Walker Evans: “A Penitent Spy (Excerpt)” (2000)

Cuba, 1933       By Belinda Rathbone, excerpt from Walker Evans: A Biography, 2000 By the late 1960’s, the influence of Walker Evans on a younger generation of American photographers had proved to be as profound as it was subtle. For an artist who never sought disciples, Evans had acquired an extraordinary range of […]

Eggleston’s World (1999)

“I think of them as parts of a novel I’m doing.”   By Walter Hopps, essay from The Hasselblad Award, 1998 These were the first words William Eggleston uttered when I asked what he felt he was accomplishing with his photographs. Another fine photographer from the South, William Christenberry, had brought Eggleston to meet me […]

Walker Evans – The Poetry of Plain Seeing (2000)

“While Evans gave much effort to photographing poor people, their houses, rooms and the things they made, it is far from clear that poverty is the point of his best pictures.”   By Leo Rubinfien, originally published in Art in America, December 2000 A traveling retrospective (2000) prompts the author to recall the austere formalist–and […]

W. Eugene Smith – More Real than Reality (2011)

W. Eugene Smith – More Real than Reality By Silke van de Grift for ASX Until March 16th the Photography Museum of Amsterdam (FOAM) presents a retrospective of W. Eugene Smith (US, 1918-1978). The exhibition features six series of photographs, including The Country Doctor (1948), acclaimed as photojournalism’s first official photo-essay. The other series shown […]

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 […]

W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photographs (2001)

W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photographs Carnegie, Nov/Dec 2001 by Ellen S. Wilson “Don’t expect,” wrote photographer W Eugene Smith, “a point-by-point hand-led tour. This is an experience as an intensely curious visitor (perhaps a new resident) might discover it.” Smith wrote those notes to himself as he began his Pittsburgh project, what he later called […]

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: “The Tender-Cruel Camera”

The choice of subject matter seemed to some critics to be totally indiscriminate, as though William Eggleston has applied no criteria at all.   William Eggleston: The Tender-Cruel Camera By Thomas Weski ‘I don’t particularly like what’s around me.’ I said that could be a good reason to take pictures. He said: ‘You know, that’s […]