“In Butte, Montana, he photographed a slovenly, middle-aged woman in her car with a sullen child staring out of the window behind her. He showed a bench full of decrepit old people in St. Petersburg, Florida, staring at nothing in particular while a shiny new Pontiac whizzed by on the street behind them.” By […]
Williams wrote me that there was a photographer there who took pictures of children and American flags in attics. Excerpt from The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays By Guy Davenport When I moved to Lexington in 1964 the poet Jonathan Williams wrote me that there was a photographer there who took pictures […]
By Robert Coles, Wellesley College, 1977 I have an intense dislike for Diane Arbus. I don’t like her photographs and I don’t like the cult that’s been made of them. Maybe it’s because I’m a psychiatrist, because some part of me feels that that’s wrong, that that isn’t the whole of the reality. Or maybe […]
Sonny, Washington Street, 1974 (Part I of II) By Roswell Angier, Text excerpt from “‘A Kind of Life’: Conversations in the Combat Zone” (1976) “It seems like what has been done in the way of magazine articles and stuff like that”, one of the strippers at the Two O’Clock Club tells me, “has to do with the really […]
From Park City, Lewis Baltz Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography By Kelly Dennis, Paper Presented at the Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century” Newcastle-upon-Tyne, April 11-16, 2005 Whereas Ansel Adams photographed the sinuous, abstract patterns left by timeless winds on […]
“Three American Road Stories” By Benedict Wells (Essay from the foreward to Wilted Country by Roger Eberhard, Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010) You’ve left Las Vegas a mere two hours behind. The lights of the nightclubs, casinos, bars, and hotels still shimmer through the hangover in your head. And suddenly you’re nowhere. The colors […]
from ‘The Americans’ @ Robert Frank Frank’s personality, described by Joyce Johnson as a blend of “European dourness and pessimistic wit,” certainly helped to focus his photographic vision. By George Cotkin, Professor, Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University Few analysts have captured the sadness, tensions, ironies and possibilities […]
Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, DC, 1963 By Alan Thomas (Originally published as “Literary Snapshots of the Sho-Nuff Blues,” In These Times, March 27-April 2, 1985) “Who can dance to this bopping music? In the old days we used to like blues. And I still do. But now the kids don’t lean on the piano no […]
Ballen’s pictures bring to life in a variety of ways what (Man) Ray illuminated: the impulse to externalise the chaos of the mind and emotions, and the possibility that the creative process may just as soon yield a monster as an object of beauty. By Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Art / South Africa, 2005 Certain […]
By Doug Rickard, ASX, October 2010 The “past” is like a magical beast. At times, it makes me want to cry as a pit in my stomach hits with the power of a ton of bricks. At other times, I want to cackle and howl like a hyena as visions flood the head, pouring out […]
In the American West is a complicated stew composed of various ingredients. While Avedon certainly addresses Western myths and refers to the artists who visualized them, his photographs also act as social commentary and as an affirmation of his own photographic style. Stylistic Trials and Documentary Tribulations in Richard Avedon’s In the American West […]
By Doug Rickard, ASX, July 2010 A long time ago, far, far away, in a rainy king-and-queen-filled land, in a colorful little-knick-knack, jigsaw-puzzle, cat-hair-filled, grease-streaked, filthy tiny fishbowl, baby Richie was born. Little Richie came into this lovely rainy little world born to proud parents, the drunk-unemployed-Ray and the devoted-enormous-“big”-Liz Billingham. Soon, little baby brother […]