Documentary Photography

Alec Soth – “Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree” (2012)

Alec Soth encountered Robert Adams’s 1985 monograph Summer Nights as a young photographer, and the book was, in his words, a “gateway drug” to the “harder stuff” in Adams’s body of work. When asked to participate in Aperture Remix, an exhibition for which artists were commissioned to create new work in response to Aperture publications […]

Russian and Ukrainian Citizens are Terrorized in Donald Weber’s “INTERROGATIONS” (2012)

Are these “interrogations” real or is this just a graphic experiment meant to help us imagine the way that power is wielded behind closed doors? By Paul Loomis, August, 2012 Whether or Not the Guns are Loaded Interrogations is a collection of photographs taken in Russia and Ukraine over six years of travel by Donald […]

ELINOR CAHN: “EAST BALTIMORE DOCUMENTARY SURVEY PROJECT” (1970’s)

Allan Grant: “American Campers” (1940’s)

Bill Ray: “Hells Angels” (1965)

Caleb Foote & Dorothea Lange: “Outcasts! : The Story of America’s Treatment of Her Japanese-American Minority” (1943)

Irrigator, who, with 595 persons of Japanese ancestry, is leaving this rural district this morning for an assembly center under Civilian Exclusion Order Number 34. Centerville, CA, 1942, Dorothea Lange Text by Caleb Foote, Photographs by Dorothea Lange The Tyranny of a Word Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco Chronicle said of the persons of […]

RUSSELL LEE: “AMERICANS”

Walker Evans – The Poetry of Plain Seeing (2000)

“While Evans gave much effort to photographing poor people, their houses, rooms and the things they made, it is far from clear that poverty is the point of his best pictures.” By Leo Rubinfien, originally published in Art in America, December 2000 A traveling retrospective (2000) prompts the author to recall the austere formalist–and […]

Weegee: Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets (2010)

Sometimes, he claimed, he would arrive before the authorities. He gained the nickname “Weegee” from the Ouija board, events would happen. By Mark Svetov, Originally Published in Noir City Sentinel, Fall 2010 By his own estimation, Arthur Fellig (a/k/a Weegee, 1899-1968) covered more than 5,000 murders as a freelance photographer in New York from […]

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, […]

Attraction and Desire – Larry Fink’s Life in Photography (2011)

Attraction and Desire: Larry Fink’s Life in Photography By Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, essay from the book Larry Fink: Attraction and Desire: 50 Years in Photography, published by The Sheldon Art Galleries. Saint Louis, Missouri. 2011. “I photograph because I live. I want to contribute that passion of living to posterity in the best way I can.”1 – Larry Fink, […]