[ajax_load_more id=”6311310330″ post_type=”post” posts_per_page=”12″ post_format=”standard” category=”essay” button_label=”More Articles” button_loading_label=”Loading…”]
Ballen’s pictures bring to life in a variety of ways what (Man) Ray illuminated: the impulse to externalise the chaos of the mind and emotions, and the possibility that the creative process may just as soon yield a monster as an object of beauty. By Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Art / South Africa, 2005 Certain […]
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” Ezra Pound By Russell Ferguson Wolfgang Tillmans has consistently pushed back against whatever perceptions of his work seem most current. If he is thought of as a casual, snapshot photographer, he produces a book of formal portraits. If he is […]
Madrid, 1933 Cartier-Bresson generated the type of admiration he both enjoyed and ran away from. By Bruno Chalifour, Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2004 A lot has been written, and more will be, about the life in photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. If Europe contributed to the medium in the twentieth century, Cartier-Bresson, a.k.a. HCB, probably stood among the […]
Two men dancing at a drag ball, N.Y.C. 1970. By Judith Butler, ArtForum, February, 2004 The Diane Arbus exhibition “Revelations,” currently (2004) showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is not difficult to attend. The crowds that circled the block to see the major Marc Chagall exhibition earlier this fall are now quite […]
Getting out of the truck, this place felt like being taken back in time. By Shelby Lee Adams, 2007 In the early ’80’s I was taken to visit the Napier family by a local preacher and friend Wayne Riddle from Leatherwood. I was advised not to drive my car, as the roads were rough. […]
What does it say about us who look at them? A Terrible Beauty By Sue Hubbard Boris Mikhailov is sixty-three, has dyed black hair, a white moustache and a young wife. Born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, he has recently exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery, just been awarded the Citibank Photography Prize and is […]
“When I was 16 I started shooting valo. Valo was a nasel inhaler you could buy at the drugstore for a dollar with a tremendous amount of amphetamine in it.” Larry Clark, April, 1971 I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January 1943. When I was 16 I started shooting valo. Valo was a nasel […]
“The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ‘snapshot’. Ignorance can always be covered by ‘snapshot’. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.” William Eggleston in Conversation with Mark Holborn (Afterward from The Democratic Forest) “I was in Oxford, Mississippi for a few days and […]
By Michael Schmidt, Camera Magazine #3, March, 1979 Photography was invented to enable us to portray reality with complete precision to the last detail. There is no other medium – apart from media which derive from the invention of photography (e.g. film and television) – which is in a position to document reality exactly as […]
New Orleans (Woman Eating), 2004 Collectively, the Shimmer books describe a chronicle of American experience circa 2004–2006, and the world presented, by and large, is a world of isolated figures, near-anonymous strangers moving past one another without much connection. By Michael Almereyda Arranged on a shelf, or stacked flat, the twelve slender books comprising Paul […]
Hiroshima City Hall, 1,000 meters from the hypocenter (1979) By Hiromi Tsuchida “In a cistern under a bridge were some mothers. One mother held on her head a baby that was burned all over, and another mother wept bitterly as her child suckled her badly burned breast. Children in the cistern cried out for their parents, […]
“Construction Detail, East Wall, Xerox, 1821 Dyer Road, Santa Ana,” 1974 from “The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California.” Gelatin silver print. (Lewis Baltz/Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne) When Baltz’s series “The Tract Houses” was exhibited at the International Museum of Photography in 1972, photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher purposely appeared in an […]