William Eggleston: Making a Name, the Southern Way
The photographer once stated dryly that the centripetal composition of all of his pictures was based on the Confederate Flag.
Tag Archives: Essay
How to Sue Richard Prince and Win
Today, Richard Prince, still glowing in triumph after his own copyright battle with Patrick Cariou, is simply screen-capturing his own participation on Instagram—brazenly selling inkjet enlargements of other people’s image uploads for $90,000 a pop. What’s more, Prince is adored for it. How to Sue Richard Prince and Win By Nate Harrison, July 10, 2015 My […]
In The Wake of Richard Prince and Instagram, Revisiting Copyright Law, Appropriation and History
Since Richard Prince first exhibited infringing appropriated photographs, reproduction technologies have thrown established conventions into disarray.
Shopping with Andy Warhol (1988)
There was no logical reason to limit the collection, for any reasons of quantity or bulk. Shopping with Andy By Stuart Pivar, originally published in volume five of the Sotheby’s Andy Warhol Collection 1988 auction catalogue Andy Warhol loved to buy art. We used to go shopping for it together for a […]
From LA to NorCal to Queens, the Ghost is in the Machine in Kwiatkowski’s ‘Eat, Prey, Drug’
Strippers, drug dealers, and psychics (sometimes they’re the same person). By Owen Campbell, ASX, December 2014 Somewhere in Oregon, a stripper boofed molly and fainted inside a hollow cake; she may have contracted giardia. Earlier, in California, an earthquake cracked the earth and released noxious spores of mold, afflicting those nearby with what is known […]
Andreas Gursky and ‘The Iron Cage of Boredom’
The Rhine II, 1999 There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. It is as though he holds up a peopled landscape or a building or a workplace for our inspection, saying simply, ‘here it is’. The Iron Cage of Boredom By Julian Stallabrass There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. […]
Jean-Michel Basquiat and “The Art of (Dis)Empowerment” (2000)
He was also known to be reluctant to involve himself in black politics, often finding himself estranged from “up town” black artist communities. By Louis Armand, from a lecture at the Comparative Studies Colloquium, August 30, 2000, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven he had only been […]
Brassai – ‘The Surrealist Observer’ (Excerpt) (1998)
Brassai always insisted that none of his photographs was posed… By Marja Warehime, excerpt from Brassai: Images of Culture and the Surrealist Observer Brassai always insisted that none of his photographs was posed, and there is no reason to believe that he behaved differently with the toughs in the rue de Lappe then he […]
Tony-Ray Jones: “A Day Off: An English Journal” (1974)
Blackpool, Lancashire,1968 ‘I want my pictures to bite like the images in Bunuel’s films which disturb you while making you think. I want them to have poignancy and sharpness but with humour on top.’ – Tony Ray-Jones By Ainslie Ellis, originally published as the introduction in A Day Off, and English Journal, 1974. In San Francisco […]
John Szarkowski On Robert Frank’s Book ‘The Americans'” (1986)
I saw it I suppose very shortly after it was published, when I was still working as a photographer myself, and it was, frankly, shocking. I sensed the power in it, and the authority about it but there was much about it that I didn’t like… The Americans was received with mixed critical reaction. Not […]
I Make My Picture on the Surface: Visiting Thomas Ruff in Dusseldorf (2005)
Sammlung Goetz, Munchen, 1994 Ruff’s work is based on a critical study of the nature and history of photography. To his mind, the reputed objectivity of photography has always been suspect, and electronic processing is no less manipulative than the subjective selection made by the person looking through the lens. By Philip Ursprung, text excerpt […]
Diane Arbus MoMA Exhibition Wall Label Text (1972)
She was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical questions but to make pictures. By John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography, NY MoMA Diane Arbus’s pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography has been thought to rest, for they deal with private rather than social […]