Alec Soth’s ‘Songbook’ at Sean Kelly Gallery

Near Kaaterskill Falls, 2012 © Alec Soth, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York “One of the biggest statements in Songbook is Soth’s decision to work solely in black and white. The pictures evoke old press photography: large format, black and white, with a strong flash.” By Shahrzad Kamel, February 2015 Following the critical acclaim for Alec Soth’s […]

Nagano Shigeichi: “Nagano’s Tokyo” (2014)

By Caille Milner, for ASX, May 2014 Why does Tokyo look so unfamiliar in Nagano Shigeichi’s photographs? He used no slights of hand; followed no special methodology. His influences were the usual ones for his generation — William Eugene Smith, Life magazine, celebrated Japanese photojournalists like Kimura Ihei and Fujimoto Shihachi. He didn’t have pretentions […]

Interview with Ben Shahn (1964)

Interview with Ben Shahn Conducted by Richard Doud at the Artist’s home in Roosevelt, New Jersey. April 14, 1964. RICHARD DOUD: I’d like to start with a general background of what you were doing prior to the time and how you managed to get with the Resettlement Program. BEN SHAHN: Well, I told you I […]

Larry Clark: “Perfect Childhoods (Excerpt)” (2005)

Clark’s aging sentient body, naked or otherwise, is central to his project to reclaim and live teenage life. By Sudhir Mahadevan, excerpt from Where the Boys are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (2005) Larry Clark has made three feature films that have been released commercially, Kids (1995), Another Day in Paradise (1998), and Bully (2001). […]

Robert D’Allesandro: “Glory”

    “‘Glory’, the title of D’Alessandro’s 1973 book of photographs, is as understated and as charged as his pictures, each of which includes an American flag. Still timely more than three decades later, twenty-five of those pointedly black and white images remind us that, where the stars and stripes are concerned, ambivalence, irreverence and […]

Enrico Natali: “Detroit 1968” (2013)

    During the time that Detroit 1968 was made, taken during 1968, many of Enrico Natali’s white middle class American Dreamers were starting to flee the city. Motor City’s status as one of the shining stars of the industrial revolution was beginning to fade. Detroit was becoming a poster child for the racial conflict […]

Christine Osinski – “From Staten Island”

    Christine Osinski moved to Staten Island, New York in the early 1980s and immediately felt at home. Osinski had grown up on the South Side of Chicago and Staten Island had the same kind of muscular, working class sensibility she was accustomed to. Between 1983 and 1984 Osinski walked the borough with a […]

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.    

Bill Owens: “American Photography and the American Dream” (excerpt) (1991)

The people in Owen’s book Suburbia, are still under the “spell” of the American Dream. They live in California suburban communities where, according to Owens, “everyone… lives ‘the good life’, which means having attractive homes, high paying jobs, swimming pools and shiny cars.”   By James Guimond, excerpt from American Photography and the American Dream, […]

David Moore: “Pictures from the Real World” (2013)

David Moore: Colour Photographs 1987-­88 Pictures From The Real World Essay by David Chandler If the chemically charged 1960s brought new constellations of colour to the drab austerity of post‐war Britain, then British documentary photography remained that period’s more sober shadow: resolutely black and white and firmly rooted in a past, it was the serious, […]