 Ybor City, Florida, 1983 from Recreation By Sally Eauclaire, “Eighteen Color Photographers/Mitch Epstein, Common Practice”, excerpt from American Independents, Abbeville Press, 1987 Mitch Epstein trusts in the power of enraptured perception. Navigating the American landscape, he intuits moments that seem blessed, harmonious, and eternal. Despite their evidence of a plastic-and-polyester society, his photographs of vacation sites … MITCH EPSTEIN: “Eighteen Color Photographers/Mitch Epstein, ‘Common Practice’” (1987)  …cors and undressed, svelte, nubile, glistening teens, torn and tormented characters, epicly beautiful… but polarizing and controversial, human and full of vitality, but in the land of taboo to be certain. Still, as with Sally Mann, there is this pure act of will on Henson’s part… a force and certainty of intention that maintains a sort of purity through the work… a dangerous line, a high wire tight rope act, but one that, … BILL HENSON: Blackness as an entity… darkness as a body  …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)  …. It just simply means that I am able to think better. Let’s put it that way. AC: I read that you don’t really consider yourself an environmental portrait photographer, is that true? AN: No, I think basically I am. But I hate labels. That label was placed on me by an early writer who did an article on me calling me the father of the environmental portrait, which seems to have stuck. But the Stravinsky is not an environmental portrait, it’s really… INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Arnold Newman”  … 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)  …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) …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)  …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) |
