by Darin Boville
by Darin Boville
We know Timothy O’Sullivan almost entirely through his images. Almost nothing else is sure about him. His most famous photographs are of the aftermath of battles in the Civil War, bodies strewn across the ground. But to photographers the name…
A sample video from an ongoing project:
(This review is co-published with Photobook Journal: The Contemporary Photobook Magazine.) When I was a young man I labored through the book On Photography, by Susan Sontag. I was a subscriber to the New York Review of Books, though not…
(This is part of series looking back at posts I wrote a decade ago.) Originally published on November 26, 2011 as “What Audacity Looks Like.” Sometimes I get a little jealous of other fields, outside of art, outside of photography.…
This post is from a series of articles chronicling a 2020 cross-country trip with my wife and two daughters and a boyfriend, from California to Ohio (to visit family) and Pennsylvania (to drop off my oldest daughter at grad school),…
It’s September 2001. The twin towers lay ruined and smoldering in New York City. At the Pentagon there are nightly vigils and there are flowers for the dead. In the small towns of eastern Pennsylvania the only topic of discussion…
(This is part of series looking back at posts I wrote a decade ago.) Originally published on November 2, 2011 as Chuck Close eyes the money, Steve Jobs envisions art’s importance Chuck Close wants his money. At least from works…
Every night when we got to the hotel the outrage-of-the-day was waiting for us. Sometimes it was one of the up-and-comers, maybe Jesse Watters, his goofy frat-boy smirk his natural facial expression at rest. Watters came to national attention on…
I crossed America by car in the summer of 2017, looking for Trump. I looked for him in truck stops and restrooms, parking lots and malls. I looked for Trump in roadside signs and unplanted fields, in thrift stores and…
We don’t like Walmarts in the part of the country where I live. We’re all good liberals. Walmart is a small-town-destroying monster, gobbling up family businesses, impoverishing its workers. There are no more little downtowns because of Walmarts, just big-box…