Do we care for anything but mystery? And does anything matter more than its apprehension? William Eggleston, Mystagogue, From 2 and 1/4. 1999. By Bruce Wagner Do we care for anything but mystery? And does anything matter more than its apprehension? During our days, we try so hard to find and hold it; at night, […]
By Doug Rickard, ASX, July 2010 A long time ago, far, far away, in a rainy king-and-queen-filled land, in a colorful little-knick-knack, jigsaw-puzzle, cat-hair-filled, grease-streaked, filthy tiny fishbowl, baby Richie was born. Little Richie came into this lovely rainy little world born to proud parents, the drunk-unemployed-Ray and the devoted-enormous-“big”-Liz Billingham. Soon, little baby brother […]
“The first time I met up with the hyena men, as they have become known, the group was staying in a ramshackle three-bedroom apartment in Dei Dei Junction, a suburb of the Nigerian capital, Abuja.” The Hyena and Other Men Text by Adetokunbo Abiola Ahmadu was 15 years old when he joined his […]
As I have considered it over the years, the work has always seemed a sustaining and challenging mix of beauty, hope, despair, anger and love. By Peter Brown, Originally published in SPOT, Spring 1996 “Over the years I have come to believe… that we live in several landscapes at once, among them the landscape […]
On Photography as the Art of Anxiety – Introduction to The Lucid Eye By Alain Bergala In the year 2000, a man collected the photos he had taken in the course of the last 46 years. This man is internationally known today as one of the greatest documentary film-makers of his time. It was however […]
It is hard now to remember what all the upset was about when they were new; hard to remember, for example, that when the Museum of Modern Art mounted an Arbus retrospective a year after her death, there were some viewers among the teeming crowds pressing into the museum to gawk at the freaks who […]
The years during which Rogovin completed this series represented a period of great loss and decline for industrial labor in the U.S., especially in traditional manufacturing cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo… Milton Rogovin’s “Approach”: Photography, Class, and the Aesthetics of Making Space By Joseph Entin, Brooklyn College, City University of New York (Note: […]
David Hockney smoking, Bridlington, 2008 If one is properly exposed to it and assuming that one has an “eye” for these things, Juergen Teller’s “aesthetic” becomes very recognizable. Not quite so much as to harm the effectiveness but much. Yes, in his case, this is a good thing. If pressed for a brief description, one […]
“I have no problem with that. I don’t want to feign being intimate with somebody I meet 5 minutes ago.” Interview with Richard Woodward, New York City, June 2007 RW: Let’s start with this new book, which is actually a series of books, and work backwards. How did the project originate? PG: Well, my […]
By Masashi Kohara Who is Takuma Nakahira? A photographer of the bure, boke1 style. A member of the Provoke group. An essayist and photography critic, a political activist, a photographer who talked too much, a photographer who lost his memory, a photographer who forgot his mother tongue, a legend… Takuma Nakahira, who influenced many photographers […]
Winogrand’s pictures are usually packed with astounding quantities of incident and “information,” a catchword popular among practitioners and students of street photography during the early ’70’s. By Pepe Karmel Photography critics raised on the classical elegances of Stieglitz and Cartier-Bresson still consider Garry Winogrand’s photographs haphazard snapshots, mach as 19th century academic critics saw the […]
Half the time the photographers seemed not to have even looked through the camera. Far from seeking the perfect composition, the ‘decisive moment’, their work seemed curiously unfinished. It captured ‘indecisive’ rather than decisive moments. By Gerry Badger “Frank… and Klein brought to the decade a feeling for its woes which, in retrospect, synthesizes […]