Journal entry by William Gedney, 1969 There are two ways of looking at a thing. Either you feel that a thing must be perfect before you present it to the public, or you are willing to let it go out even knowing that it is not perfect, because you are striving for something even beyond […]
“Three American Road Stories” By Benedict Wells (Essay from the foreward to Wilted Country by Roger Eberhard, Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010) You’ve left Las Vegas a mere two hours behind. The lights of the nightclubs, casinos, bars, and hotels still shimmer through the hangover in your head. And suddenly you’re nowhere. The colors […]
“When I began to take photographs, I never imaged that my photos would travel around the world.” Interview in Madrid for the PHotoEspaña Baume & Mercier 2009 Award Since 1960, Malick Sidibé (Mali, 1936) has produced photographs in his studio, Studio Malick, located in Bamako. These images with their pure gaze document popular culture […]
Everything about him suggests an anarchic temperament, capable of playing any worldly system to the hilt and then throwing away its benefits. Brought to ASX by Errata Editions. Full essay included in Books on Books #5 William Klein: Life is Good…New York! By Max Kozloff, Excerpt from William Klein and the Radioactive Fifties, originally appeared […]
Leather, spikes, face paint, and brandished weapons are standard and go along with a clearly stated stance of outsider-dom. King of Hell Intro from True Norwegian Black Metal, 2008 By Johan Kugelberg and Peter Beste Over the last two decades, a bizarre and violent musical subculture called black metal has emerged in Norway. Its […]
W. Eugene Smith – More Real than Reality By Silke van de Grift for ASX Until March 16th the Photography Museum of Amsterdam (FOAM) presents a retrospective of W. Eugene Smith (US, 1918-1978). The exhibition features six series of photographs, including The Country Doctor (1948), acclaimed as photojournalism’s first official photo-essay. The other series shown […]
The picture-taking nomad was so awed by the charm of Brazil’s former capital and its citizens that, over the next 50 years, he chose it as the center of his life and as his base and starting point for countless trips to Africa. Introduction to Pierre Verger – Black Gods in Exile By Manfred […]
David Wojnarowicz, 1981 Some Sort of Grace – David Wojnarowicz’s Archive of the Death of Peter Hujar By Emily Colucci In his essay, “Living Close to the Knives,” on the death of his lover and artistic mentor Peter Hujar, a renowned New York photographer, David Wojnarowicz explains, “and his death is now as if it’s […]
The Last Days of Ernest J. Bellocq By Rex Rose In the early 1900s, Ernest J. Bellocq carried his 8 x 10-inch view camera across Basin Street to photograph the women of New Orleans’ notorious district of legalized prostitution, Storyville. His private photographic project remained unknown until after his death, but eventually found its way […]
By Baptiste Lignel for ASX Upon walking into the office of the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, one faces a very large digital print, literally nailed to the wall. A large brown metal oval shape seems to have landed over the ruins of a city. The contrast is striking between the two halves of the […]
Looking at Eggleston’s Before Color pictures, newly reborn, requires an odd energy of de-colorization. By Tim Davis For years, Tod Papageorge, the head of the Photography Department at the Yale University School of Art, would begin student critiques of color pictures with the question, “Why color?” Color was an aesthetic choice and Papageorge felt […]
from ‘The Americans’ @ Robert Frank Frank’s personality, described by Joyce Johnson as a blend of “European dourness and pessimistic wit,” certainly helped to focus his photographic vision. By George Cotkin, Professor, Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University Few analysts have captured the sadness, tensions, ironies and possibilities […]