Red Cross, 2008 Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2009, pp. 72-75 Elad Lassry approaches photography as if it is intangible, assuming that when broken into parts, the medium can productively turn in on itself. Lassry brings curiosity and intellect to “looking” and to the appropriation of existing images, displaying an unusually subtle […]
Chi LA #84 By Stephen Longmire, Afterimage, July 1, 2005 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 […]
Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory By: Alan Trachtenberg, Social Research, Saturday, March 22, 2008 “I don’t know why a Replicant would collect photos – maybe they were like Rachel – they needed memories.” In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford […]
Jorge Luis runs the most popular news blog in Ciudad Juarez. His site is called “La Polaka,” which is a derogatory word for “politician” in Mexican slang. Last fall after receiving threats to his life, Luis and his family fled the city for the safety of El Paso, Texas.
The Treacherous Medium: Why Photography Critics Hate Photographs Boston Review, by Susie Linfield In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that […]
New Work: Marilyn Minter By Joshua Shirkey In 1969 the photographer Diane Arbus visited a class at the University of Florida in Gainesville and, as a guest instructor, led a critique of the students’ artwork. Marilyn Minter, an undergraduate at the time, was not enrolled in the class, but her professor encouraged her to bring […]
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 […]
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 […]
When I was just a little girl I asked my mother, what will I be Will I be pretty, will I be rich Here’s what she said to me… Que Sera, Sera, Whatever will be, will be The future’s not ours, to see Que Sera, Sera What will be, will be… (Doris Day – Que […]
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 […]
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 […]
“Wonder Power Activate – Form of Tema – Form of America” Let’s just call it “T-America”. Tema Stauffer’s got her finger on the trigger, Tema Stauffer’s got her finger on the pulse… Tema’s got the vibe, oh yeah, Tema’s got the energy, oh yeah… Tema is feelin’ it. Tema’s… an American girl, yes she is […]