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 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…
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), and then back. We spent over five weeks on the road…
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 is the plane that fell from the sky. The nation…