Posts
Camera Lucida
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes I doubt if any book about photography has been more thoroughly dissected than Camera Lucida. I have no illusion that I can add anything significant to the body of work on this small volume. It is a safe bet to say that for every one of the 119 pages in Roland […]
Is Robert Adams the finest writer on photography?
Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams, Aperture The measure of a great essay is that after one reads it, there is simply nothing more to say. That is my reaction to Robert Adams’ Beauty in Photography. I have read it and re-read it. I want to comment on it, but frankly, I find it difficult to […]
Interview: Philip Gefter and Buzz Hartshorn
I enjoyed Philip Gefter’s collection of essays “Photography After Frank.” So, when I saw this interview by Gefter of Willis “Buzz” Hartshorn, the director of the International Center of Photography, I knew I would want to re-post it. I’m not familiar with Hartshorn, but I’m aware of the ICP and the interview was conducted shortly […]
The Saddest Picture. Ever.
I can’t get this picture out of my head. I’ve thought about it for years and it always tears at my heart. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s called “Meine Frau in Freud und Leid” (My Wife in Joy and Sorrow) and it was taken in 1911 by August Sander. It shows Anna […]
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 […]
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 […]
2009 NPR Story about Robert Frank
One of the great things about Google and the Internet is that you never know when you might stumble upon a prize. This one comes via Google Alerts and is an NPR story from 2009 on Robert Frank. It’s pretty basic stuff, but I have a rule that virtually anything on Robert Frank that I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]