Robert Adams on Working at Home and Photography as Metaphor (2009)
“By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm.” Excerpt from a 2014 Hasselblad Award chat transcript Question: Congratulations! You have been taking pictures of the American West for four decades now. Why […]
Andreas Gursky and ‘The Iron Cage of Boredom’
The Rhine II, 1999 There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. It is as though he holds up a peopled landscape or a building or a workplace for our inspection, saying simply, ‘here it is’. The Iron Cage of Boredom By Julian Stallabrass There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. […]
Lewis Baltz on ‘New Topographics and Exhibition ‘Remakes’ (‘A Very Bad Idea’)
39, WEST WALL, SMICOA, 333 MCCORMICK, COSTA MESA © LEWIS BALTZ, IP 39, FROM THE SERIES “NEW INDUSTRIAL PARKS, NEAR IRVINE, CALIFORNIA”, 1974; STEIDL Interview (excerpt) with Lewis Baltz Conducted by Matt Witkovsky At Baltz’s home in Paris, France. 2009 November 15-17 MR. BALTZ: You aspire to making something – at least at the time, […]
Walker Evans on What Makes a ‘Good Photograph’ and Avoiding ‘Too Much Pictorialism’ (1971)
Elizabeth and Dora Mae Tengle, Hale County, Alabama, 1936 “‘Visual impact’ may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it’s a quality that something has or does not have.” Walker Evans interviewed (excerpt) by Paul Cummings for Smithsonian, NYC, Oct-Dec, 1971 PAUL CUMMINGS: Could you describe in some […]
ASX.TV: Erik Kessels’ Eye (2014)
Photography: Mark Bakker Editor: Bart van den Broek Sound Recording: Erik Leek Soundmix: Hugo Dijkstal Production: Willemijn Cerutti Production VPRO: Karin Vermeulen Commissioning Editor VPRO: Barbara Truyen Producer: Frank van den Engel Written en Directed By: Simone de Vries © 2009 Zeppers Film en TV / VPRO This film was produced with support from Dutch […]
All Women Fall in Love with Nobuyoshi Araki (And Duchamps is a Swindler) (2014)
‘Chiro’ from Sentimental Journey @ Araki In many ways, “Sentimental Journey 1972-1992” is quintessential Araki. It is a documentary of his marriage life with his wife Aoki Yoko till the day she lost her fight to ovarian cancer in 1990. By Zhuang Wubin, epSITE and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 2004 Nobuyoshi Araki, or Tensai […]
An Italian Playboy and His Villa Full of Women – ‘Carlo Mollino: Polaroids’ by Damiani (2014)
There is something of satyriasis, or Don Juanism, the male equivalent of nymphomania, in Mollino’s work, as if they were undertaken compulsively, and perhaps without joy, as part of a doomed project to reach an unattainable ideal: the tragic desire to keep thousands of women in an empty house. By Owen Campbell Carlo Mollino was […]
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Four Decades of Photographing Dioramas
The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has visited to the Museum four times in the past four decades to shoot his “Dioramas” series, which focuses on habitat displays to explore the distinction between the real and the fictive. What initially surprised Sugimoto about the series was that his photos looked utterly real–as if he were photographing on […]