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On Photography-

Camera Lucida in The Guardian

Interested in Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes? This article by Brian Dillon in the Guardian from 2011 offers a good overview and insights that may encourage you to move the book up on your list of must reads. “…what Barthes had written was neither a work of theoretical strictness nor avant-garde polemic, still less a […]

Reinhold Marxhausen and Seeing

Something recently got me thinking about Reinhold Marxhausen and how he helped teach me to see. Marxhausen was an artist and photographer who spent most of his professional life as a professor at Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska. In the mid-1970s I had the good fortune to take a brief evening class from him through […]
Photography the Key Concepts

Striving for Art

Photography, the Key Concepts by David Bate, Berg Publishers Where exactly does photography fit into the world of art? That photography is, or can be, “art” has been a settled question for a century or more. Far more difficult to answer is: what sorts of photographs are “art.” And, who is it that determines the […]
Disappearing Witness

In Search of Things as They Are

Disappearing Witness by Gretchen Garner. Johns Hopkins University Press. Gretchen Garner thinks documentary photography contributes something that is worth preserving. For much of the 20th Century,  that would have seemed like a ridiculously self-evident perspective. Documentary photography, or more precisely, what Garner refers to as spontaneous witness, dominated photography for most of the past century […]
Photography After Frank

Two Languages: Words and Pictures

Philip Gefter, Photography After Frank. “Many people approach the act of looking at photographs with an inherent blind spot. They need to know what it is before they can appreciate how it looks.” For me this statement, and the essay it is from, would alone have made reading Philip Gefter’s “Photography After Frank” worthwhile.  It […]

On Topographics, Street Photogaphy and Lewis Sullivan

Perhaps it’s just me. But when I visited three separate exhibitions and a single piece in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago they meshed into a larger reflection on the context,  connections and cross-pollinating influences of street photography and “New Topographics.” At the center is an exhibit of Lewis Baltz’s Prototypes which […]
History of Photography Newhall

Thinking about Beaumont

The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall. The Museum of Modern Art (1982 Edition) Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography is so much a part of the history that it documents that it can be hard to read it today and evaluate the book on its own merits. I first read Newhall’s history more than 35 […]
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