Originally published on some long-ago blog of mine on November 9, 2011, updated slightly here. There’s a sort of mythology growing in some quarters that once-upon-a-time cameras required knowledge of the craft of photography to use. That you had to know a little about f-stops and shutter speeds in order…
(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…
My iPhone doesn't have a camera. Like all iPhone 12s (the iPhone 12 Pro Max, to say its full name, just this once), it has three cameras. Each of its three lenses has its own sensor chip behind it and the sensor chips aren't all the same. That makes it…
It's a beautiful valley in an unexpected place, south of Elko, Nevada, deep in the desert, and with the mist hanging in the air it looks like some primordial morning, suggestive of a time before Man. But it's not a time before Man and that's not mist. That's smoke, and…
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 Phonebook 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…