from ‘The Americans’ @ Robert Frank Frank’s personality, described by Joyce Johnson as a blend of “European dourness and pessimistic wit,” certainly helped to focus his photographic vision. By George Cotkin, Professor, Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University Few analysts have captured the sadness, tensions, ironies and possibilities […]
For Avedon’s program is supraindividual. He wants to portray the whole American West as a blighted culture that spews out casualties by the bucket: misfits, drifters, degenerates, crackups, and prisoners-entrapped, either literally or by debasing work. Richard Avedon’s “In the American West” By Max Kozloff “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of […]
Photography is a generous, abundant medium and Parke is a voracious photographer. By Geoff Dyer I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer, Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first […]
“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 […]
While he lived Meatyard’s work was shown and collected by major museums, published in important art magazines, and regarded by his peers as among the most original and disturbing imagery ever created with a camera. By James Rhem, 1999 Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s death in 1972, a week away from his 47th birthday, came at the […]
Half the time the photographers seemed not to have even looked through the camera. Far from seeking the perfect composition, the ‘decisive moment’, their work seemed curiously unfinished. It captured ‘indecisive’ rather than decisive moments. By Gerry Badger “Frank… and Klein brought to the decade a feeling for its woes which, in retrospect, synthesizes […]
Stray Dog, Misawa, Aomori (1971) Moriyama is conspicuous for the brutality with which he distorts photographic description: his pictures are sooty with grain, blotchy with glare, often out of focus or blurred by movement, often defaced by scratches in their negatives. By Leo Rubinfien, October, 1999 The photographer Daido Moriyama, whose first U.S. […]
Along with Berenice Abbott and Weegee, Lisette Model became a photographer of New York. The city–the place became very important to Model–even her portraits are uniquely anchored to place. By Elsa Dorfman, Ann Thomas on Lisette Model (Published by the National Gallery of Canada to accompany an exhibition of Model’s work which travelled in the […]
Stephen Shore is a prominent photographer and photographic educator. A pioneer in the field of color photography, Shore has published numerous books of photography, included his seminal book, Uncommon Places, published in 1982 (reissued in 2004).
Whenever I see it, I immediately hear a voice singing, “Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by.” Yes, it is a sexist work. But that is a fact about Winogrand we must face and accept, if we are to honestly assess his picture-making. Part II (This is the second of a two-part […]
“I thought that to make photographs, you froze everybody before the fact, but Robert never froze them except in the camera. So that was a revelation.” Excerpt from “Still Going”, from Bystander: A History of Street Photography (2001) by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz CW: The name we are giving to this final chapter, “Still […]
Then she appeared at the door, and compared with my image of her, she might almost have been her own daughter. A Visit with Diane Arbus – On a Hot Summer Day in New York, One Month Before Her Death By Allan Porter On a hot, muggy afternoon in New York, I took a […]