Art
The Photographers of 1870s London Who Documented Their Disappearing City
The idea of capturing something in photography before it disappears dates back almost to the dawn of the medium.
Photography
Art
From Fluxus to Selfies, Photographs that Blur the Performative and the Real
LONDON — Five figures stand cocooned in the radiating steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge — four of them are naked and covered in painted spots, hanging out beneath a banner that reads “SELF-OBLITERATION.”
Art
A Photographer Who Captured Workers Without Romanticizing Them
PARIS — Poignancy pervades A Working Eye, the first comprehensive retrospective of François Kollar’s Constructivist-style photography that, through nuanced grays and deep blacks, dramatized French workers’ empowerment.
Art
Photographing the Acceleration of Modernity Through a Privileged Lens
PITTSBURGH — The work of Jacques Henri Lartigue melds today’s concepts of the autobiographical with street, fine art, action, and fashion photography.
Art
An Interactive Map of a Midcentury Botanist’s Amazonian Trips
Richard Evans Schultes took peyote with the Kiowa in Oklahoma in the 1930s, was the first scientist invited to a hallucinogenic yagé ceremony in the Amazon's Sibundoy Valley in the 1940s, and inadvertently helped launch the psychedelic era of the 1960s.
Books
A Photographic Survey of Africa's Enduring Masquerade Traditions
From initiation rites to harvest festivals, many traditional African rituals require participants to don masks and elaborate costumes that transform their wearers into spirits, beasts, or ancestral beings.
Books
Scarred Rejects from the Farm Security Administration's Great Depression Photos
Spend some time browsing the 145,000 negatives at the Library of Congress from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and an odd pattern will emerge.
Art
Remembering Malick Sidibé, the Photographer Who Captured Modern Malian Life
The Malian photographer Malick Sidibé died on Friday in Bamako, Mali.
News
Century-Old Glass Photographic Plate Reveals Earliest Evidence of an Exoplanet
The Carnegie Institution for Science announced this week that one researcher's dive into a collection of glass photographic plates turned up an unexpected image from 1917 that indicates the presence of an exoplanetary system.
Art
A Photographer Who Worked Through the Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany Has Her US Debut
Elisabeth Hase documented Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich and its postwar devastation.
Art
The Radioactive Ruins of the Cold War’s Secret Cities
When Nadav Kander, an Israeli-born, London-based photographer who is interested in the "aesthetics of destruction," learned of these secret cities, he traveled to eastern Kazakstan to document their ruins.
Art
The Natural Geometries of Ellsworth Kelly’s Photographs
Any exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s art is a bittersweet event following the artist’s recent death, a postmortem reflection on a masterful legacy.