Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968

Art in America, March, 2002 by Leo Rubinfien

Robert Adams is preeminent among the many photographers who have concerned themselves with the urban development of the once-wild lands of the American West. He began to photograph on the Colorado high plains in 1965, and the subjects of his broad body of work have included the spreading of tract houses along the Rockies; strip malls, parking lots, freeways, cheap motels and garishly lit discount houses; abused land and brutalized animals; the defunct orange estates of outer Los Angeles; the ruined forests of coastal Oregon, and the adult and child citizens of the new West as he finds them, often enough, marooned in bleak trailer parks or graceless rooms.

Self Portrait, Photo Booth, Knoxville, 1967

By Jack Neely, Metro Pulse, July 21, 2010

In his artful memoir 'Memories of Myself,' the well known photographer reveals a forgotten Knoxville milieu. Knoxville scenes inspired the well-traveled photographer, and Lyon’s photographs of Knoxville as it was 43 years ago make up a section of the well-known photographer’s recent autobiographical book, Memories of Myself (Phaidon Press).

“There are now 14 rolls of film to develop,” photographer Danny Lyon wrote in his diary on Sept. 4, 1967. “The most I’ve ever done in such a short period, five days.”

Somewhere else that season was being hailed as the Summer of Love, but the year 1967 was perhaps not Knoxville’s most jubilant time. Some things were looking up—events at the modern Civic Coliseum, the Market Square “Mall.” But the last census indicated that the population was in steep decline. Factories had closed, too many of them to count, and that was part of it, but a bigger factor by 1967 was that the affluent white population in recently desegregated Knoxville was in headlong suburban flight.

By Michael Schmidt, Camera Magazine #3, March, 1979

Photography was invented to enable us to portray reality with complete precision to the last detail. There is no other medium - apart from media which derive from the invention of photography (e.g. film and television) - which is in a position to document reality exactly as it is by means of technical process.

This is how I regard photography. To me, it is an ideal means of documenting our times in a valid and credible form. I say credible, because man is primarily a visual creature to whom thought is a secondary process. Credible also - and in fact mainly - because the photographer has no influence on the evolution of the negative, unlike in the media of painting and literature in which the artist alone is responsible for the development and execution of his work of art. It makes no difference what the photographer's intentions were when he began his work, the creative process is and remains subjective.

Car on Fire, Ohio, 1983-1984

By Justin Hoffman & Charles V. Miller, Artforum, January 1, 1993

Joachim Brohm's work demonstrates that there are other kinds of "straight" photography in Germany besides the "Becher School." The effect of Brohm's work is comparable to that of the Bechers: he equates reproduction and the autonomous image, realism and abstraction, but his vision is different. While Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, or Axel Hutte place classical subjects such as humankind, a landscape, or the city at the center of their work, Brohm's images seem strangely empty. Their centers seem to have fled; a surface has appeared in front of the camera's lense that surrounds the actual image. In one image, a high wall obscures a house; one can only see the chimney and the peak of the roof. In another, one can only surmise what can be seen through the holes of a sheet of corrugated iron. Decentralization, the empty center becomes characteristic of Brohm's work; the dynamic components of the image are pressed to the periphery just as in the paintings of Sam Francis or Clyfford Still.

from From Back Home, 2009

By Martin Jaeggi

A profound sense of displacement and uncertainty pervades JH Engström's work. On the back cover of his 2004 book Trying to Dance he states, almost programatically: "I am always looking for presence. Whenever I try, my doubts get unmasked ... " Whereas most photographers use their camera merely as a tool to convey their deeply held convictions about the ways of the world to their viewers, Engström uses the camera and darkroom to pursue his doubts about whether it is possible to represent any real understanding of our surroundings. The urgent intensity of his work is predicated upon a radical questioning of the possibility of a meaningful communication with the world, an almost Heideggerian sense of "being thrown into world."

Biljana Yrhovac wounded by a shell, Bosnia, 1992

By Michael Fried, Artforum, March 1, 2006

The photograph, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros.

This tale is of destruction and madness, of blunt force and smashing and of howling and of sadness. For everything gave way and fell under its heinous wrath.

"Help! Help!" they said and no one would come. "HELP" they sprayed and shattered they remained.

"FUCK - FUCK"! "Seek GOD!" "I AM HERE I HAVE A GUN!" "I WILL SHOOT TO KILL" and engulfed, they waited.

"DOG KILLERS" "12 LEFT TO DIE IN CRATES"... drowning dogs in the dark... water logged and rotting dogs. And letters on walls left to lead the way.

"I AM ALIVE"... "Fuck You". "RIP"... "Possible body".

from the San Fernando Valley Series, 1970's

On the Vandalism, Forced Entry, and Zuma series

Interview by Jan Tumlir, May 2005

Jan: What is your background? Haven’t you always lived in Los Angeles?

John Divola: I grew up in the West San Fernando Valley. My parents lived in Venice California when I was born, then we moved to the West San Fernando Valley when I was about seven. It was suburban, but rural-suburban, at the time. When I went off to College, in 1967, I went thinking I would become a lawyer, an architect… I was originally an Economics major, but then the Vietnam War was happening and the draft and, of course, there was the hippie influence—all of this resulted in my reevaluation of those assumptions. The culture appeared insane, bankrupt. I had become alienated from the idea of taking a conventional place in society, and somehow that freed me up to pursue more basic interests. So I wound up reading philosophy, taking courses in experimental film, in photography. I’d done some photography in High School, so I already had the basic skills, and that enabled me to quickly become deeply interested in the subject in a new way.

By Nan Goldin, ArtForum, November 1995

Diane Arbus is one of our legends, and the news that a new book of her work has been published is like hearing that a new John Cassavetes film has been released or a new Truman Capote novel discovered. Twenty-four years after her death and eleven years after the last book of her work came out, she's broken her silence and haunts us again.

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Melissa Rachleff

The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930s, inscribed into the culture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as "progressive," came unhinged. By 1933, four years after the stock market crash, one quarter of the work force was unemployed.(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic projects, the most famous of which were sponsored by the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemployed and others.