Gritty 1980’s NYC and the Glorious Intuition of Richard Sandler

                          “Street photography is very difficult. The number of really good pictures that you get is very small in comparison to the number of pictures taken. You’re better off, I think, letting your intuition completely run wild… and even when you find yourself […]

The Last Francis Bacon Interview – On Violence, Meat and Photography

“We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.”   Excerpts from Francis Bacon: I Painted to be Loved Interview by Francis Giacobetti conducted on February 1992, published in The Art Newspaper, no. 137, […]

Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs of 1940’s NYC

    Between 1945 and 1950, Stanley Kubrick worked as a staff photographer for LOOK magazine. Only 17 years old when he joined the magazine, he was by far its youngest photographer. Kubrick often turned his camera on New York City. (All rights reserved. Images @ The Estate of Stanley Kubrick.)

Saul Leiter’s Color Street Photography – The Palette of NYC

    Interview excerpts: “I’m sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important. I have a deep-seated distrust and even contempt for people who are driven by ambition to conquer the world … those who cannot control themselves and produce vast amounts of crap that no […]

Jean-Michel Basquiat and “The Art of (Dis)Empowerment” (2000)

He was also known to be reluctant to involve himself in black politics, often finding himself estranged from “up town” black artist communities. By Louis Armand,  from a lecture at the Comparative Studies Colloquium, August 30, 2000, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven he had only been […]

Diane Arbus – Flirt, Flash & Mirror (2013)

Diane Arbus at “Love-In,” Central Park, New York 1969 @ The Estate of Garry Winogrand   Arbus hunts out forms that can be judged as impure, hidden from the view of everyday onlookers. Whilst transsexuals, tattoos and prostitutes are now very much part of the “Official Institution of the Conventional Archetype of the Bizarre”, there […]

Lee Friedlander Puts Your Selfies to Shame

  “At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings.” – Lee Friedlander Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait Museum of Modern Art EXPLORE ALL LEE FRIEDLANDER ON ASX […]

Robert Frank Interviewed at Wellesley College (1977)

“It was logical for me to get off doing still photography after becoming a success at it. I think it would just become a repeat—I would repeat myself.”   An interview with Robert Frank, from one of ten symposiums at Wellesley College 1977 called “Photography within the Humanities”. Robert Frank: I’m just trying to, as they say, […]

Diane Arbus MoMA Exhibition Wall Label Text (1972)

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 […]

Notes from the Margin of Spoiled Identity – The Art of Diane Arbus (1988)

“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 […]