“I think Michael felt the need to discuss the meaning and importance of American photography with a younger generation in Germany who had no experience with these kinds of elderly figures. The National Socialists had either killed or persecuted them in Germany, so for my generation there was no elderly generation in photography.”
June 8, 1972 @ Nick Ut Excerpt from a speech delivered at a Wellesley College photographic symposium on April 21, 1975. I am a writer and a filmmaker. I don’t consider myself a critic, and I am above all not a critic of photography. But it’s from that strictly independent and freelance position that I […]
First of all, the pictures are unforgettable – photography’s ultimate standard of value. Introduction text to Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans By Susan Sontag First of all, the pictures are unforgettable – photography’s ultimate standard of value. And it’s not hard to see why the trove of glass negatives […]
It is hard now to remember what all the upset was about when they were new; hard to remember, for example, that when the Museum of Modern Art mounted an Arbus retrospective a year after her death, there were some viewers among the teeming crowds pressing into the museum to gawk at the freaks who […]
The years during which Rogovin completed this series represented a period of great loss and decline for industrial labor in the U.S., especially in traditional manufacturing cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo… Milton Rogovin’s “Approach”: Photography, Class, and the Aesthetics of Making Space By Joseph Entin, Brooklyn College, City University of New York (Note: […]
An Interview With Susan Sontag Geoffrey Movius: In one of your recent essays on photography in The New York Review of Books, you write that “no work of imaginative literature can have the same authenticity as a document,” and that there is “a rancorous suspicion in America of anything that seems literary.” Do you […]