Visual arts/museums

He is a pioneer in the field of medical-imaging technology. In a new book, From Conception to Birth: a Life Unfolds, he collects images of the fetus in every stage of its development. The three-dimensional color visualizations are culled from a variety of medical-image techniques and then reconfigured on the computer. Tsiaras is also a photojournalist and an artist. His previous book is The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. He is also president and CEO of Anatomical Travelogue, Inc.

She is a leading portrait photographer specializing in writers. Over the years her subjects have included Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, William Styron, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Miller and Sarah Vowell, among others. She is currently working on a book of her author portraits to be released next year.

She's put together a book of photographs of and from the museum's collection of human oddities and outdated medical models. The Mutter Museum is in Philadelphia, Pa., and is one of the last medical museums from the 19th century. It originated with the collection of Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter, who gathered unique specimens for teaching purposes. The museum displays many strange human artifacts, such as a slice of a face, amputated limbs and a plaster cast of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker.

Since September 11th, Joel Meyerowitz has taken over 7000 photographs of Ground Zero. He gained unlimited access to the site and did so in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York. A selection of those pictures can been seen in the May 20th issue of The New Yorker.

In honor of the six-month anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, Meyerowitz talks about his World Trade Center Archive Project, a traveling State Department-sponsored exhibition of Ground Zero photographs. Meyerowitz originally spoke about his World Trade Center photos when he was a guest on Fresh Air on October 23, 2001.

He is the cartoon editor of the New Yorker magazine. His new book is The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Creativity. It's a how-to of cartooning and a collection of New Yorker cartoons, including many of Mankoff’s own.

Photographer Doug Niven. Hes curated a new show (with companion coffee table book published by National Geographic Press) called Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side. Its an exhibition of photos from the Vietnam War, as seen through the lens of North Vietnamese photographers. It runs until March 17th 2002 at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan (www.icp.org). Its the first time these photos have been publicly shown. They were locked away in government archives or secretly stored by the photographers.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz has spent the past month taking photographs of Ground Zero for the Museum of City of the New York archives. He had also been shooting pictures of the Manhattan skyline and the World Trade Center Towers since 1981. The last photo he took of the skyline was shot four days before the September 11 attacks. Several of these photos were recently featured in the New Yorker magazine. They'll also be on exhibit at the Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery in Manhattan beginning November 1st.

Abstract painter Frank Stella. The 64 year old artist was first well known in the late 1950s for his Black Paintings series - striped monochrome works that helped touch off the minimalism movement. Over the years his work evolved from the canvas to colorful geometrical configurations of sculpture and architectural dimension. Some of his recent work is being shown at the Lock Gallery in Philadelphia, through November 25th.

Cartoonist Ben Katchor, creator of the weekly comic strip, Julius Knipl (ka-NIP-le), Real Estate Photographer. Through his comic strips, Katchor has been an astute and witty commentator on New York in particular and urban life in general. His new book, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: the Beauty Supply District” (Pantheon), is a novel that incorporates some of his single-page strips from the last few years. Katchor has been syndicated in alternative newspapers and magazines since 1988.