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W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photographs Carnegie, Nov/Dec 2001 by Ellen S. Wilson “Don’t expect,” wrote photographer W Eugene Smith, “a point-by-point hand-led tour. This is an experience as an intensely curious visitor (perhaps a new resident) might discover it.” Smith wrote those notes to himself as he began his Pittsburgh project, what he later called […]
If it is a rarity in our society to experience death in its moment, our mediated selves consume it daily through TV and film. Ever since Viet Nam, our living rooms have been the sites of death and destruction. Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata By David L. Jacobs, Afterimage, Summer, 1996 Where adults see […]
A Life on the Piss, 2003, from Lost Man By Robert Cook, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia I never figured out how to make art from the suburbs. While I lived there throughout art school (and still do, just in a different one) the translation of the places I resided […]
Diane Arbus’ Noah’s Ark of Humanity – A legendary photographer’s unfinished book By Randall Decoteau This article was written in response to the exhibit Diane Arbus: Family Albums at the Portland Museum of Art. In 1968, three years before her suicide, the great American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) wrote that she was compiling her photographs […]
Plaza de la Soledad By Josue Ramirez ¿Qué decir sobre el dolor, de la tristeza o la dureza plasmadas en estas fotografías de Maya Goded? Acaso decir “estética de la miseria” no es más que otro de los equívocos de nuestras maneras de nombrar el mundo, un error conceptual, una aberración designativa que evidencia nuestras […]
“The director confided that Winogrand doesn’t make learning easy; be patient, he urged, it’s worth it. If we weren’t satisfied by the weekend, he’d give us a refund.” Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop With Garry Winogrand – Two Weeks with a Master of Street Photography that Changed My Life By Mason Resnick My two-week […]
Artificial Nature by John Divola Over twenty years ago I read an essay by Arthur C. Clarke that occasionally comes to mind. Clarke was speculating on the certainty that mankind would develop artificial intelligence, and that eventually such intelligence would have the ability to learn, move through the world, and act. It would not be […]
In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan (USA) and Mike Mandel (USA) published a book of photographs entitled Evidence. Accompanied by an exhibition in the same year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this project was the culmination of a three-year search through the files and archives of over one hundred American government agencies, educational […]
Physically, she says, she’s never been the same since, and she’s scared she never will be. She’s afraid she may never be free of Ward 81. By Karen Folger Jacobs At first glance, they could be almost any group of women in any institutional lounge or day room–college students, staff personnel, or patients in any […]
By Steve Giles, New Formations, June 22, 2007 KRACAUER ON PHOTOGRAPHY One of the most striking aspects of Thomas Levin’s recent translation of Kracauer’s Weimar essays is its inclusion of photographic material from the 1920s and early 1930s which typifies the ‘new photography’ associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. (1) Kracauer’s 1927 essay on photography, […]
Seated Transvestite with Crossed Ankles, N.Y.C., 1966 Since there were few spaces for photographers to exhibit or sell their work in the late fifties, Arbus had to continually seek out magazine work. The Missing Photographs: An Examination of Diane Arbus’s Images of Transvestites and Homosexuals from 1957 to 1965 By Laureen Trainer Much […]
Nan Goldin on Jean-Christian Bourcart (2002) Nan Goldin, Paris, April, 2002 I first saw Jean-Christian Bourcart’s photos ten years ago in the home of my former dealer Gilles Dusein, in his little apartment on rue du Repos overlooking Père Lachaise. Gilles, whose ashes are now dispersed in the famous cemetery, had just begun to represent […]