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 […]
“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do, that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” – Diane Arbus By Gerry Badger as a collaboration with ASX, Originally Published in Phototexts, 1988 The principal issue raised by the remarkable photographs […]
“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 […]
Haverstraw, New York, 1966 Friedlander is a photographer, never forget. Although a major photographic artist, he is not an ‘artist utilising photography.’ He uses the camera, that unthinking machine, to transcribe his visual perceptions of the world. Out of the Cool – Lee Friedlander at the V&A By Gerry Badger, from Creative Camera (1991) ‘That […]
Shooting inordinate amounts of film, Winogrand charted a vast, freebooting odyssey through three-and-a-half decades of American culture. Garry Winogrand: . . . ‘I forgot what year when Robert Frank’s book came out. He was working pretty much around that time, ’55 or whenever it was. And there were photographs in there, particularly that […]
Looking at Eggleston’s Before Color pictures, newly reborn, requires an odd energy of de-colorization. By Tim Davis For years, Tod Papageorge, the head of the Photography Department at the Yale University School of Art, would begin student critiques of color pictures with the question, “Why color?” Color was an aesthetic choice and Papageorge felt […]
For Avedon’s program is supraindividual. He wants to portray the whole American West as a blighted culture that spews out casualties by the bucket: misfits, drifters, degenerates, crackups, and prisoners-entrapped, either literally or by debasing work. Richard Avedon’s “In the American West” By Max Kozloff “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of […]
From 1962 to 1991, John Szarkowski served as the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This documentary examines Szarkowski’s rich life as guided by the lens — both curator and photographer. Ultimately he was a man who helped to establish photography as a true and […]
Stephen Shore. Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979 In 1982, a slender yet hugely impressive version of Uncommon Places was released. Its impact was felt almost immediately, forever changing the course of art photography, and securing Stephen Shore a place within the canon of photographic history. By Aaron Schuman, originally published […]
Do we care for anything but mystery? And does anything matter more than its apprehension? William Eggleston, Mystagogue, From 2 and 1/4. 1999. By Bruce Wagner Do we care for anything but mystery? And does anything matter more than its apprehension? During our days, we try so hard to find and hold it; at night, […]