taking their photo. I would walk around and spot people, then simply approach them, shoot one shot quickly, and then leave. I was inspired by street photographers like Mark Cohen and Bruce Gilden.”

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.

Linda Kuo only photographs animals. Her new series entitled Displaced pictures exotic creatures being treated for various maladies at the New York City Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine. Her subjects represent just a few of the estimated 300 million animals that are illegally imported into the United States each year as exotic pets. Although this alarming societal problem is at the heart of Kuo’s series, it’s impossible not to smile when you’re looking at a bunny rabbit wearing an oxygen mask.

Kuo began making her gracefully composed animal pictures as a result of moving from Manhattan to Westchester County, a much more rural environment. She was shocked by the volume of dead animals along the side of the road, and began by making photographs of these recently and not-so-recently deceased critters. “In Illinois, where I’m originally from, the terrain is open prairie land so there is just the occasional rabbit or opossum along the side of the road. I was truly bereaved by what I saw—beautiful wildlife along the side of the road. I felt a need to document it and that is what lead to a series called Hit and Run. I often ponder why I’m drawn to animals as a subject, and I think that it’s a confluence of many variables; my yoga practice and study of devotional tenets, the human condition, suffering. It’s not necessarily solely the animal that solicits my projects, but it’s the animal that most strongly connects me to the underlying sensibilities of my work; the disquiet, the abjection, often of being denied or withheld, disregarded and oppressed.”

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Matthew Leifheit is an independent writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City.

Brooklyn-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya specializes in portraiture. His work focuses on people in his life and has an air of casual familiarity which explores ideas of friendship, sex and intimacy. His project Studio Work deconstructs the “pleasures and burdens” of his practice. Best seen as an installation, the images focus on people and objects that were part of his studio space for an entire year. Sepuya’s minimal aesthetic gives the images a cool and detached feel, while the ease and confidence of his subjects infuse them with seduction and vulnerability. This simultaneous sense of feeling excluded while invited in creates a tension that toys with us, as the end result becomes a surprisingly intimate portrait of the artist himself.

This post was contributed by Guy Merrill, Art Director at Getty Images London.

The work of Austin-based photographer Casey James Wilson is hard to pin down. Wilson works concurrently in several modes of photographic representation—colorful still-life photos of mundane objects skewed by digital manipulation, impromptu street scenes, and close-ups that revel in the surface texture of the subject—creating a body of work that evades categorization and keeps us guessing. We asked him a couple of questions about his approach and style.

What draws you to the type of images you make?
“I think my approach to image making is somewhat fluid and I keep a large space for intuition to play a role in my practice. I also try to work in multiple ways simultaneously and I continue to think of the studio and the street as equally lucrative places for me to make photographs.

“In some images I am certainly more invested in the material form of a subject and want to confront this curiosity in the control of the studio, but more often I tend to find the most motivating and inspirational scenes are still the impromptu, happenstance combinations of objects and surfaces formed outside of my influence. Generally, I’m pointing at these situations that appear to insinuate digital manipulation even when represented directly, and subjects that have a certain clumsiness when translated to the photographic surface.”

By combining all of these images, what are you looking to achieve?
“To me this certain lack of continuity borrows from Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser’s ideas regarding information games and breakthroughs in the photographic universe, as well as the Theatre of the Absurd technique of engaging an audience by breaking from logic and questioning correctness. In freely combining various treatments to the medium, I’m adding to the lexicon in play and the potential to make more compelling or more complex connections between images.”

This post was contributed by photographer Trey Wright.

I am choosing people to photograph regardless of gender, race, and class, and consciously interacting with my environment. The work is an exploration of my history and the ways I have been guarded and chosen to not speak to strangers. I want to explore going against what I believed to be socially correct. I want to translate my compassionate nature and what I feel for the people I encounter, the space we all share together both socially and environmentally.—Joy Mckinney

New York-based photographer Joy Mckinney is after a shared experience in The Guardian, a series of photographs in which she has touched 74 strangers on the street, creating images that break the barriers of personal space. The project is an experiment of sorts, Mckinney acknowledges along the way her own perceptions about strangers, space, and time were false—rather people were accepting and willing to share in the connection.

Maine-based photographer Caleb Charland’s series Demonstrations was inspired by his personal interest in science. “My process and choice of subject matter stem from growing up in a do-it-yourself household where I learned to appreciate the power held by tools and materials. As I explore the garage and search through the basement to solve these pictures, I find new ways of putting old tools and familiar materials to work. Each piece begins with a simple question: How would this look? Is that possible? What would happen if…and then I develop the image through a process of experimentation.”

To create the composition for each image, he says it is a “combination of experimentation and serendipity. I usually sketch ideas out for a while before physically constructing them. Some ideas take a day. Some months, and some years.” His images are created in-camera, using multiple exposures, with no Photoshop.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.

Photographers living or working in the USA and Japan are invited to submit their work to be considered in the Tokyo International Photography Competition (TIPC). Presented by Tokyo Institute of Photography (TIP) and Brooklyn-born United Photo Industries (UPI), the competition was created to provide an opportunity for American and Japanese photographers to present their artistic visions beyond their country’s borders, opening up the possibilities for cross-pollination and cross-border collaborations. TIPC is the first step of a three-year plan to launch an international photography festival in Tokyo, starting in 2015.

A group of 8 photographers from the USA and Japan will be selected by a team of seven internationally recognized jurors. The work will be presented in a group exhibition at TIP’s 72 Gallery in Tokyo and UPI’s Gallery in Brooklyn in the fall of 2013. Additionally, there will be one grand prize winner selected, who will receive a FUJIFILM X-Pro 1 camera with the winner’s choice of three XF Lenses and a four-page feature in Japan’s PHaT PHOTO magazine.

The theme is civilization. Submit your work by June 30, 2013.