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 …ic integrity while admitting that everything he has accomplished as a creative artist depends on the participation of others. Demanding that he be seen as an artist is nothing new for Avedon; he has spent decades fighting the label “fashion photographer.” This is partly because it is important for him to claim his own identity as a photographic artist as opposed to a constantly compromised and therefore non-existent individual associa…  …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,…  … 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… …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)  …n a vernacular culture, the architecture and details of a landscape that idiosyncratically described the U.S. This became the central theme of Evans’s photography as supported by both Keller and Rathbone, who dispel the labeling of Evans as a “socially concerned” photographer. Whatever Evans’s personal beliefs were about the social conditions brought on by the Depression, he did not use photography as a crusading practice…. WALKER EVANS: “Scavenging the Landscape – Walker Evans and American Life” (1996)  … 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)  … 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…  … 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….  …y identifies a realist use of the medium, which could be seen to open up a much more complex and rich understanding of photography than the limiting implications of terms like formalism, which tend to get used pejoratively to label your writings and contribution to the history of photography. JS: When critics don’t know what to say about a good photographer who uses the camera simply and directly they say that the photographer uses the came… INTERVIEW: “Eyes Wide Open: Interview with John Szarkowski” (2006)  …unes of Depression times, but your photographs are not critical. I find them more of a glorification—glorification of the plain and simple reality. W.E.: I’m pleased to hear you say that, because I didn’t like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring d… INTERVIEW: Walker Evans – “The Thing Itself is Such a Secret and so Unapproachable” (1974) | ||||||||||||||
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