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@ Lisette Model Estate Model’s art is definitely antibourgeois: her judgments indict the middle class’s smugness as well as its selfishness. By Max Kozloff, Excerpt from New York: Capital of Photography, 2002 Model’s art is definitely antibourgeois: her judgments indict the middle class’s smugness as well as its selfishness. For example, she depicted […]
By Robert Coles, Wellesley College, 1977 I have an intense dislike for Diane Arbus. I don’t like her photographs and I don’t like the cult that’s been made of them. Maybe it’s because I’m a psychiatrist, because some part of me feels that that’s wrong, that that isn’t the whole of the reality. Or maybe […]
With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. By Robert Frank, U.S. Camera Annual, p. 115, 1958 I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for their confidence and the provisions they made for me to work freely in my […]
Sick of Goodby’s, Mabou, 1978, Robert Frank Paint dripping from a mirror like blood. I’m sick of goodbyes. By Lou Reed, originally published in Tate Magazine, Issue 2, Autumn, 2004 I was looking at Robert Frank’s photograph Sick of Goodby’s in his book The Lines of My Hand. Moments before I had been […]
Not Fade Away: The Face of German History in Michael Schmidt’s Ein-heit By Michael W. Jennings, October, 2003 Fotografieren verboten. Photography forbidden. Is this the coded message that stutters at us in a central image from the photoessay U-ni-ty (Ein-heit) by the contemporary Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt? The cropped image of a sign, perhaps a […]
Untitled, 1978-82 from At the Pump By Steven Skopik, Published originally in the catalog for the exhibition So Far So Good, (Mahwah: Ramapo College, 2007), pp. 1-7. Retrospectives are a lot like photographs. Both produce the illusion of order by means of a not-so-evident selectivity. The photograph’s striking descriptive fidelity appears to capture the world’s […]
Irrigator, who, with 595 persons of Japanese ancestry, is leaving this rural district this morning for an assembly center under Civilian Exclusion Order Number 34. Centerville, CA, 1942, Dorothea Lange Text by Caleb Foote, Photographs by Dorothea Lange The Tyranny of a Word Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco Chronicle said of the persons of […]
Originally Published in Creative Camera, Issue 52, October 1968 In an era of pop commerce, and out of the gimmick-ridden world of lucrative non-art, it is refreshing to discover a photographer who – by-passing the slick ploy of self-conscious fashion cult – has an eye for What Is. His hand does not finger the […]
“While Evans gave much effort to photographing poor people, their houses, rooms and the things they made, it is far from clear that poverty is the point of his best pictures.” By Leo Rubinfien, originally published in Art in America, December 2000 A traveling retrospective (2000) prompts the author to recall the austere formalist–and […]
He brought out hundreds of his photographs, some in copies, others in books and still others in originals. He placed the pictures on the table, one at a time, and ordered me to make an instant decision whether I would take it or not. A Message from Cartier-Bresson By Yoshitomo Kajikawa It was autumn, […]
Sometimes, he claimed, he would arrive before the authorities. He gained the nickname “Weegee” from the Ouija board, events would happen. By Mark Svetov, Originally Published in Noir City Sentinel, Fall 2010 By his own estimation, Arthur Fellig (a/k/a Weegee, 1899-1968) covered more than 5,000 murders as a freelance photographer in New York from […]
From Park City, Lewis Baltz Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography By Kelly Dennis, Paper Presented at the Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century” Newcastle-upon-Tyne, April 11-16, 2005 Whereas Ansel Adams photographed the sinuous, abstract patterns left by timeless winds on […]