'Why am I making this picture?'

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian UK

Ever since 1971, when she was a student at Harvard and decided to take portraits of the people who shared her boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the American photographer Susan Meiselas has questioned the motivation behind her pictures and their relevance to the wider world. She has been a member of the international co-operative Magnum Photos since 1976, but her work has developed far beyond the role of a photojournalist. She spent the end of the 1970s and most of the 1980s in Central and South America on the front line of the people's revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, documenting the "dirty war" in Argentina, human rights abuses in Columbia and the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile. During that time, and since, working with her own photographs and with other people's, she has expanded her role to that of curator, film-maker, teacher, historian and archivist.

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Double Exposure: William Eggleston and Enrique Metinides

Buckle up for some curious photo road trips

By Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

'Life is in color, but black-and-white is more realistic," director Samuel Fuller once said. Two exhibitions—a retrospective devoted to the sumptuously hued visions of a decadent Southern gentleman, and a show of vintage black-and-white prints, south-of-the border tabloid fodder by a man of the people—suggest he was only partially right.

Both artists were given Brownie cameras as 10-year-old boys. But William Eggleston deferred picture-taking until after he'd left the family plantation, when in college and later, as a restless young man-about-Memphis in the 1960s, he began honing a color aesthetic that was part Cartier-Bresson, part visitor from another planet.

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Photograph of Jesus