“Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles… ” sings Bob Dylan, and I know exactly what he means. Since I’ve been back from my trip there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t have to fight the urge to pack my bags and leave […]
“When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head.” Garry Winogrand with Bill Moyers, Creativity, WNET, 1982 “When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, […]
It’s hard for me to describe the fascination that William Eggleston’s photographs exert on me. William Eggleston: Draft of a Presentation By Thomas Weski It’s hard for me to describe the fascination that William Eggleston’s photographs exert on me. More than twenty years ago, I bought William Eggleston’s Guide, the catalogue of his solo […]
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 […]
Hauts-de-Seine, Parc de Sceaux, France, 1987. Czeslaw Milosz on Josef Koudelka’s “Exiles” While writing this essay I had before my eyes Josef Koudelka’s photographs. Let my words serve as a tribute to his art of telling stories without words. Rhythm is at the core of human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
John Tusa Interviews David Hockney As an artist David Hockney is easy to get wrong. For years viewers have responded to the extrovert hedonism of his California pictures, the swimming pools, the sensual lifestyle, the uninhibited colours, the recognisable images. Hockney too has always been recognised as a wonderful draftsman. At a time when some […]
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 […]
Thomas Ruff talks to Philip Pocock (1993) Philip Pocock: Unlike the Neue Sachlichkeit of Sander or Renger-Patzsch, there is a clear crisis of belief in the objectivity of your medium in your work. True or false? Thomas Ruff: It’s both. It’s true and false. They also used the camera as an instrument to take pictures. […]
The work of late American photographer Francesca Woodman, produced from the mid- to late-1970s, displays a unique artistic displacement and transformation of ‘feminine’ identity.