Alexander Gronsky’s photograph of families in the snow hints at something more dubious

The photographer Alexander Gronsky calls the series of pictures he took in Moscow suburbs, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Something Is Going on Here. This image of families in the snow has a kind of dubious innocence. It is juxtaposed in other photos in the collection with military vehicles idling in these same winter landscapes at the edge of the city, and uniformed Russian soldiers mingling with ordinary residents. The contrast gives all of the images a disturbing edge of menace. You find yourself looking hard, for example, at the couple of figures on the right of this picture, in authoritarian black, and wondering how they fit with the people in the primary-coloured jackets. They are part of a landscape in which “normal life” is never quite what it seems.

Gronsky was born in Estonia, and has been based in Russia for most of his career – despite being arrested in the anti-Putin protests of 2015. He has long been drawn to the curious hinterlands at the edge of cities, places half-developed or awaiting development, bulldozers standing by, tower blocks not completed. In a recent interview he explained how he was drawn to these areas because those “edgelands” represented an uncertain kind of escape from the normal rules of cities that require you to walk on the pavement and behave yourself. “Suddenly,” he said, “there’s a gap in the fence, and beyond lies an abandoned construction site. Different rules apply in this space – there are no ethical boundaries; you can use this place as a restroom or smash beer bottles.” That kind of unwritten licence creates what Gronsky documents as a new kind of uneasy “pastoral” where norms become unruly, borders porous, and everywhere is a sort of no man’s land, where – good or bad – “anything can happen”.

Alexander Gronsky is at Galerie Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse, until 23 March

The performance artist shocked 1980s London with his surreal outfits, outlandish lifestyle and collaborations with Lucian Freud, dancer Michael Clark and others. As a major exhibition opens at Tate Modern, family and friends talk about Bowery’s larger-than-life legacy

In October 1980, 19 year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the small Australian town of Sunshine in suburban Melbourne. He brought with him a single suitcase and a portable sewing machine. A few months later, he spent his first Christmas away from home in a rented bedsit feeling depressed and lonely. On 31 December, he attempted to raise his spirits by writing down his new year resolutions:

1. Get weight down to 12 stone.
2. Learn as much as possible.
3. Become established in the world of art, fashion or literature.
4. Wear makeup every day.

In some of the photographs you have to squint hard to see it – sandwiched between tree trunks or cloaked in fog. In others, it’s so close up that all you see are rivets or the cross-hatching of metal beams. In his series Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge (the title nods to Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodcut prints of Mount Fuji), US photographer Arthur Drooker set out to defamiliarise the great Californian landmark, asking: “Is it possible to see the most photographed bridge in the world anew?” After two years on the project, he came away with “deep admiration” for its builders who defied predictions that the mile-wide strait could never be bridged. “What I found most resonant,” says Drooker, “even more than the span’s status as an engineering and architectural icon, is its power as a symbol of possibility.”

• Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge is available from arthurdrooker.com

Magnificent, irreplaceable 20th-century architecture made with craft and imagination was destroyed in the Palisades wildfires

Pacific Palisades and its surrounding neighbourhoods, which have burned so ferociously over the past three weeks, happen to be the location of some beautiful and magnificent 20th-century architecture. Or were, as the fire has taken a terrible toll.

Houses by the émigré Austrian modernist Richard Neutra have gone, as have most of the Park Planned Homes of 1948, an idealistic experiment in affordable modern living by the architect Gregory Ain. Stone chimney stacks are all that remain of the scaled-up cabin that was Will Rogers’ ranch house. His 30-horse stables, in their centre a rotonda like an equine chapter house, are ashes.

Exploring themes of identity, heritage and individuality, the Ghanaian photographer used surreal colours to add a dreamlike quality

Reginald Kofi Boateng had spent his morning scouting the perfect location and gathering props. “The day was steeped with intention,” says Boateng, who comes from Koforidua, in eastern Ghana and now lives in Dansoman, in the capital, Accra.

“Dansoman is a sprawling estate and a place of contrasts,” he says. “Stories are waiting to be uncovered in its bustling streets and quiet corners. This setting became the perfect backdrop to explore themes of identity, heritage and individuality.”

From dancers to divas, amputees to activists: what images of the human form throughout the decades tell us about who we are

There is no image more compelling to us than to see another human being naked. Thousands of years of evolution and desire, of empathy and curiosity, hardwire us to stare. The sight is visceral, electrifying, irresistible. It is familiar and forbidden; innocence and sin. The naked body is there in the bathroom mirror every morning, but to see another always feels like stumbling on a secret. A salt-twist of narcissism heightens our emotions, so that looking at a nude feels very different from admiring a watercolour landscape. Ethics come into it. In the history of portraiture, it is the nudes that are the most honest, or the most exploitative – or sometimes both.

Photographs are part of the fabric of everyday life for all of us, in a way charcoal sketches or oil paintings are not. So when a nude is not a sketch or a painting but a photograph, the intensity ratchets up. The polite distance of the art gallery experience is stripped away, leaving gut reaction and raw emotion. All of which is to say: nothing like a nude photograph to get you by the jugular.

Palestinians return to Gaza, Americans survey the aftermath of the Palisades fire and Hindus gather at the Shahi Snan in India: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing