MAYA GODED: “Plaza de la Soledad” (Spanish)

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 […]

John Divola: Artificial Nature (2002)

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 […]

“Polaroid: The Life of the Party” (2002)

  By Nat Trotman, originally published in Afterimage, May 1, 2002 In the ongoing push for consumer ease that characterizes the history of popular photography, the Polaroid Corporation stands as the undisputed champion of the later twentieth century. Among its many successes and numerous patents–including the process of polarization from which the corporation adapted its name–the […]

Vaguely Stealthy Creatures: Max Kozloff on the Poetics of Street Photography (2002)

Image @ Joel Meyerowitz “Vaguely Stealthy Creatures”: Max Kozloff on the Poetics of Street Photography By Martin Patrick, Afterimage, December 22, 2002 The critic Max Kozloff frequently reminds his readers of the inherent instability of meaning within the photographic medium. In an early essay (from 1964) he considers “the aesthetic situation in photography to be […]

Letters to Aaron Siskind (2003)

Joe Jachna A letter for Aaron (p. 12) Aaron, I know that photography came into your life later than it did to mine. It began for me in high school; for you after teaching literature, possessing a desire to play the piano and almost in mid life. Your early photography we call documentary; with it […]

ADAM BARTOS: “Abiding Memories: Adam Bartos – Kosmos” (2002)

Abiding Memories: Adam Bartos, Kosmos By Philip W. Martin, Afterimage, July 1, 2002 The striking thing–or what strikes you first–about Adam Bartos‘s photographs of the people and places of the Russian space program is that they let you In: into a world thought to be off-limits and into the space of the photographs themselves, which […]

Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape (2001)

SF Panorama, 1990 Another Look At The West – View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape By Stephen Longmire, Afterimage, July 2001 We now view landscape photographs, both past and present, much like the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. They are artifacts of what we think we know about the land, […]

“Peter Mitchell – A New Refutation of the Viking IV Lander” (1974)

  Mitchell dealt in discrete spaces and identified portraits, all bounded by comedy and geographic spots on Mars and Leeds. But Mitchell’s photographs were also locales for familiar industrial pastoral spaces, marred and broken by the same sense of contemporary cultural collapse which haunted Duff.   Peter Mitchell- A New Refutation of the Viking IV […]

“Tunnel Vision: Photographic Education in Britain in the 1980s”

Tunnel Vision: Photographic Education in Britain in the 1980s By Simon Watney, Afterimage, January 1, 2006 In Britain the 1980s began in 1979 with the election of the first government of Margaret Thatcher, and it would be impossible to discuss any aspect of social life in Britain in that troubled and turbulent decade without some […]