4 May 2012 | Books, Modern, Photography
Book Review: Bouvet, Vincent and Gérard Durozoi. Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life and Culture. Trans. Ruth Sharman. New York: Vendome Press. Print. 2010. Art is neither created nor viewed in a vacuum. It is this notion perhaps that helped to inspire Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozoi in the organization of their recent book [...]
26 April 2012 | Modern, Photography
The term “snapshot” predates the invention of photography. From 1808, the term has meant “a quick or hurried shot taken without deliberate aim, esp. one at a rising bird or quickly moving animal.” It is strange to think that this hunting term for a spontaneous and haphazard reaction would ever be associated with the Nabis [...]
20 March 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences, Modern, Photography
As I headed out to Los Angeles from New York last month, a remark by Mary Anne Staniszewski kept coming back to me. I spent a stimulating evening last winter at a small alternative art space on Ludlow Street listening to her, Martin Beck, and Ken Saylor talk about the practice of putting together exhibitions [...]
24 February 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Photography, Teaching, Theory
The Los Angeles Convention Center is massive. Despite its girth, the College Art Association 2012 Conference occupies about one third of the center. There is no shortage of simultaneous interesting sessions, forcing attendees to choose carefully. The sessions I’ve visited thus far have been largely interesting, with some presenters generating more enthusiasm than others. “Deconstructing [...]
11 January 2012 | Africa, Books, Modern, Photography
Wendy A. Grossman. Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens. Washington DC: International Art and Artists, 2009. 184 pp.; 23 color ills.; 259 b/w. $39.95 Wendy A. Grossman’s thoroughly researched and lucidly written exhibition catalog Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens effectively reveals the process “by which African objects, formerly considered [...]
26 July 2011 | Modern, Museums, Photography, Teaching
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde San Francisco Museum of Modern Art May 21-September 6 Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco May 12-September 6 Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris De Young Museum, San Francisco June 11 – October 9 What is an [...]
29 April 2011 | Photography
A writer for the French blog Niouzesetweberies writes: Fabienne Cherisma is a fifteen-year-old Haitian adolescent. She escaped the tragic earthquake. But Fabienne happened to be among the ruins when she received three bullets to the head from Haitian police trying to disperse looters. This photo by Paul Hansen won best photo of the year in [...]
3 December 2010 | Photography
In a recent issue of History of Photography (August 2010), Jan Baetens reviews Photography and Literature by François Brunet: An Americanist in Paris, François Brunet combines the best of both worlds. It is indeed extremely rare to discover a book that has such a profound knowledge of the Continental as well as the Anglo-Saxon traditions [...]
14 October 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Photography, Renaissance
Recently in the papers: In the Economist, reviews of Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate, and Bronzino at the Palazzo Strossi. In the FT, Jackie Wullschlager on four books on Caravaggio (Strinati, Fried, Graham-Dixon, Schütze). At the NYRBlog, a teaser of Willibald Sauerländer’s article on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. In the Guardian, Rosemary Hill on the pre-Raphaelites [...]
4 September 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Museums, Photography
Recently in the papers: “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE) Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB) Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian) Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at [...]
14 May 2010 | Conferences, Photography
As a San Francisco Chronicle article noted, the SFMOMA recently hosted a symposium, “Is Photography Over?” Refreshingly, its website published the panelists’ statements and created a forum to extend the conversation and draw in more voices (W.J.T. Mitchell wrote, “I am a little grumpy about the premise of this symposium.”) In the Chronicle, critic Kenneth [...]
26 March 2010 | Awards, Books, Photography
Historian Linda Gordon has been awarded a Bancroft Prize (her second) for her book on the photographer Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. The prize is “awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia [University] to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy.” In this [...]
29 October 2009 | Contemporary, Photography
From The New York Times: Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89. His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his [...]
27 October 2009 | Photography
Two recent posts by French photo historian André Gunthert have generated considerable discussion. In one post, Gunthert discusses elites who protest that one of their own is being “lynched,” an expression whose power lies in part in its ability to evoke a potent image, an expression that is also too easily abused. In the other [...]
30 September 2009 | Photography
Thomas Morton recently wrote for Vice: … Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters … The interest in coverage is legitimate … [but they all] write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn. On The Media‘s Bob [...]
28 May 2009 | Books, Contemporary, Photography
In caa.reviews, Matthew Biro considers a new book by Michael Fried: Two related projects are combined in Michael Fried’s well-observed, conceptually ambitious, and beautifully written new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. First, the text presents a formal and theoretical justification of tableau photography since the late 1970s … Second, Fried puts [...]
24 April 2009 | Books, Photography
In Slate, Barron H. Lerner reviews Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930: The photographs in the remarkable new book Dissection shocked me, even though I spent a year in anatomy class during medical school. Dissection includes dozens of images of late-19th- and early-20th-century medical students posing, often in comedic manners, [...]
14 January 2009 | Photography
André Gunthert discusses Gaza images on his blog: Scandalized by the Jan. 7 issue of L’Humanité, Alain Korkos, columnist for Arrêt sur images, published an “Open Letter to Pierre Laurent“, in which he condemned the usage of this “unbearable photo,” which shows a dead child buried in rubble in the Gaza Strip (taken by Fadi [...]
26 November 2008 | Photography
Just as Sarah Palin’s fashion was hamfistedly spruced up by individuals hoping to help her fit in on the national stage, so a French minister’s image was recently edited by a sympathetic newspaper worried she might stand out in the wrong way. Or was it? André Gunthert writes in Actualités de la Recherche en histoire [...]
10 November 2008 | Photography
An article in Le Temps recounts the controversy that ensued in 1994 when Time darkened a photograph of O.J. Simpson for its cover. Then it writes: Fourteen years later, it’s impossible not to notice how scrupulous such magazines have been to present Barack Obama favorably, taking care to neither darken nor lighten overmuch the skin [...]
