Although photographs have always been altered, new tools and the pervasiveness of images have made a skeptical viewer. Still, photography’s power holds strong.
Photography
Posted inArt
Photos of Car-Pooling Migrants Reveal Another Layer to Mexico’s Hyper-Urbanization
Photographer Alejandro Cartagena gets a snapshot of life from a unique angle: directly above the highway in the suburbs of Monterrey, Mexico. His series Car-Poolers documents the travels of commuting workers who drive daily from homes in the city’s outer suburban sprawl to jobs more centrally located. The truck beds caught by Cartagena’s camera present open windows not only into the personal lives of Mexico’s working class but the country’s environmental and infrastructural problems as well.
Posted inArt
Rineke Dijkstra: Contemporary Photographer or Old Master?
It’s very rare that museum directors or curators, when introducing a new show to a room full of writers and critics, say anything remotely thought-provoking or profound. Introducing the Rineke Dijkstra mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim, however, the museum director Richard Armstrong made a simple, obvious, but truly striking declaration. “Rineke Dijkstra,” he said, “is an artist with very few peers.”
Posted inArt
A Place Where Landscapes Transform into Poetries of Space
LAFAYETTE, Indiana — How do we know where we are? Those of us who rely on smartphone maps to navigate know this is not just a theoretical question. We use visual cues in the built or natural environment and the safety of a map’s grid to reassure us that we are where we think we are. Anyone who’s seen before and after pictures following a Midwest tornado or the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami knows that as soon as you remove those landmarks, it’s difficult to identify where you stand.
Posted inBooks
The Sore Subject of Family Dynamics
The family unit, siblings, extended family, and the individuals who make up these large trees, is the subject of photographer Lydia Panas’ hardback book of glossy, meticulous portraits, aptly titled The Mark of Abel. Thinking back on the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Panas’ clever reverse of the “mark” seems to imply that her subjects and viewers alike suffer Abel’s curse of brotherhood, fraternity, and family. It’s a rich theme for rich photographs, set in an Eden-like location of lush and overgrown greenery. Ninety-five pages long, containing fifty perfectly paced photographs, The Mark of Abel presents us with hundreds of strangers, all of whom feel bizarrely familiar. Panas’ family portraits are tender rather than sentimental, serious though not cynical, and dysfunctional without being cliché.
Posted inArt
How Lawyers Ruined a Great Photograph [UPDATED]
Photographer Mo Gelber captured this rather romantic moment outside the Manhattan Criminal Court on August 16. He entered the image into the Project Imaginat10n contest organized by director Ron Howard and Canon. Gelber’s photo is obviously quite powerful but the contest administrators let the photographer know that they needed written permission from the subjects in the shot in order to qualify.
Posted inNews
Have Researchers Found a New Photo of Emily Dickinson?
Today we take it for granted that we have photographs of pretty much everyone: famous or not, smartphone-owning or not, Instagram-using or not. It’s hard to imagine anyone becoming famous without an attendant cache of images to identify them.
Posted inArt
Watching the Art Watchers
There is something about art that begs us to get closer, which is why museum guards often stride up to visitors with a warning: “Please don’t touch the artwork.” To many, guards can be a nuisance, but to San Francisco–based photographer Andy Freeberg, they are an inspiration.
Posted inArt
Art’s a Drag: Leland Bobbé’s Split-Personality Portraits
Few men have the balls to be women, but even fewer can truly master the art of drag. New York–based photographer Leland Bobbé celebrates the fabulous queens that populate our fair metropolis in a new series titled Half-Drag, creating dynamic dual portraits of drag queens simultaneously in and out of hair and makeup.
Posted inBooks
Rediscovering a Moment in San Francisco’s Past
Earlier this spring, the de Young Museum exhibited recently uncovered work by photographer Arthur Tress. In 2009, while sorting through the belongings of his recently deceased sister, Tress found a number of prints and more than nine hundred negatives he had taken on a 1964 trip to San Francisco. In those pictures, the young Tress captured the collision of two major events taking place in San Francisco — the Republican National Convention and the influx of a large number of Beatles fans prior to the launch of the band’s first North American tour.
Posted inBooks
Photographing Protest
What does protest look like? This was the question posed to over a dozen artists featured in Capricious Magazine #12 — Protest.
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: Weegee’s Balancing Act
Weegee, the New York tabloid photographer, who documented street life in the “naked city” in the 1930s and 40s, had an eye for the asymmetrical. His principle subject was public mayhem: the crime and criminals that enacted their traumatic narratives in public.
