The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Cauleen Smith’s 1998 debut about a California girl who takes Polaroids of young black men as an endangered-species record, is captivating

The title is an African American term from the US south meaning “ordinary” or “ordinariness” – but there’s nothing ordinary about this 1998 indie from artist and film-maker Cauleen Smith, rereleased for its 25th anniversary. Smith shot it in her 20s while still in grad school at UCLA, and maybe the film does have a distinctive film-school project feel with its DIY aesthetic. But there is a captivating kind of innocence in its walking-pace narrative, its indifference to the irony and self-awareness that was fashionable in independent cinema at the time, and in the unaffected charm and guilelessness of its performances.

Toby Smith plays Pica, a girl who lives with her mother and grandmother in a chaotic house near Oakland, California, where she is enrolled in a photography class; instead of creating artistically refined studies on 35mm film cameras as demanded by her professor, Pica is taking Polaroids of young black men because she believes this is a kind of endangered-species record, as so many of these men will wind up in prison or dead. It’s a radically simple street-art reportage, which of course makes the professorial sophisticated compositions look dull and bloodless; the film itself arguably endorses the Polaroid aesthetic.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

In the 1970s, the photographer began teaching in a progressive US women’s prison and made moving portraits of many of the inmates. Looking back, he sees how many of them actually felt safer in prison

In 1970, aged 35, Jack Lueders-Booth left a well-paid management job at an insurance company in his native Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue his interest in photography. “Until then, I was a serious hobbyist,” he tells me over the phone from the city where he still lives, “but my interest had deepened to the point where it was more and more difficult to do my day job. I needed something more stimulating. Photography was my real vocation.”

Soon afterwards he landed a job as an administrator for the fledgling photography department at Harvard University, where later he also enrolled as a student. For his master’s thesis, he submitted a proposal that would alter the course of his life. “I told them I wanted to teach photography in places of confinement such as prisons and mental hospitals,” he elaborates, “I thought it would be beneficial for the inmates in all sorts of ways, not least because they could share their experience with their families through the images they made.”

Much art, from Bob Dylan to Robert Frank, derives its greatness from its flaws. But sporting perfection is a whole different ball game

I’m not one to boast but on a recent Sunday morning I achieved perfection. To be precise – and there is no perfection without precision – I was half of something perfectly achieved. On the second version of the song Love Sick – which only saw the light of day last year as part of the continuing series of official Bootleg releases – Bob Dylan says he’s “struggling, striving / For perfection”. Proof of the struggle and strife is the way that this declaration was absent from the first take and deleted from the subsequent version selected for the album Time Out of Mind (1997). Despite what he claims, Dylan is not – and never has been – interested in perfection. He’s always been plunging on to the next line, the next verse, the next song. Yes, he looks forward, in another song, to the day when he’ll paint his masterpiece but on several occasions potential masterpieces were abandoned – She’s Your Lover Now, I’m Not There – because other imperfect masterpieces were soon jostling for attention.

Dylan has written more great songs than anyone in history but a condition of that greatness is that he was not hung up on perfecting any of them. Every version of every Dylan song could be improved. For each enhancement made to a song’s lyrics there’s a corresponding loss. He throws in wonderful lines, chucks out great lines and leaves terrible ones intact. His constant tampering with the lyrics is evidence not of perfectionism but of a restless hunger that is in some ways its opposite. In this respect he’s similar to the photographer Robert Frank , who said that a book of photographs by Hermann Eidenbenz (in whose studio he worked) “put me off perfection for life”.

A new exhibition asks us to look again at classic images of war, protest and revolution, and sheds light on manipulated photographs

A Russian soldier raises a Soviet flag over Berlin’s Reichstag in Yevgeny Khaldei’s well-known 1945 photograph of wartime triumph.

But in the original image, the officer standing below can clearly be seen wearing a watch on both wrists. Khaldei’s shot, first printed in a Moscow magazine, was quickly withdrawn and the extra watch, which might actually have been a military compass, was removed for safety’s sake. Looting was not a good look and was punishable by death.

The celebrated ​writer, who died last week, is captured​ by Arnold Newman in his study ​in 1993​ with his trusty Olympia manual typewriter​

Few novelists ever inhabited their vocation with more conviction than Paul Auster , who died last week of lung cancer at the age of 77. This picture, taken in 1993 by Arnold Newman, captured the writer in his element and among the objects that defined him.

The author of The New York Trilogy is pictured in his basement study in the Brooklyn brownstone house that he shared with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt (she wrote in a room in the attic). The white walls and bare lightbulbs cast the 19th-century workspace in 20th-century light; you are reminded that his contemporary and friend Don DeLillo had, the previous year, described Auster’s fictional method as “building a traditional storytelling architecture with sharply modern interiors”. There is the ever-present authorial cigarette – Auster’s 1995 film Smoke was set in a Brooklyn tobacconist (he belatedly switched to a vape in 2018) – and, centre stage, the Olympia manual typewriter on which he produced every word of his novels and which was itself the subject of a short 2002 book.

Our photographer Tom Jenkins was at Portman Road to witness the scenes as the Tractor Boys’ victory meant a return to the Premier League for the first time since 2002

Artist Selena Kearney was raised on the Chehalis reservation in Washington state and began photographing fake native regalia after a chance encounter with a young woman in a grocery store on Halloween. “She was wearing a skimpy faux-Native American costume,” she says. “I couldn’t begin to understand how that cheap outfit had anything to do with me, or my heritage.” Curious about the power of these objects, she started to collect and consider them, sourcing sports paraphernalia, traditional headdresses and vintage and new costumes from eBay and Amazon. Over the course of five years, Kearney photographed them and the resulting series is now featured in a book, Every Object Has a Ritual (published by Minor Matters) , and an exhibition at the Suquamish Museum in Washington state (Object/Ritual, 18 May-January 2025). “Collecting masks felt the hardest of all,” she says. One featuring a woman with two braids was particularly unsettling. “A parody of me, looking back at me.”