Say you were dumb, I mean really dumb, computer dumb, literally dumb as a rock, albeit one with some lines scratched into it. And say I showed you ten pictures of dogs--and I told you they were all dogs--and ten pictures of cats--and I told you those were all cats--and…
Rephotography—projects that seek out the tripod holes of past photographers to reshoot the same images of the same thing, in the same place, maybe at the same time—have their fascinations but, in the end, impart lessons on the same general theme: Man is bad. Man is bad because man tears…
(This is part of series looking back at posts I wrote a decade ago. First published on November 4, 2011.) If Albrecht Dürer were alive today he would be a photographer. I’m sure of it. I’ve been a fan of Durer’s work for many years and have always felt he…
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 Leicas and other tiny German cameras, which took postage-stamp-size…
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 are easy for the viewer to scan. Here’s my listicle:…
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 said to weigh 40,000 pounds. You can see the painting…
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 Timothy O'Sullivan evokes images of the American West, a land…
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 during the early 1970s when the chapters in this book…
(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. I look at what science and technology have achieved--and continue…