Tag
Photography
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“Suddenly, the New Story Was There”
“I had seen a lot of bitumen in the devastated landscapes of the bitumen mines. But seeing it here, in such a mundane and tranquil setting, surprised me. That was when I first understood that this material is natural.”
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Where We Live Now
The family portrait is part of the immigrant tradition. An establishing shot for family history, they remind us of who we come from, who we love.
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Picturing the Lost
In segregated neighborhoods throughout New York, memorials to those claimed by COVID-19 have appeared and evolved.
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Ferrante Breaks the Frame
A defaced family photograph—with an ancestor cut out—reveals to Ferrante’s new protagonist how women are erased by the words and deeds of men.
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Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
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“There Are Black People in the Future”: An Interview with Artist Alisha B. Wormsley
I think I make art because it’s what I’ve always done. It’s how I communicate my dreams. It’s how I stay alive, or rather it’s how I live … [none-for-homepage]
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The Book of Faces
I’m not actually sure if I should call Jessica Helfand’s Face: A Visual Odyssey a book. I mean, it looks like a book. It has text, divided into sentences, paragraphs, and sections. It’s on pages …
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Smiling Donors, Bored Recipients: Free Food In America
People lining up for free food are often tired, bored, and shabbily dressed …
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Muslim Fashion Is Now Mainstream
Modest Fashion is having a moment. From London catwalks, which hosted the first branded “Modest Fashion Week” in February this year, to gyms and running …
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“Detroit Is No Dry Bones”: Photos of a Surviving City
In February, just after a big snowstorm, I revisited Detroit. It was my second trip …
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No Exit: Recreating George Tooker’s “The Subway”
Late on election night in 2016, I rode the subway home from what I had hoped would be a celebration, but the car was full and quiet and covered by a pall. Perhaps not everyone was thinking of the election …
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Keyword of the Week: Mothers
It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday! If you know a mom who loves to read, send her this week’s Public Bookshelf. It features four of our favorite PB articles about motherhood, including a review of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, and an essay on Sally Mann’s extraordinary family photography. The Bingewatch: Mother Winona 9.15.2016 Sarah Kessler Since its release in mid-July, Stranger Things,…
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What Next for Detroit?
One of the most important urban photographers of our time, Camilo José Vergara arrived in the United States in the midst of the “urban crisis,” as great American cities struggled with massive deindustrialization and commercial disinvestment, deep racial segregation, and intense street-level protests and violence. In 1970, Vergara, working as an audio-visual assistant for an…
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Diane Arbus and the Power of Cruel Art
“What you notice about people,” Diane Arbus said, “is the flaw.” Arbus turned flaws into great photographs. During the 1950s and ’60s, she pointed her camera straight across polite social boundaries, at dwarves, nudists, disturbed children, the ugly, the afflicted, the uncertain, the caught-off-guard. What kind of person could work so intensely, for so long,…
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The Woolf Girl
Pity the small back of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, child victim of the refugee crisis. His photo went viral, sparked outrage; perhaps it will win an award. But as Lidia Yuknavitch asks in her terrifyingly prescient novel The Small Backs of Children, how can we look…
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Seeing Things
December 1, 2015 — One of the great myths of our time concerns the promise of a global vision, of seeing things with the power, distance, and clarity of an all-encompassing vantage point, what Donna Haraway once called “the god trick.”1 It is no surprise that the first photographs to give this kind of perspective on…
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Keep It Dirty, Durham
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. They call it “Bull City,” though, with the exception of a downtown statue, there are no bulls and there’s no evidence that there ever were. The nickname comes from the old tobacco brand “Bull Durham,” which was named…
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Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies …”
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The Price of Great Art
When someone who made good art is accused of being a Bad Mother, can she ever be remembered as anything but a Bad Mother? In 1992, Mann’s book Immediate Family tapped into collective anxiety …
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Gates
This is the latest installment of El Mirador an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. At dusk we find the cave entrance buried in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The…
