Exploring, Entering a World and Earning Your Dues – An Interview with Bruce Davidson

USA. Hampton, Virginia. 1962. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos “Look, I’m kind of an explorer. I’m entering a world and it takes time.”   A Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson has been renowned since the late fifties for his photographs of gangs in Brooklyn, and subsequent projects including New York’s East 100th street, circus performers, civil rights marchers […]

‘That Dark’, Melancholy and Death in the Works of Catherine Anyango

Mike Brown @ Catherine Anyango “One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist, except in the darkness of our minds.” James Baldwin – Notes from a Native Son   By Michael Salu, ASX, February 2015 It is THAT dark. You know, the dark that exists under your fingernails that you idly […]

DORIS ULMANN: “APPALACHIAN PORTRAITS”

  Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) was born and educated in New York City. A graduate of the school of the Ethical Culture Society, a socially liberal organization that championed individual worth regardless of ethnic background or economic condition. In the late 1920’s Ulmann made trips each summer to document the rural people of the South, particularly […]

Interview with Ben Shahn (1964)

Interview with Ben Shahn Conducted by Richard Doud at the Artist’s home in Roosevelt, New Jersey. April 14, 1964. RICHARD DOUD: I’d like to start with a general background of what you were doing prior to the time and how you managed to get with the Resettlement Program. BEN SHAHN: Well, I told you I […]

Bruce Gilden – “Detroit: The Troubled City” (2009)

By Bruce Gilden My work on foreclosed homes in Detroit has actually been a continuation of a project that started in Fort Myers, Florida in September 2008. For me the major concentration of the work is on the houses or what’s left of the houses. I chose to photograph them mostly straight on like my […]

Robert Frank: “Unpleasant Connections” (1991)

“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 […]