Diane Arbus: Imaginary Lives, Subjective Projections

“Arbus reveals the powerful ability of photography to lie, but also it is a testimony of how the lie is not mere betrayal, but a far-reaching human necessity to escape factual reality, the human urge to create and believe in stories, to draw mythical worlds and the inter-subjective life’s alternative narrative.”   Imaginary lives, compulsive […]

How to Sue Richard Prince and Win

 Today, Richard Prince, still glowing in triumph after his own copyright battle with Patrick Cariou, is simply screen-capturing his own participation on Instagram—brazenly selling inkjet enlargements of other people’s image uploads for $90,000 a pop. What’s more, Prince is adored for it. How to Sue Richard Prince and Win By Nate Harrison, July 10, 2015 My […]

Anton Corbijn on Kohei Yoshiyuki’s ‘The Park’ series 1971–9

“The images are far more erotic than most porno photographs…”   By Anton Corbijn, for Tate, May 2010 I had not been aware of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s work until I saw a review of his series The Park about two years ago, which was accompanied by a photograph that caught my eye immediately. The infrared grittiness […]

Andreas Gursky and ‘The Iron Cage of Boredom’

The Rhine II, 1999 There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. It is as though he holds up a peopled landscape or a building or a workplace for our inspection, saying simply, ‘here it is’.   The Iron Cage of Boredom By Julian Stallabrass There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. […]

Thomas Ruff: Aesthetic of the Pixel

Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image.   By David Campany, originally published in IANN magazine No.2, 2008 The photographic art of Thomas Ruff makes […]

Notes on Five Key Jean-Michel Basquiat Works

Untitled (Head), 1981 His paintings proclaimed the existence of a more basic truth locked within a given event or thought. The Defining Years: Notes on Five Key Works By Fred Hoffman The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic Just because the body is rotten— That is all fantasy. What is found now […]

Jean-Michel Basquiat and “The Art of (Dis)Empowerment” (2000)

He was also known to be reluctant to involve himself in black politics, often finding himself estranged from “up town” black artist communities. By Louis Armand,  from a lecture at the Comparative Studies Colloquium, August 30, 2000, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven he had only been […]