"Owens explains that, "the photographs for Suburbia weren't done by accident. I put together a shooting script of events that I wanted to photograph... Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Birthdays, et cetera. I got a small grant, and began taking photographs every Saturday for a year, so basically Suburbia was shot in 52 days..."
ANTHONY HERNANDEZ - "Phantoms and Dreams, Ghosts and Grit..."
"The 1970’s photographs of Anthony Hernandez possess something stupendous, something despairing and faint... lusciously strange… something that is fleeting, or maybe some would say… “hard to pin down”. Of course the aesthetic is godsmackingly gorgeous in its bleak ugliness…"
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TAIYO ONORATO & NICO KREBS: "The Great Unreal" (2009)
"Off into the wind, and the great-wide-open-never-ever-end beckons... so off you go and it gusts into your ear and it whispers, "have no fear". Up a path you trot... you are pulled backwards as the dust lights your way and you follow the pull of the dust like a shining beacon into the rear view mirror of your head."
MIKE BRODIE: "The Roof of the World is the Place to Be..."
"Take a wild rivet ride rough steel bracin' your rollin' wandering eyes, bracin' your rollin' adventurin' thighs, runnin' wind and flowery air rushin' through your tingly beaming beautiful feeling face... free hearts, open skies, push your spirit out on a rise... to the roof of the world... ride, baby, ride..."
EIKOH HOSOE: "Subject Matter"
"I am Eikoh Hosoe, a photographer from Tokyo. It is a great honor for me to speak on this special occasion about my collection of photographs of Ba-ra-kei, or Ordeal by Roses, and my experience of photographing Yukio Mishima."
TODD HIDO: "Ohio"
"Your father’s failures and rage are waiting for you little boy and the secrets of the adults are beckoning for you to come. Come bring your purity and your innocence… and let us destroy it."
PAUL SCHIEK: "Good by Angels"
" American photographer Paul Schiek weaves a tale of glass, fabric, suffocation, flash bulbs and fragile human threads. The viewer's head (and heart) are held underwater by force as a feeling of organic claustraphobia and a slight tinge of a smothering madness rush through..."
ASX CHANNEL: SHELBY LEE ADAMS
AUGUST SANDER: "The Mask Behind the Face" (2004)
"For all this nuance, though, Sander's work is full of elisions of time, place and identity, about which he was so reticent that his portraits' titles never give a sitter's name; instead, he assigned his people terse labels like "Boxers," "Woman" or "Communists," then let his camera say everything about their fur collars, hounds, walking sticks, military medals and the anxious wrinkles that beset their cautious eyes. He is equally obscure about where we are..."
WILLIAM GEDNEY: "Writings - Excerpts" (1969-1976)
"Go to dinner for Edward Steichen - I do not relate to the affair or the people, dull speeches, pompous etc. I sit next to Mrs. Harry Callahan. She is nice, a home body. I suspect totally uninterested in art outside of her husband's work..."
"The Missing Photographs: An Examination of Diane Arbus’s Images of Transvestites and Homosexuals"
"Much of the writing and scholarship on Diane Arbus is rooted in psychoanalysis, as scholars attempt to pinpoint the images that signaled her despair, her self-loathing, and her intention to take her own life."
RICHARD AVEDON: "Listening to Avedon" (1995)
"Avedon is very specific about what he brings to that moment - a desire for control. In Avedon's view, "[The sitter's] need to plead his case is probably as deep as my need to plead mine. But the control is with me."
TANYTH BERKELEY and the Special Ones...
"She likes the pale ones, the large headed types, the big bodies and the long giraffe necks. She likes the Robert Crumb shapes and the vampire faces, the glowing white skin and the men-in-dresses with womanly laces..."
INTERVIEW: "Harry Callahan Interview" (1975)
"Well, I'd photographed my wife before. I had been photographing her for a long time. But, yes, I think that we'd been married, let's see, fourteen years before our daughter was born. So this was a real surprise. We had never tried to . . . well, for many years we hadn't tried to prevent having any children. But we'd just forgotten about it because it wasn't happening..."
THEORY: "Perfect Uncertainty - Robert Adams and the American West (2002)"
"One can theorize about beauty all day, but words are weak and at day's end one will go out into the blue and golden and multifarious world, and one will know with the responsive heart, before there is time for words, what is and isn't beautiful."
STEIDL: "New Topographics" (2009)
"In 1975, when the exhibition was first produced, "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape" met up with a smallish and relatively "unimpressive" crowd. One of the larger rooms of the Eastman House Museum was almost filled yet everything about the William Jenkins production seemed to speak to the unassuming and the subtle. "
PIETER HUGO: "The Hyena and Other Men" (2008)
"The first time I met up with the hyena men, as they have become known, the group was staying in a ramshackle three-bedroom apartment in Dei Dei Junction, a suburb of the Nigerian capital, Abuja. The animals were housed in specially constructed boxes. Every member of the party had sores and scars on their faces, legs and hands - legacies of times when the animals suddenly turned hostile and pounced on their handlers with their teeth and claws."
