Yelena Yemchuk – Odesa

Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]

Larry Sultan – Swimmers

During a talk he gave to his students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1980, Larry Sultan opened up about the challenges he faced with his latest series of photographs featuring swimmers in the community pools of the Bay Area. The young photographer struggled to justify this new body of work, as the […]

Lee Friedlander – Workers: The Human Clay

Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]

Diane Arbus: Imaginary Lives, Subjective Projections

“Arbus reveals the powerful ability of photography to lie, but also it is a testimony of how the lie is not mere betrayal, but a far-reaching human necessity to escape factual reality, the human urge to create and believe in stories, to draw mythical worlds and the inter-subjective life’s alternative narrative.”   Imaginary lives, compulsive […]

Wolfgang Tillmans: Faces in the Crowd

Corinne on Gloucester Place, 1993 Wolfgang Tillmans has consistently pushed back against whatever perceptions of his work seem most current. The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. —Ezra Pound By Russell Ferguson, excerpt from “Faces in the Crowd” Wolfgang Tillmans has consistently pushed back against whatever perceptions of […]

Evocations of the Everyday: The Street Pictures of Jeff Wall (2009)

To combine cinematography with photography, Wall took his camera out of the studio along with lights and actors with the intention ofmaking pictures with the look of films from the 1970s that would lend a sharp, documentary style to his pieces. By Graham W. Bell In 1982, Wall took his photography to the street. Combining the aesthetic […]

First and Foremost, Christopher Wool is a Painter

And If, 1992 enamel on aluminum 52 x 36 in. (135 X 90 cm.   First and foremost, Christopher Wool is a painter and when it comes to the discourse on the viability of painting, he shows us that the medium is indeed very much still alive.   Excerpt from a Wright Auctions text on […]

Takashi Kawashima: Transcending the Real, Digital Alchemy

from New Coast, And a Fragment of a Woman, (2013) It all happened in a second. With the rumbling of a great sound. On the next day, it was snowing, and people were freezing in cold recalling that scene… By Sunil Shah, ASX, September 2015 The story starts from greeting a woman. Recording #1 23’ […]