Books
The Rose-Washed Past: Ron Haviv’s 'Lost Rolls'
I’ve long been fascinated by the various filters for Instagram and other digital camera apps whose names are simply years: 1969, 1972, 1977.
Photography
Art
Does the Museum of Modern Art Even Know About This Great Photographer?
In November 1955, four days after Robert Frank was arrested, questioned, and released in Arkansas under the suspicion of being a Communist spy, he took a photograph, ‘‘Trolley — New Orleans’’ (1955), that was included with eighty-two others in his justly famous book, The Americans, which – we should
Art
A Photographer Who Tracked Displacement, from Soviet Gulags to Ethiopia's Civil War
Ruth Gruber was the youngest PhD graduate in the world, earning her degree at the age of 20 with a doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf (the first academic work on the author), when she trudged out into the Arctic and became the first journalist to interview prisoners at a Soviet Gulag in 1935.
In Brief
Badly Photoshopped Photo Wins Nikon Award and Internet Freaks Out
Hastily photoshopping a graphic of an airplane into a shot of some abstracted architecture could win you a Nikon prize.
Art
Bangladeshi Photographers Capture the Fallout from Their Country's Globalization
Transitions: New Photography from Bangladesh, a collaboration between the Bangladeshi American Creative Collective and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, offers a dark view of the forces of industrial production and globalization at work in contemporary Bangladesh.
Books
The First Flash Photographs of the Natural World At Night
With a magnesium flash triggered by a tripwire, George Shiras shot some of the world's first nocturnal wildlife photographs.
Art
Catching the Uncanniness of Medical School Simulations
Learning diagnostic medicine is not just about recognizing symptoms of illness, but also involves interacting with the emotionally complex creature that is the human being.
Art
A Radiologist's X-Ray Photographs of Flowers from the 1930s
When we think of X-rays, we generally think of the human body's skeletal structure, but in the 1930s, one osteopathist turned his attention to the anatomy of plants and used his X-ray machine as what it fundamentally exists as: a camera.
Art
A Portrait of a Chinese Ghost Town on the Verge of New Life
The district of Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia, China, is famous for its emptiness.
News
Renowned Artist Leila Alaoui, Injured in Burkina Faso Terrorist Attacks, Dies at 33
Leila Alaoui, the French-Moroccan photographer and video artist known for her poetic and unsentimental images of daily life in the Mediterranean and Middle East, died last night from injuries sustained during last week's terrorist attack in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.
Art
Rediscovered Glass Plate Photographs Show the Skies 120 Years Ago
Over 150 glass plate photographs of the moon, stars, and solar eclipses were recently rediscovered in the basement of the the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) in Copenhagen.
Art
Jim French, Male Beauty, and Languages of Desire
I recently became aware of the hashtag “#masculinitysofragile.” The words together felt poetic. Fragility is supposed to be the antithesis of masculinity, right?