Larry Shaving, 1991 © SALLY MANN The end is coming for us all, and if you don't believe it, Sally Mann's work heralds a poignant and impactful reminder. Memory, family, place, desire, death. Mann's career has been shaped by looking at the things no one wants to look at or acknowledge: moldering bodies [...]
Bus Stop March. Havana, Cuba, 1992 © Tria Giovan In Walker Evans: A Biography, by Belinda Rathbone (Mariner Books, 2000), the photographer expresses the compulsion to document life. “It's as though there's a wonderful secret in a certain place and I can capture it…. Only I, at this moment, can capture it, and [...]
You never forget your first Arbus. In the early 1980s, I worked for legendary art dealer Harry Lunn, whose vision and impact first established photography as a thriving component of the art market. An art history graduate student, I was charged with creating condition reports and cataloging the trove of photographs acquired during his frequent [...]
Imogen and Twinka, 1974, Judy Dater © JUDY DATER, 1974. THE LANE COLLECTION. COURTESY, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON Best known for her sharp-focus modernist images from the 1920s and 30s, Imogen Cunningham, who died in 1976, worked in a myriad of styles. Admired to the point of reverence for her seven decades [...]
Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan, 1950 / PHOTOGRAPH BY GORDON PARKS. COURTESY AND © THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION. COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON “I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty ”” the memory of that beginning influences my work today.” Gordon Parks Everything is about timing, [...]
Empire Falling 2 © Elena Dorfman There's an unspoken agreement between artist and viewer that runs through Elena Dorfman's work ”” “leave your visual comfort zone, give yourself over to the image and I'll take you to a place unlike anywhere you've been before.” It's there in her wide-ranging portrait work featuring sex [...]
Over the past 20 years, as photography has become increasingly hands-off, Anita Douthat has literally run the other way ”” and, one might say, into the light. Produced without a camera, her photograms rely on the sun to expose images placed directly on ultraviolet light-sensitive printing-out paper. At once skeletal X-ray and intricate detail, these light drawings of objects evoke connection to the human body, speaking of breeze and breath with the delicacy of half-remembered dreams.
In a career spanning six decades, Ray K. Metzker, who called himself "an intellectual wanderer," created images of rare variety and intensity that reflected his commitment to exploring blackandwhite photography. From overlapping exposures to making a single picture from a roll of film, from using prints as building blocks for composite works to playing with [...]
New York, ca. 1962 ©The Estate of Garry WinoGrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Garry Winogrand’s body of work is as big and sprawling as the country he documented. It’s said that over two million people ”” roughly one percent of the U.S. population in the 1960s ”” were captured by his lens. [...]
Ohashi: Chopsticks, 2006. From the Desert Sands Project / © EMILY HANAKO MOMOHARA Emily Hanako Momohara creates conceptual landscapes in homage to her Japanese and Hawaiian heritage. Intrigued by collective memory and its relationship to the imagination, her images combine the real and fictional to create places that explore familial history, legacy, myth [...]
