A Statement by Robert Frank (1958)

With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. By Robert Frank, U.S. Camera Annual, p. 115, 1958 I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for their confidence and the provisions they made for me to work freely in my […]

Lou Reed on Robert Frank: “Sick of Goodby’s” (1978)

Sick of Goodby’s, Mabou, 1978, Robert Frank   Paint dripping from a mirror like blood. I’m sick of goodbyes.     By Lou Reed, originally published in Tate Magazine, Issue 2, Autumn, 2004 I was looking at Robert Frank’s photograph Sick of Goodby’s in his book The Lines of My Hand. Moments before I had been […]

HELEN LEVITT: “COLOR” (1971-1981)

Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 29, 2009) was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for “street photography” around New York City, and has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.”   ASX ARTIST CHANNEL: HELEN LEVITT (All images @ and courtesy of Helen Levitt Estate)

Photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia Talks (2003)

“I mean I never took photography to be anything that I considered to be truthful.”   Dorian Devens and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Transcription of a conversation on The Speakeasy, WFMU.org, 2003 Dorian Devens: How did you get started in photography? Philip-Lorca diCorcia: I was a student in an art college and it was more or less […]

WALKER EVANS: “POLAROIDS OF WOMEN”

“I’ve now taken up that little SX-70 camera for fun and become very interested in it. I’m feeling wildly with it. But a year ago I would have said that color is vulgar and should never be tried under any circumstances. It’s a paradox that I’m now associated with it and in fact I intend […]

‘Like a One Eyed Cat’, Lee Friedlander – Out of the Cool

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 […]

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 […]

Richard Avedon’s ‘In the American West’

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 […]

Pieter Hugo and the Hyena Men – “The Dog’s Master” (2007)

“The first series of pictures had caused varying reactions from people – inquisitiveness, disbelief and repulsion. People were fascinated by them, just as I had been by that first cellphone photograph.”   The Dog’s Master By Pieter Hugo These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a […]