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Looking at Photographs

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See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Many authors have tackled the idea of looking at photographs. The difference from this traditional approach is that in See/Saw we get a lot of Geoff Dyer as well. Dyer takes the artist’s background, significance and intent as a starting point, but uses his essays to expound on his own observations. In a sense, the […]
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 […]

How to Read a History of Photography

I’ve discovered a secret about reading histories and criticisms of photography. It’s the internet. Almost every book on photography contains a disclaimer from the author that he or she regrets that the practical limits of publication means the book cannot possibly include enough images to give the reader a complete picture of the photographers and […]