The feeling among them was unanimous: this was not how America was to be shown. But what was at issue was a larger matter than patriotism. The challenge of Frank’s work in the late ’50s lay in his treatment of his subject matter and in his use of a photographic style well out of the […]
Madrid, 1933 Cartier-Bresson generated the type of admiration he both enjoyed and ran away from. By Bruno Chalifour, Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2004 A lot has been written, and more will be, about the life in photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. If Europe contributed to the medium in the twentieth century, Cartier-Bresson, a.k.a. HCB, probably stood among the […]
If it is a rarity in our society to experience death in its moment, our mediated selves consume it daily through TV and film. Ever since Viet Nam, our living rooms have been the sites of death and destruction. Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata By David L. Jacobs, Afterimage, Summer, 1996 Where adults see […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Afterimage, July-August, 2005 by Stephen Longmire 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 world opens itself […]