Forty-eight years ago John Szarkowski, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department -- a department that more or less was leading the world in taking photography seriously as an art -- published a book entitled Looking at Photographs. In his book he shared one hundred images from…
After going through William Frej's exciting photobook, Maya Ruins Revisited (see my review here), that excitement carried on and I wanted to dig deeper. Do you want more, too? The first place to start is the most obvious: One essay in Frej's book offers a good summary of what is…
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…
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:…
(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…
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…
Book review of Zaido, by Yukari Chikura, Wednesday, December 9, 3:02 p.m., liveblogging now: Gray slipcase, pleasantly soft to the touch. Thin cardstock. I must be careful not to damage it. It is difficult to remove the book from the slipcase. I try holding the book in the air and…
On the Amazon-owned DPReview, probably the most popular photography site in the world, the forum area has over forty-five million posts spread over four million threads. Only eight of those threads mention (and only just mention) Alexy Brodovitch and only two of these mentions (and only just mentions) his book…
Somehow, since my last post on my many unopened photography books, more have arrived. I posted about three hoping to shrink the stacks—seven new ones have appeared, add to the two piles upon my desk. I'm going in the wrong direction. Luckily my desk is more of a table so…
(This review of Rebecca Senf's Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams appears in two parts. This is part two. Part one can be found here.) If a deep dive into the Parmelian Prints wasn't treat enough (or new enough) for you, Making a Photographer explores in-depth Ansel's…