 …enting is extremely dull and journalism…I’m a very bad reporter and a photojournalist. Capa told me when I had an exhibition at the museum of Modern Art in ’46, he said no, he’d be very careful. You mustn’t have a label of a surrealist photographer. All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to a surrealist but he said if you were labelled as a surrealist photographer you won’t go any further you won’t have an assignment … HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: “Words by Henri Cartier-Bresson” (1973)  …ted photographic book made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, one represented the quintessential photographic style of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic histor… WALKER EVANS: “Scavenging the Landscape – Walker Evans and American Life” (1996)  …taneously, but the opportunity to write in depth on him never arose. I do greatly admire the list that you offer, but I also greatly admire Harry Callahan and Alfred Stieglitz and Irving Penn and Ansel Adams and Bob Adams and Dorothea Lange and Wright Morris and others on whom I have also written, as well as many others on whom I have not. Of all the people on your list, surely none was less simple and direct, as a person, than Evans. He was comp… INTERVIEW: “Eyes Wide Open: Interview with John Szarkowski” (2006)  …ant even to the work of Ansel Adams, has become despairing, and reveals a flawed and damaged landscape that is only occasionally brightened by an appreciation of the fragile beauty of what remains. The optimism that energized Dorothea Lange and her colleagues to rally for change has been transformed into a weary acceptance of what exists and what we have done.(14) These are the lessons of the photographers of what Phillips names the “new do… “Back West: Reviewing American Landscape Photography” (1997)  … of Evans’s work on his own, Robert Adams would seem to have had no comparable masters, at least not in 1968. While, as the text emphasizes, he took something important from Timothy O’Sullivan — and, Adams has said, also from Dorothea Lange — related to how the light of the western plains might be described in his photographs, it is difficult to credit his having learned anything from O’Sullivan or Lange clearly related to the picture-making styl… ROBERT ADAMS: “Tod Papageorge on Robert Adams – The Missing Criticism – What We Bought” …tists and the historical effects of their work are rarely synonymous. For example, artists who have benefited from the renewed critical and curatorial interest in Conceptual Art in the last decade have themselves resisted the label “conceptual.”(2) This is understandable – no practicing artist wants to be pigeon-holed as an example of an historical movement. Yet the conceptual designation has been crucial to the historical under… “The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography” (1999)  … works are ‘portraits’ of spaces, but really you could just as easily turn that around: several of the portraits in my earlier work were to a certain extent already images of ‘spaces’, as I now see them. At the same time, the label that was attached to my photos very early on is proving stubborn. The same clichés keep on turning up in article after article. Admittedly, I still don’t make optimistic, colourful pictures, but I still believe I’m doi… INTERVIEW: “Conversation with Dirk Braeckman” (1998)  … work. I can’t stand to give him even that much credit. NF: Has your work aroused censorship in America? CS: No, I don’t think so. But I wasn’t surprised when Metro Pictures felt they should put up a warning label for kids. NF: You mean the sign at the exhibition of the Sex Pictures that read, “Parents might want to view the works inside before letting their children see them.” CS: Yes. But on the other hand, I suppo… INTERVIEW: “Interview with Artist Cindy Sherman – A Woman of Parts” (1997)  …23-1971) wrote that she was compiling her photographs into a ‘Family Album,’ likening it to a ‘Noah’s Ark’ and imagining in it the people who might be remembered and saved in the aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s.” Exhibition label, Portland Museum of Art, Diane Arbus’ cast of characters is a startlingly unusual group. They are people held together by all sorts of bonds, traditional and alternative, yet each merits special attention. Her mothers,… DIANE ARBUS: “Diane Arbus’ Noah’s Ark of Humanity” (2004)  … but, on taking a closer look (as these images always demand), you can see shoes from both the fall and spring collections, a simultaneity never encountered in a Prada store. Despite the fact that fashion in general (and this label in particular) is all about currency and ephemer ality, Gursky creates from it something so paradoxically solid that the image compresses “fashion” to become its emblem. Shoes aren’t the only seemingl… ANDREAS GURSKY: “The Big Picture” (2001)  … Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus was introduced together in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, entitled New Documents, setting the standard for a new notion about the ‘documentary.’ In his wall label for that exhibit John Szaskowski wrote, ‘In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.’ 18…. LEE FRIEDLANDER: “Out of the Cool” (1991) |
