With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. By Robert Frank, U.S. Camera Annual, p. 115, 1958 I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for their confidence and the provisions they made for me to work freely in my […]
“Photography is a system of picture making in which subject and form are identical and indistinguishable, in which the subject and the picture are beyond argument the same thing.” Evening Lecture I would like to address myself to what may seem to be a positively primitive question, and consider in an exploratory way the manner in which […]
He brought out hundreds of his photographs, some in copies, others in books and still others in originals. He placed the pictures on the table, one at a time, and ordered me to make an instant decision whether I would take it or not. A Message from Cartier-Bresson By Yoshitomo Kajikawa It was autumn, […]
El Grafico 28,051, November 29, 2010 Hot, Daily Death and Sex Text by Paul Loomis, ASX, May 2012 I had been living in Mexico City for only two months when I encountered artist P.J. Rountree’s collection of El Grafico covers. He collects various visual textures from the urban environment, manipulating some and archiving others as […]
“There are two ways of looking at a thing. Either you feel that a thing must be perfect before you present it to the public, or you are willing to let it go out even knowing that it is not perfect, because you are striving for something even beyond what you have achieved, but […]
“I wanted to be visible in the biggest way possible. My aesthetics was the New York Daily News. I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get.” By Jane Livingston, excerpt from […]
“When I photograph now,” he said, “I try to imagine that I’d never seen a place like this before.” Lars Tunbjörk: Alien at the Office By Joshua Kors Whether Lars Tunbjörk is a visionary or simply a weirdo with a camera, perhaps that’s a matter of opinion. Certainly Tunbjörk, the acclaimed Swedish photographer – winner […]
In the mid-1950s, LIFE magazine published a multi-part series that was titled “The Background of Segregation” exploring how the politically-violently-ethically charged issue was playing out from a Jim Crow South to the first fiery stirrings of the heroic Civil Rights movement. Today, here we sit, our cities crumbling – segregation (race, socio-economics, class, ideology) […]
By Brassai, Excerpts from the intro to, Brassai: Letters to My Parents, 1998. I was delighted to notice in the letters that from the start I saw photography as a way to uncover and record the world that surrounded me, the city in which I lived, as comprehensively as possible. There were a good […]
By focusing her lens specifically on the urban street child, Levitt revived an iconographic tradition that gained significance in nineteenth century realist traditions concerned with the fate of the urban poor. By Elizabeth Gand, “Child’s Play in Helen Levitt’s Early Photographs” “The unconscious obsession we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to […]
From the series American Surfaces Looking at Stephen Shore’s large-format pictures of America, it might be hard to believe the images were once controversial. The Landscape of Stephen Shore at the ICP By Carl Gunhouse, May 22, 2007 Looking at Stephen Shore’s large-format pictures of America, it might be hard to believe the […]
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991 “People commonly think of the photographer as a voyeur, but this is my party, I’m not crashing.” Excerpt from, Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, University of Mexico Press, 2003 By Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble The work of the American artist Nan Goldin, […]