• La Jolla, Calif.: Jean Lowe, Hey Sexy!, at Quint Contemporary. Opens Saturday at 6pm.
• NYC: Carol Salmanson and Stephen Truax, at Storefront Bushwick. Opens Friday at 6pm.
• NYC: Anja Hitzenberg, Take Out: Chinese Fast Food Photographs, at Underline Gallery. Through May 13, in the West Village. (God help me, I want a Twist Potato.)
• Lima: Photography of Iquitos and the Amazon from the collective Supayfotos, at the Central Cultural Ricardo Palma. Through April 21, in Miraflores.
• London: Gillian Wearing, at Whitechapel Gallery. Through June 17.
• Paris: The Palais de Tokyo re-opens with the triennial exhibition Intense Proximité. Opens Friday, near the Jardins du Trocadero.
• Plus: All my latest New York picks over at Gallerina…

I’ve been marinating in photographer Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann’s latest book Zapallal | Yurinaki for several days — a chronicle of two Peruvian communities that are connected by circumstance and economics, even as they stand worlds apart. Separated by the Andes, Yurinaki sits at the edge of the central Amazon. Zapallal is located on the outskirts of Lima, tucked into the dusty-apocalyptic hills that make up the Peruvian coast.

The latter settlement came into existence in the 1980s, after a series of economic crises and the country’s simmering Internal Conflict led hundreds of thousands of rural Peruvians to migrate to the capital. Many of the residents of Zapallal hail from or are in some way linked to Yurinaki. But they are connected in other ways, too: by poverty, by social class, by their lack of political power.

In these communities, Marroquín Winkelmann finds a rare beauty. A young man sits cinematically in a mototaxi. A cat howls from a rickety wood platform while a pig watches pensively. A little boy plays in a toy car without wheels; he has nowhere to go. Marroquín uses lighting to dramatic effect — even in daylight settings — for images that take on an almost baroque quality in tone and content. (Note the daughter, above, in an almost blessing-like pose with the fly swatter.)

In Peru — a country where nearly one in ten people live in extreme poverty, and nearly one in three live under the poverty line — the lives of the poor can seem almost like an abstract concept. But Marroquín takes the statistics and makes them human, recording dignity where most folks wouldn’t think to look.

Zapallal | Yurinaki is available at Dalpine. Plus, see some of the images from the series on Marroquín’s website. (The puny images on my blog don’t do it justice.)

• L.A.: Elizabeth Peyton, What Wondrous Thing Do I See, at Regen Projects. Opens Thursday at 6pm, in Beverly Hills.
• S.F.: Solo ESAS Mujeres, a group show with Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and many others, at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Through May 5, in the Mission.
• S.F.: Everything Ever and Nothing Ever, a group show featuring Deuce 7, Read More Books, Bill Daniel and many others, at Needles and Pens. Opens Saturday at 7pm, in the Mission.
• Seattle: Sharon Butler and Allison Manch, Squeeze Hard (Hold That Thought), at Season. Opens Sunday at 5pm.
• Nashville: Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination, at the First Center for the Visual Arts. Through May 28, in downtown.
• Pittsburgh: Henri Matisse: The Thousand and One Nights, at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Opens Saturday.
• NYC: David Lyle, Misbehaving, at Lyons Wier Gallery. Opens Thursday, in Chelsea.
• NYC: Brent Birnbaum, The Bureau of Apology, at the LAB at the Roger Smith Hotel. Opens Friday, in Midtown.
• Paris: Helmut Newton, at the Grand Palais. Through June 17. (Adverve.)
• Plus: All my latest New York picks in Gallerina…

• “Make a cruel and offensive offer.” Papers filed in a lawsuit reveal negotiating tactics at Gagosian. Juicy.
• N+1 has a must-read essay on the general oleaginousness of Sotheby’s, which makes their treatment of unionized art handlers even more nausea-inspiring.
• If you go to a shit farm, you’ll find shit: Morley Safer went to Art Basel Miami Beach and found general vapidity. Duh!
• Roberta Smith deconstructs Safer’s “clueless exercise.” She also takes a dig at “semi-informed” bloggers. (Because lord knows I’ve *never* read anything semi-informed in the New York Times.)
• Jerry Saltz has challenged Safer to curate a show. I’d like to suggest that Safer hang out with those Sotheby’s art handlers instead of hobnobbing with Larry Gagosian. You know, something informed and incisive, rather than mere gum-flapping.
• Speaking of which: The price of art fairs. Highly interesting piece, even if it appears to be missing the line items for rent-a-boyfriends and cocaine.
• Urban Outfitters — a company with a Santorum-supporting CEO — sells (or sold?) T-shirt featuring gay icon Robert Mapplethorpe.
• On the world of art celebrity: Klaus Biesenbach and his Twitter feed. (Gallerist NY.)
• Larry Rivers’ Legs: Are they a sculpture? Or a structure? I love it when these scintillating questions get asked.
• A round-up of interesting artist websites. (Have to agree with Hyperallergic: the David Hockney copyright disclaimer is pretty douchey.)
• Sasha Frere-Jones, in defense of Twitter.
• Will the train ever leave the station? On trying to fund Jeff Koons’ steaming piece of boner art.
• Plus: Heart As Arena comes up with a tasteful alternative to Koons’ dangling locomotive.
• Remembering Hilton Kramer…and his incredibly right-wing politics. (Read this all the way through. The end is pretty spectacular.)
• Teaching Art in 89 Simple Lessons: If the producers of Work of Art had employed this book to come up with the challenges in the show things coulda been really interesting…
• The Gallery of Default Anonymity.
• Related: Screenshots of Despair.
• Just because: Snoop Dogg’s Soundcloud.

• MUST. READ. A stunning 1988 essay by Joan Didion on our political “process” and its coverage in the media, and how it bears absolutely no resemblance to reality. Though I’m still trying to figure out what the hell “housemaid Spanish” is. (@citizen_kahn.)
• Why solar energy is not as green as we might like to believe. A good reason to stop air conditioning shit to death.
• “There are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”
• Men in trucks: The photography of Alejandro Cartagena.
• Jeff Chu on his round-the-world tour of Damien Hirst’s spots, an excellent opportunity to catch up on his reading.
• Is the theft of virtual goods considered stealing? It is by the Dutch Supreme Court. (Kyle Chayka.)
• The Day in Art Merch: A Sol Lewitt yarmulke. Awesome.
• A Christian app for viewing art.
• How Facebook and other businesses are using you.
• And why the U.S. should consider a digital privacy law à la Europe.
• Werner Herzog, on interviewing men on death row. God help me, Herzog could be talking about taking out the trash and I’d tune in.
• Vintage Iranian “Barbie” dolls.
• No idea what this is about but give me more: A Turkish Star Trek spoof. (@jmcolberg.)
• Pac Mondrian.