“I wanted to be visible in the biggest way possible. My aesthetics was the New York Daily News. I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get.” By Jane Livingston, excerpt from […]
“Strangers and Friends” By Anne Wilkes Tucker, foreword to Rough Beauty Small towns are typically closed communities, outwardly friendly, but suspicious of anyone who is not a resident. Carrying a camera escalates those suspicions.i Paparazzi journalism and “candid camera” TV have also sensitized people to how easily a photographer can denigrate and caricature his subjects. […]
In the 1950s, when Boston was a major Navy port, the area around Washington Street became known as the Combat Zone; the name derived from the Shore Patrolmen, who prowled the rock-and-roll bars, busting the heads of sailors. By the 1970s, when Angier spent two and half years (1973-1975) photographing the area, the sailors […]
New Mexico, 1957 (Figure 13) Part I By Carl Chiarenza Originally Published in IMAGE Magazine: Journal of Photography and Motion Pictures of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Volume 34, Number 3–4, Fall–Winter, 1991 Sometimes an idea gets the better of us as individuals, as professionals, as artists, as essayers of a […]
By Constance Lewallen, Berkeley Art Museum & Film Archive, Early May – Early June, 1983 The myth of the photograph as a perfect analogue of reality persists to this day. Though the photograph continues to be used as evidence-by police, by news media-we now know that a photograph cannot be totally objective. Every news photographer […]
“Basically, I mean, ah—well, let’s say that for me anyway when a photograph is interesting, it’s interesting because of the kind of photographic problem it states—which has to do with the . . . contest between content and form.” Originally Published in Image Magazine by George Eastman House – Vol. 15, No. 2, […]
Amarillo, Texas, August, 1973 “I think it was simply the time was right for color photography. It was about the same time that William Eggleston, Luigi Ghirri, and Joel Meyerowitz began to use color.” The Apparent Is the Bridge to the Real By Rong Jiang, ICP, New York, June 4, 2007 RJ: You said […]
From the series American Surfaces Looking at Stephen Shore’s large-format pictures of America, it might be hard to believe the images were once controversial. The Landscape of Stephen Shore at the ICP By Carl Gunhouse, May 22, 2007 Looking at Stephen Shore’s large-format pictures of America, it might be hard to believe the […]
Haverstraw, New York, 1966 Friedlander is a photographer, never forget. Although a major photographic artist, he is not an ‘artist utilising photography.’ He uses the camera, that unthinking machine, to transcribe his visual perceptions of the world. Out of the Cool – Lee Friedlander at the V&A By Gerry Badger, from Creative Camera (1991) ‘That […]
Bourbon St, New Orleans, 1995 @ Mark Steinmetz “I don’t begin a project with an agenda that is going to over-determine the outcome. I think it begins with a faint vision – one of those whispers on a breeze – that somehow gets a grip on me.” By Amelia Sechman and Paul Schiek, […]
Zoniers, Porte de Choisy, 1913 By Stephen Longmire, Afterimage, May 2001 It has been 20 years, amazingly enough, since New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) launched its landmark cycle of exhibitions of the work of French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927), who spent his last 30 years documenting the architectural record of Paris and […]
Edith, 1970 @ Emmet Gowin “I realized that my own family — Edith’s family — was as miraculous as the most distant people in the world and they were at the same time, the most available to me, and perhaps available only to me…. I had not realized that art could be made by […]