by Darin Boville
by Darin Boville
During the early years of the Depression one began to notice, here and there, young men with what appeared to be leather-cased opera glasses slung about their necks. They were the pioneers of the camera craze who had discovered that…
The Internet loves listicles—articles of the top ten this, the world’s best that. Easy to read and easy to write, they score high in Google’s search rankings because they are easy for the algorithms to parse and the search results…
The painting is by Vincent Van Gogh and depicts three sunflowers, arranged in a vase. It is twenty-four feet across, thirty-six feet high an it leans upon its easel some eighty feet in the air at the top. It is…
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…