‘Tulsa’ – An Essay by Larry Clark (1971)

“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 […]

ASX.TV: Christian Marclay – “Telephones” (1995)

Christian Marclay’s “Telephones” (1995), a 7 1/2-minute compilation of brief Hollywood film clips that creates a narrative of its own. These linked-together snippets of scenes involve innumerable well-known actors such as Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart and Meg Ryan, who dial, pick up the receiver, converse, react, say good-bye and hang up. […]

William Eggleston: Afterward from ‘The Democratic Forest’ (1988)

“The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ‘snapshot’. Ignorance can always be covered by ‘snapshot’. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.”   William Eggleston in Conversation with Mark Holborn (Afterward from The Democratic Forest) “I was in Oxford, Mississippi for a few days and […]

Michael Schmidt: “Thoughts About My Way of Working” (1979)

By Michael Schmidt, Camera Magazine #3, March, 1979 Photography was invented to enable us to portray reality with complete precision to the last detail. There is no other medium – apart from media which derive from the invention of photography (e.g. film and television) – which is in a position to document reality exactly as […]

Paul Graham: “A Shimmer of Possibility” (2009)

New Orleans (Woman Eating), 2004 Collectively, the Shimmer books describe a chronicle of American experience circa 2004–2006, and the world presented, by and large, is a world of isolated figures, near-anonymous strangers moving past one another without much connection. By Michael Almereyda Arranged on a shelf, or stacked flat, the twelve slender books comprising Paul […]

ASX.TV: James Nachtwey – “War Photographer” (2001)

War Photographer is a documentary by Christian Frei about the photographer James Nachtwey. As well as telling the story of an iconic man in the field of war photography, the film addresses the broader scope of ideas common to all those involved in war journalism, as well as the issues that they cover. The documentary […]

An Inversion Taking Place in Asger Carlsen’s ‘Wrong’ (2010)

 Yes, we don’t so much like these “gross” ones, the odd color ones and the misshapen ones. By Doug Rickard There is an inversion taking place here in that which is Wrong. Yes, an inversion taking place as elements and features, constructed from “normal ones”, are twisted into creatures. Replace and deface, erase and retrace, […]

HIROMI TSUCHIDA: “Hiroshima” (1985)

Hiroshima City Hall, 1,000 meters from the hypocenter (1979) By Hiromi Tsuchida “In a cistern under a bridge were some mothers. One mother held on her head a baby that was burned all over, and another mother wept bitterly as her child suckled her badly burned breast. Children in the cistern cried out for their parents, […]

Lewis Baltz – Notes on Recent Industrial Developments in Southern California (1974)

“Construction Detail, East Wall, Xerox, 1821 Dyer Road, Santa Ana,” 1974 from “The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California.” Gelatin silver print. (Lewis Baltz/Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne)   When Baltz’s series “The Tract Houses” was exhibited at the International Museum of Photography in 1972, photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher purposely appeared in an […]