Roswell Angier: “Combat Zone”

  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 […]

Lee Friedlander: “The New Cars 1964” (2011)

  In 1964, two young art directors at Harper’s Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander’s jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaarwas to […]

KARLHEINZ WEINBERGER: “REBEL YOUTH” (1950-1960’s)

  (Images © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger) For decades the work of Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger was shrouded in obscurity. In the 1950s he published numerous homoerotic photographs under the pseudonym “Jim” in Der Kreis (The Circle), the legendary international gay magazine that featured highly sophisticated photographs by, among others, George Platt Lynes and […]

PAUL KWILECKI: “GEORGIA”

Paul Kwilecki’s Photograph Collection at Duke University contains 583 black and white prints made in and around the town of Bainbridge, Georgia from 1960-2008. A self-taught photographer, Kwilecki honed his craft by photographing the broad spectrum of daily life manifested in Bainbridge and the rural areas of Decatur County. From the Shade Tobacco workers in […]

Dorothea Lange: “Portraits” (1935 – 1939)

  American photographer. From 1914 to 1917 she attended the New York Training School for Teachers and there decided to become a photographer, partly influenced by visits to the photographer Arnold Genthe. From 1917 to 1918 she attended a photography course run by Clarence H. White at Columbia University, NY. Lange moved to San Francisco […]

America’s Race Riots of the Sixties

In the early 1960s, African Americans in cities nationwide were growing frustrated with the high level of poverty in their communities. Since the years immediately following World War II (1939–45), middle-class white Americans had been leaving the cities for nearby suburbs. Businesses that had once provided jobs and tax funding in the cities were leaving […]

CARLO MOLLINO: POLAROIDS, ETC (1962-1973)

  In a career that spanned more than four decades, Carlo Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars, aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he […]

WALKER EVANS: “DRIVE-BY PICTURES”

Walker Evans, pictures taken from a moving automobile or train.   EXPLORE ALL WALKER EVANS ON ASX (© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Mark Ruwedel: Desert Houses

  Mark Ruwedel is an artist who has been photographing American deserts and other remote locations for over 25 years. With an affinity for stark, barren landscapes that are otherwise uninhabited, Ruwedel found the desert and it soon became his primary field of inquiry. Influenced by photographers Lewis Baltz, Walker Evans and Robert Adams, Ruwedel’s […]

Mike Brodie: “Tones of Dirt and Bone”

The images in Tones of Dirt and Bone were made between 2004 and 2006, with a Polaroid camera and Time Zero film. Brodie used the characteristics and limitations inherent to this type of camera and film to his advantage. The portraits he made are further enhanced by the peculiar color palette of the film. Due […]

The Lomax Collection: “American Folk”

The collection includes 400 snapshot photographs made in the course of sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and ca. 1950 for the Archive of American Folk-Song.    

Alexis Penney – Sore, 2014

“Well, I got in trouble for putting naked photos on the Internet when I was seventeen.”   Alexis Penney, Sore, 2014 “Well, I got in trouble for putting naked photos on the Internet when I was seventeen,” Alexis Penney told me, when I asked how long he’d been taking photos. Penney, who told me she […]

Berenice Abbott – The Photographer of New York City

Berenice Abbott can be considered the photographer of New York City. A revolutionary documentary photographer, Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, and studied for one year at Ohio State University, Columbus, before moving to New York in 1918.

Todd Hido: “House Hunting” (2001)

“Todd Hido’s large color photographs of suburbia are lonely, forlorn, mysterious… and strangely comforting. Hido photographs the interior rooms of repossessed tract homes, and the outsides of similar houses at night whose habitation is suggested by the glow of a television set or unseen overhead bulb. Seldom does the similar evoke such melancholy. Yet rather […]

Vietnam Zippo Lighters (‘DEATH FROM ABOVE’)”

    Vietnam War-era Zippo lighters featuring personalized and anonymous engravings chosen by U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen during deployment. The collection has been compiled individually by American artist Bradford Edwards over several years in the 1990s, on-site in Vietnam. (Images @ Cowan Auctions)

MARGUERITE BAKER JOHNSON: “AMERICAN LIFE” (1952-1964)

Marguerite Baker Johnson, a native of Brussels Belgium was a noted female photographer noted as the first woman to take photographs inside the arena at “Cheyenne Frontier Days”, a task formerly conducted by men due to the dangerous setting. Her photos appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Automotive Periodicals, London Times, Daily Mirror, […]

Araki’s Chiro, Yoko, Death and the Baring of a Soul

  In Sentimental Journey and later in Winter Journey Araki documented both the intimate and the mundane from his honeymoon and his wife’s terminal battle with cancer. By blurring the boundaries between life and art Araki’s work becomes uncomfortably candid, presenting death with a reverence as shocking and graphic as any of his more erotic […]

BRAD ELTERMAN: “PAPARAZZO”

  Brad Elterman (American, b. 1956) is known for his photographs of the Hollywood rock’n’roll lifestyle, capturing such celebrities as Rod Steward, the Runaways, Bebe Buell, Kiss, Queen, and the Ramones,  (All rights reserved. Images @ Brad Elterman.)

Daido Moriyama: “Tights and Lips”

  One of the most revered living Japanese photographers, Daido Moriyama’s work is saturated with the melancholic beauty of life at its most ordinary. His photographs epitomize wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in imperfection. Moriyama focuses in on the lost and the discarded, and finds echoes of living through the breakdown of traditional […]

Man Ray – “Rayographs, Etc.”

    Man Ray made his “rayographs” without a camera by placing objects-such as the thumbtacks, coil of wire, and other circular forms used here-directly on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing it to light.

Lee Friedlander: “The American Monument” (1976)

Vince Aletti describes The American Monument as “almost maniacally inclusive, rounding up everything from Plymouth Rock to a plaque commemorating the Pony Express in Salt Lake City and treating them with the same nonchalance. The doggedness of Friedlander’s quest is at once astounding and hilarious… History stalks the landscape at every turn.” The American Monument. […]

Edward Hopper: “Survey” (1882-1967)

  Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and often melancholy renderings reflected his personal […]