William Klein: “Life is Good & Good for You in New York” (2010)

 Everything about him suggests an anarchic temperament, capable of playing any worldly system to the hilt and then throwing away its benefits.   Brought to ASX by Errata Editions. Full essay included in Books on Books #5 William Klein: Life is Good…New York! By Max Kozloff, Excerpt from William Klein and the Radioactive Fifties, originally appeared […]

The Photographer in the Beat-Hipster Idiom – Robert Frank’s The Americans

from ‘The Americans’ @ Robert Frank   Frank’s personality, described by Joyce Johnson as a blend of “European dourness and pessimistic wit,” certainly helped to focus his photographic vision.   By George Cotkin, Professor, Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University Few analysts have captured the sadness, tensions, ironies and possibilities […]

Henri Cartier Bresson: Decisive Photographs” (1953)

Gestapo Informer, Dessau, Germany, 1945 For some twenty years now Cartier-Bresson has been doing just that. He carries a camera with him constantly. Every picture which he has taken is a very personal record of something which is already taking place. He has no studio, does not employ models, does not even direct those he […]

Robert Frank’s America (1982)

The feeling among them was unanimous: this was not how America was to be shown. But what was at issue was a larger matter than patriotism. The challenge of Frank’s work in the late ’50s lay in his treatment of his subject matter and in his use of a photographic style well out of the […]

Geoff Dyer on Trent Parke (2008)

Photography is a generous, abundant medium and Parke is a voracious photographer.   By Geoff Dyer I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer, Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first […]

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Last Decisive Moment (2004)

Madrid, 1933 Cartier-Bresson generated the type of admiration he both enjoyed and ran away from.   By Bruno Chalifour, Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2004 A lot has been written, and more will be, about the life in photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. If Europe contributed to the medium in the twentieth century, Cartier-Bresson, a.k.a. HCB, probably stood among the […]

Paul Graham: “A Shimmer of Possibility” (2009)

New Orleans (Woman Eating), 2004 Collectively, the Shimmer books describe a chronicle of American experience circa 2004–2006, and the world presented, by and large, is a world of isolated figures, near-anonymous strangers moving past one another without much connection. By Michael Almereyda Arranged on a shelf, or stacked flat, the twelve slender books comprising Paul […]

ASX.TV: Enrique Villaseñor – “Cuba y Mexico”

Enrique Villaseñor.- CUBA Y MEXICO. Una semblaza en las relaciones fotográficas entre México y Cuba. Desde los primeros acercamientos de amistad en 1978, hasta los eventos de 2002. Cuba y México: veinticinco años de compartir la fotografía y la amistad. Dos patrias, una sola manera de amar la vida y la fotografía.