Carla Williams – Tender

Carla Williams can make the world beyond us seem a simple place. Looking at the self-portraits she made over a fifteen year period, from 1984-1999, may briefly lull us into a false apprehension of the world as containing little interest of its own. Such is the poetic depth of these pictures, which, when edited and […]

Stephen Shore Steel Town

    Glancing at Steel Town by Stephen Shore (MACK, 2021) gives the reader the impression that what they are looking at has a point of fixity in the past. The images, produced in 1977 for Fortune Magazine, and have a quality that suggests a bygone era. Whether it is the kitsch interior of Eddie’s […]

Matt Eich’s The Seven Cities

“Everything seems somehow familiar and distant at the same time. It is as if time has wedged us between the fever dream of summer and the insoluble gaslighting conjured up from what was believed to be a significantly flawed, but tolerable near past”     The way we live now. It all seems so easily […]

Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957/2020

  “It would be easy for me to say that this book is published at the right moment and that it correlates a simple reminder about the inhuman conditions of the past…”   It is June 9th, 2020 and as I sit here penning this “review” of Gordon Parks perhaps sadly non-anachronistic and oddly prescient […]

Gordon Parks: Collected Works of an Alien Afloat In Genius

  Gordon Parks was first described to me as a renaissance man for his enduring and unfailing talent behind a lens. I think in those terms adding to this moniker Renaissance Alien would not be incorrect.   There are certain people in this world in which there is no other possible recourse but to name […]

‘Segregation Story’ by Gordon Parks Brings the Jim Crow South into Full Color View

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation  Untitled. Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation Untitled. Mobile, Alabama, 1956 @ The Gordon Parks Foundation At Segregated […]

INTERVIEW: “Oral History Interview with Gordon Parks” (1964)

Oral history interview with Gordon Parks, 1964 Dec. 30, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview with Gordon Parks Conducted by Richard Doud In New York December 30, 1964 RICHARD DOUD: If you would, Mr. Parks, I’d like to hear something about your background and how you became interested in photography in the first place. […]