Art
How Commercial Photography Sold Modernism
The Real Thing at the Met Museum shows that the advertising tactics of commercial studios were in dialogue with avant-garde art in the 1920 and ’30s.
Julia Curl
Julia Curl is a PhD student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where her research focuses on avant-garde film and photography.
Art
Stan VanDerBeek’s Virtual Windows on the World
A cacophony of life, death, and perfume ads, transmitted across the same frequency, VanDerBeek’s fax collages captures an “international picture language.”
Film
The Surreal Realism of Buñuel’s Mexican Films
Luis Buñuel believed that surreal moments were necessary to achieve a true documentary style, as they reflect the fantastical, mysterious nature of everyday reality.
Art
Takako Saito Made Fluxus Fun
“I don’t want people to be an audience,” the artist explained in a 2014 interview, “I want everybody to be participants. Everybody involved!”
Art
How peter campus Changed the Video Art Game
“Three Transitions” from 1973 depicts a slippery reality that thwarts the notion of video as an inherently “documentary” medium.
Art
Carla Williams Takes Ownership of the Gaze
Williams’s scholarly interest in the Black female form paralleled a decades-long private photographic practice that began in the 1980s.
Books
Jay DeFeo Put a Lens Up to the World
Recently discovered work demonstrates DeFeo's status as a major contemporary photographer.
Books
A Global History of Women's Photography Includes Over 300 Artists
This book unearths a trove of unseen images from the past two centuries.
Art
The “Society Photographer” of NYC’s Downtown Underground
Jimmy DeSana’s work remains transgressive, even by today’s standards.
Art
Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre
Critics who have deemed the photographer couple’s work outmoded and detached are simply wrong.
Film
Pierre Clémenti, Rebel With a Cause
The French director made his films with his own earnings as an actor, not for monetary gain or widespread recognition but as a form of self-realization.
Art
Women’s Photography as a Tool of Resistance
What is a feminist picture? A MoMA exhibition is the latest to attempt to answer this question.