Photographer

Sylvia Halpern Barkan, 95, a photographer and artist who was a community activist in University City for 63 years, died in her home there, Saturday, June 30. In 1949, Mrs. Barkan and her husband, Ben, a labor attorney, moved into a home at 47th and Osage in the Garden Court section of University City. They renovated the early-20th-century twin and became involved in the community. When Mrs. Barkan received the Garden Court Community Association's first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, the association chronicled the Barkans' contributions.

Even in Hollywood, the top-10 actresses get paid only about 55 percent of what the top-10 men earn. But for movie stars, that's still not too shabby. On Forbes' latest list of the highest-paid actresses, the new No. 1 is Kristen Stewart, who, thanks to a little series of films based on the Twilight books and her "Snow White and the Huntsman," earned a hefty $34.5 million last year. Still commanding big dollars in second place was Cameron Diaz at $34 million, followed by Sandra Bullock at $25 million, Angelina Jolie at $20 million and Charlize Theron at $18 million.

The suits have knocked off the superheroes at the box office. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones' sequel Men in Black 3 debuted as the No. 1 movie over Memorial Day weekend with $55 million domestically from Friday to Sunday. That bumps The Avengers into second place after three blockbuster weekends. The Avengers took in $37 million over the three days to push its domestic total to $514 million and become only the fourth movie to top half a billion dollars. Sony estimates that by the end of the four-day holiday weekend Monday, Men in Black 3 will have pulled in $70 million domestically and $202 million worldwide.

Digital cameras and smartphones have revolutionized garden photography like everything else. But, as Matthew Benson's new book, The Photographic Garden, illustrates so ably, new technology may have changed the tools, but the fundamentals of compelling photography are timeless. And so he writes for gardeners who want to see the garden differently through a lens, and thus, take better pictures. We can all use some help here, which makes Benson's introduction positively tantalizing: "Learning to see the garden photographically will make you a better garden designer, tuning your eye to the complex textural detail of plants, to the way they hold and transmit light, and to their posture and habit.

Horst Faas, 79, a prizewinning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with the Associated Press, died Thursday in Munich, Germany. A native of Germany who joined the U.S.-based news cooperative there in 1956, Mr. Faas photographed wars, revolutions, the Olympic Games, and events in between. He was best known for covering Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in 1967 and won four major photo awards, including the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes.

Informed in 2004 that her house in Newark, N.J., was soon to be demolished, the photographer Emma Wilcox exacted a kind of artistic revenge on the city's exercises of eminent domain. She began writing enormous, pithy texts in flour and paint on rooftops throughout the city and photographing them from a helicopter. (She knew, unlike many Internet users, that Google Earth does not function in real time.) Upstairs at the Print Center, where her documentary daytime aerial photographs from the series "Where It Falls" are paired with her mysterious nocturnal street scenes of Newark, from an ongoing series titled "Forensic Landscapes," Wilcox comes across as an activist and a romantic.

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years ?By Zoe Strauss?Edited by Peter Barberie?With essays by Peter Barberie, Sally Stein,?and Zoe Strauss?Yale University Press. 270 pp. $55 ($19.95 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art)??Reviewed by Andrew Ervin Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is a book for those of us who still lament the day when the Gap opened on South Street. It serves as the lavish catalog for the Philly photographer's current (through April 22) exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but it's also a tribute to the golden age before national franchises put so many of our family-owned shops out of business, and before urban renewal homogenized vast sections of our community in the name of progress.

Gorillapods are flexible, multi-jointed camera tripods that can be affixed around door handles, tree limbs, and other objects for self-portraits pretty much anywhere. Now comes the Gorillapod Micro, a simpler, svelter model that can remain attached to a camera all the time for setup in a flash. The tiny Micro has three zinc-alloy legs that can grip even uneven surfaces with their rubberized feet. The legs, though not multi-jointed, fan out from an aluminum positioning ball that allows 36 degrees of movement in any direction.

The immediacy and gutsiness in Stephen Perloff's photography show "Unseen Color, Part 1" at Light Room Gallery are truly impressive. This solo appears startlingly fresh even though it features pictures that this well-known Langhorne photographer, founder/editor of Photo Review, took between 1966 and 1982, both here and abroad. Accustomed to exhibiting only his black-and-white photos, Perloff lately revisited his Kodachrome slides in storage, and was able to bring these images back to life as new digital prints using a high-quality scanner and printer.

The photographer Emmet Gowin is justifiably well known for the remarkably frank, and simultaneously mysterious, portraits he took of his wife, Edith Morris, and their family in the 1960s and '70s. His aerial photographs of landscapes ravaged by strip mining and weapons testing, taken over the next two decades, offer a similarly matter-of-fact yet ambiguous view of their subjects, but from a distance. Over the last decade, Gowin has gotten up close and personal again, photographing various species of moths in Panama and South America alone, during the day, and as they flit around Edith at night, creating ribbons of light in the dark.