Art
Why Frederick Douglass Was the Most Photographed 19th-Century American
In a lifelong battle against racist imagery, Frederick Douglass had over 160 portraits taken, which he hoped would create a public acknowledgment of his humanity.
Photography
Art
The Need Right Now for Subversive Photography
What does it mean for a photograph to challenge what we know about the world and reveal new aspects of it?
Books
A Photographer Documents the Uncanny Consistency of Hilton Hotel Rooms
Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard traveled to 32 cities in five continents to document the uncanny uniformity of the Hilton's standard hotel room.
Books
Richard Sandler’s Startling Photographs of Pre-9/11 New York
From 1977 to 2001, Richard Sandler photographed startling juxtapositions between the grit and glamour of New York City and Boston.
Art
The Many Forms and Meanings of the Scientific Image
Seeing Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is a yearlong online project that explores photography's role in defining, promoting, and furthering science.
Books
A Book and Exhibition Reveal Josef Albers's Rarely Seen Photocollages
In his only lecture on photography, Albers warned students against approaching photography carelessly, and the collages he made of his own photos show how he put that mantra into practice.
Books
The Beauty and Devastation of Mankind's Impact on Earth
In his book Overview: A New Perspective of Earth, photographer Benjamin Grant uses satellite imagery to convey the enormity of mankind's effects on the planet.
Art
The First Known Photograph of the White House
A Welsh immigrant named John Plumbe, Jr., who was one of the country's first prominent professional photographers, took the daguerreotype in January 1846.
Art
Aesthetic Interference: On Those Photos from Ankara
I don’t just see the images as documents of atrocity. I also see them as aesthetic, and that doesn’t sit easily. Indeed, it feels immoral. It feels wrong.
Books
A Photographer Retraces the Coastal Landscapes of Longfellow's "Evangeline"
Mark Marchesi spent several years documenting the emptiness of Acadia, which inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 epic poem.
Art
In a Show of African Portrait Photography, the Figure Fades Away
The exhibition looks beyond the horizon of defining an African identity, beyond the notion of authentically representing what this identity is supposed to be, as both local and foreign photographers have sought to do.
Art
The First Photographs of Snowflakes
In 1885, Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Vermont, became the first known person to photograph a snowflake. He would document 5,000 of them in his lifetime.