Where Diane Arbus Went (2005)

A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968   Where Diane Arbus Went: A Comprehensive Retrospective, prompts the author to reconsider the short yet powerfully influential career of a photographer whose “fascination with eccentricity and masquerade brought her into an unforeseeable convergence with her era, and made her one of its essential voices. […]

“The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography” (1999)

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Lucy Soutter “They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.” – Dennis Oppenheim on his use of photographs.(1) This statement by Dennis Oppenheim introduces the paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since […]

“Back West: Reviewing American Landscape Photography” (1997)

Robert Adams Back West: Reviewing American Landscape Photography Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1997 by Stephen Longmire “The West to me is where the landscape is,” Lee Friedlander writes in his new book of landscape photographs of the Sonora, The Desert Seen.(1) The sentiment is so characteristically American that it is difficult not to take it ironically, coming […]

THEORY: "Nicholas Mirzoeff: An Introduction to Visual Culture" (1999)

By Nicholas Mirzoeff Dept of Art, SUNY Stony Brook Modern life takes place onscreen. Life in industrialized countries is increasingly lived under constant video surveillance from cameras in buses and shopping malls, on highways and bridges, and next to ATM cash machines. More and more people look back, using devices ranging from traditional cameras to […]

CANDIDA HOFER: “Candida Höfer: The Atmosphere of Absence”

By Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, writer and curator Much has been made of the absence of people from Candida Höfer’s photographs. How the empty halls, silent lobbies and unpeopled rooms might set us dreaming uneasily of a world bereft of human beings. How these vacated interiors, which she has been photographing assiduously since the late […]

ART SINSABAUGH: “Life on the Road: Art Sinsabaugh’s Midwest Landscapes” (2005)

Afterimage, July-August, 2005 by Stephen Longmire If Edward Hopper had been a photographer, he might have been Art Sinsabaugh. Both are poets of the ordinary, of the inhabited but often unpeopled landscape, sociologists of the visual with a magical realist touch. And both take as opportunities for their pictures the way the world opens itself […]