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 [...]
4 November 2008 | Photography
Rémi Coignet, who blogs about photography and books for Le Monde, recently reviewed Playboy: Posters, La collection complète, which is a kind of catalogue raisonné comprising all the hundreds of centerfolds the magazine has published since 1953: Flipping through the work, you get an impression of great repetition, an impression confirmed by a quick tally [...]
5 March 2008 | Americas, Photography
The Fall 2007 issue of American Art contains five commentaries on photography. Anthony W. Lee writes: More than most fields, the history of photography is mercurial and eclectic in its interests and methods. This is partly because its subject has continually proved to be a moving target (even the earliest inventors could not agree what [...]
17 January 2008 | Photography
From Le Monde: It’s a stunning photograph that has caused much ink to be spilled since it was published January 3rd on the cover of the Nouvel Observateur. On the occasion of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth, the magazine chose an image of the writer, nude, seen from behind, in the middle of [...]
3 January 2008 | Photography
A recent issue (29.2) of Studies in American Culture includes an essay by Larry Vonalt (who died in 2005) on “The Dignity of Shelby Lee Adams’s ‘Disturbing’ Family Photograph’: The photographs in Shelby Lee Adams’s first two monographs, Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), attracted praise and, often in his native Eastern Kentucky, blame. [...]
18 December 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the October 2007 Text and Performance Quarterly, Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli contribute “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade“: On February 25, 2006, the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana (SPLL) hosted the twenty-sixth Annual Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade in downtown Baton Rouge … The 2006 theme, FEMAture Evacuation, took [...]
10 December 2007 | Books, Photography
Writing in Le Monde des livres, Michel Guerrin recently panned the new 620-page survey L’Art de la photographie, edited by André Gunthert and Michel Poivert. The editors respond: Michel Guerrin has published … a methodical assassination of L’Art de la photographie. Everything gets it. From the “chilling” price to the deceitful cover. “Grand masters” are [...]
