Tomatsu Shomei <11:02> Nagasaki An Overview

  Full Article on Patreon   …11:02 Nagasaki contains elements of documentary practice mixed with an emotional and highly subjective style of photography. In essence, the book is caught, like Kawada’s Chizu, between two schools of thought regarding photography. On the one hand, there is a legacy of photography that considers politics and a (at […]

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 […]

Daido Moriyama: Investigations of a Dog (1999)

 Stray Dog, Misawa, Aomori (1971)   Moriyama is conspicuous for the brutality with which he distorts photographic description: his pictures are sooty with grain, blotchy with glare, often out of focus or blurred by movement, often defaced by scratches in their negatives.   By Leo Rubinfien, October, 1999 The photographer Daido Moriyama, whose first U.S. […]

Where Diane Arbus Went (2005)

A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968   Where Diane Arbus Went: A Comprehensive Retrospective, prompts the author to reconsider the short yet powerfully influential career of a photographer whose “fascination with eccentricity and masquerade brought her into an unforeseeable convergence with her era, and made her one of its essential voices. […]