Taryn Simon's photographs are crisp to the point of being stark, stripped of all but the most essential elements. She documents places and things that are normally kept far from view: items detained at customs, radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility, the art collection of the CIA. ...

In 1928 the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered the fungus from which penicillin is derived. Fleming made the discovery while trying an unusual experiment: painting with strains of bacteria. Lindsay Patterson talked with a team that’s taking bacterial painting to a new level.

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The biggest piece of bad news of the last 4 months seems to be getting less bad: the Deepwater Horizon oil well is plugged, and the spill is disappearing from the surface of the Gulf fast.  As the catastrophe fades the photographer Zoe Strauss is doing her part to keep our focus on the disaster – and how it continues to affect people who live on the Gulf.

Our extended cut of Kurt's conversation with Patti Smith, including three things you didn’t know about the rock legend: 1) mother turned her on to poetry; 2) writes detective stories; 3) enthusiastic golfer.

As the Belvedere Torso inspired Michelangelo, Michelangelo inspired Robert Mapplethorpe. The Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Italy, has never exhibited a contemporary artist in the revered museum that houses Michelangelo's 'David.' Until now.

This week on Studio 360, Nick Heling talks to Muslim punk rockers The Kominas about taqwacore, the movement inspired by novelist Michael Muhammad Knight's 2002 novel The Taqwacores. Photographer Kim Badawi met Knight shortly after Taqwacores was published, and in 2006 began tagging along on tours with taqwa bands The Kominas and Secret Trial Five, snapping pics of the scene in its infancy. Now that taqwacore is a raging adolescent, Brooklyn publisher powerHouse (which specializes in not-your-mamma's coffee table books) has come out with a beautiful new book of Badawi's photos: The Taqwacores: Muslim Punk in the U.S.A.. What I love about Badawi's photos are the juxtapositions: there's the obligatory sex, drugs, and thrashing guitars, but also veiled heads, prayer rugs, and band members bowed towards Mecca.

In his new film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” filmmaker Errol Morris explores one of the darkest chapters of recent history: the shocking photos that emerged from the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib four years ago. He explains to Kurt why those photos were not just ...

David Plowden explains why he's made an extensive photo study of bridges -- both as an artist and documentarian.