PAUL GRAHAM: "The Unreasonable Apple" (2010)
"The point is that we need the smart, erudite and eloquent people in the art world, the clever curators and writers, those who do get it, to take the time to speak seriously about the nature of such photography, and articulate something of its dazzlingly unique qualities, to help the greater art world, and the public itself understand the nature of the creative act..."
LEWIS BALTZ: "Lewis Baltz" (1979)
"The photographs of Lewis Baltz are derived from what Robert Venturi, the architect, has called the "industrial vernacular". The tract houses and factories that litter the landscape in California where Baltz lives, are bald units of non-architecture; their occasional beauties occur from functions aptly met within strict economic imperatives. Theirs are mostly unconscious virtues, awaiting the eye to elevate the apparently mundane."
REVIEW: "Todd Hido - A Road Divided" (2010)
"One could imagine that the stories have somehow soaked into the ground to live there, residing like a memory, distant yet always near the surface. Color perhaps is then like their moods, moods that shift in shape with the elements. Perhaps the elements wear the roads down over time, beating on them and leaving marks, like the forceful experiences in ones own life."
LARRY SULTAN: "The Valley" (2004)
"The entire house vibrates, shaking as if a dozen overloaded washing machines were stuck on the spin cycle. Exaggerated moans, groans and screams erupt from the back rooms. From the crescendo I can tell that the director has called for the FIP (fake internal pop) shot."
MARK STEINMETZ: "The Gray that Blankets the Living"
"It is almost as if the suffocating gray that inhabits the insides of these people has slowly spilled out from in them to seep into everything around them... covering every object, every thing... every truth, every lie... every hope, every dream..."
REVIEW: Robert Adams - "Summer Nights Walking" (2009)
"As the summer night falls and the crickets chirp, the sky slightly aglow from the street lamps, the stillness comes. And the stillness of the summer dark lays over the land like a warm blanket surrounding a child and it becomes a paradox."
REVIEW: Chris Shaw - "Life as a Night Porter" (2006)
"The graveyard shift is no doubt a motherf-cker. Though you try to force your body and its natural clock on to an ugly artificial one, it never really adjusts. You just live in a weird sort of phantom world where everything is illuminated by the artificial... perhaps then making it a sort of artificial world..."
WILLIAM EGGLESTON: "Introduction to William Eggleston's Guide" (1976)
"At this writing I have not yet visited Memphis, or northern Mississippi, and thus have no basis for judging how closely the photographs in this book might seem to resemble that part of the world and the life that is lived there."
SCOT SOTHERN: "LOWLIFE..."
"The fried-egg platter at Denny's looked just like the laminated photos on the menu. I cleaned my plate with a corner of toast and washed it down with coffee. At two AM the clubs on Sunset turned out the lights..."
BRUCE JACKSON: "Walker Evans: Public Photographs" (1998)
"It is difficult to know now with certainty whether Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it," Szarkowski continued. "Beyond doubt, the accepted myth of our recent past is in some measure the creation of this photographer, whose work has persuaded us of the validity of a new set of clues and symbols bearing on the question of who we are..."
THEORY: "Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult (2009)"
"It’s so easy it's ridiculous. It’s so easy that I can’t even begin – I just don’t know where to start. After all, it’s just looking at things. We all do that. It’s simply a way of recording what you see – point the camera at it, and press a button. How hard is that?"
ANTOINE D'AGATA: "Dead Shell Walking..."
"A living thing yes, a tortured adventuring heartbeat, yes... perhaps a sort of hybrid man-beast animal behind glass... one that seeks, that follows its urges and never finds satisfaction...
GARRY WINOGRAND: "Mirror of Self or World - Pt. I & II" (1991)
"Garry Winogrand's premature death seven years ago was tragic and troubling. He was too young to die. He had not yet worked through what was clearly a very difficult passage in his photographic work. To want to eulogize him and his work seems natural..."
ROSWELL ANGIER: "Sticky Floors and White Men Roars..."
"Stripper-stretch marks and desert-devil-dust... Mexican-Men and Tequila-Worm-Lust... jiggling breasts and White Men roars, sticky palms and sticky floors... booze-boars and bottle-breath, broken-teeth smiles and flailing-fist-death..."
INTERVIEW: "An Uncommon Interview with Stephen Shore" (2007)
"My book does not deal with the content of the pictures, it deals with what might be called the visual grammar of photography. That is not separate from what you’re asking, the projection of personality. I think personality expresses itself in these choices that a photographer makes, because of the choices the tools present."
LISE SARFATI: "Looking at Photographs - Molly #3"
"The room itself is quite an ordinary room. If you examine the details and remove the soft, young female from your mental focus you can feel the “oldness”. One can almost smell that scent that seems to permeate the very essence of a room that is inhabited by someone who is “older”. Not old, just “older”.
INTERVIEW: "Jacob Holdt - American Pictures" (1993)
"I lived with my black friends all those years," said Holdt. "I saw the pain and the suffering and I felt, when I showed the pictures to people, they didn't even know the suffering that was going on in the midst of their own cities. And they were deeply moved by it. So I felt that I was a mediator between totally segregated worlds."