The Photographer, The Entrepreneur, The Stockbroker And Their Rent-A-Mob

by Jeremy Nicholl @ The Russian Photos Blog

A few years ago somebody played a cruel joke on Flickr’s DeleteMe group, where a photo is posted and self-appointed critics decide whether to keep or trash the image. A picture of a cyclist was posted and condemnation was quick. “Soft”, “grey”, “blurry” were among the criticisms as the judges decided the picture was, well, a bit crap. Then it was revealed that the photographer was Henri Cartier-Bresson.


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CHARLES TRAUB with Phong Bui

by Phong Bui @ The Brooklyn Rail

On the occasion of his exhibit Object of My Creation: Photographs 1967 – 1990 (February 17 – April 23, 2011 at Gitterman Gallery) the photographer Charles Traub welcomed Rail publisher Phong Bui at the MFA Program in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where Traub has been Chair since 1987, to discuss his life and work before an audience of graduate students.


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Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

By Brian Dillon @ The Guardian

On Monday 25 February 1980, at the invitation of the future French culture minister Jack Lang, Roland Barthes attended a lunch hosted by François Mitterrand. As he rallied support for his presidential campaign of the following year, the leader of the Socialist party was in the habit of entertaining Parisian writers and intellectuals at relatively informal gatherings; political cajolery aside, it was said that Mitterrand simply liked to be apprised of new ideas in art and culture. Barthes, however, had wavered before giving in to yet another interruption of his working routine. It may well have been exasperation or boredom (for he was often bored) that made him decide, when the lunch concluded, to clear his head and walk home alone to his apartment on the rue Servandoni.

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Ed Ruscha's revolutionary moment in street photography

By Christopher Knigh @ Los Angeles Times

You don't hear much about street photography anymore. There are lots of reasons why. One, hitherto unacknowledged, is that artist Ed Ruscha's extraordinary photo books turned the genre upside down in the 1960s. It hasn't been the same since.

In the '60s, street photography's art world stature was peaking. We'll get to Ruscha's brilliant reinvention in a moment, but first it's worth mentioning "Streetwise: Masters of '60s Photography," a quiet, sometimes absorbing show currently at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts. It examines street photography's old ideal — a personal style of documentary camera-work that crystallized in the wake of "The Americans," Robert Frank's landmark 1958 book.

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Images from the secret STASI archives

by Simon Menner @ Conscientious

I am very much interested in images that can be decoded on several layers with different results. For instance I took a series of pictures of objects that have been used in real murder cases to kill people. So a knife in this series can be seen simply as a knife or as something that goes far beyond. Both seems to be true. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to approach both layers simultaneously.

The question that fascinates me here is one about the way our perception works. Images show us something but we keep altering this “something” all the time. This entirely happens in the mind. Then how can we then ever fully trust images? Photography is my medium of choice for working on this topic since it still seems to be the most trustworthy.

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The Lost Eggleston Review

by Doug Harvey

This is the piece the WEEKLY didn't want - thought I should get it out there before the exhibit closes this weekend:

The Egg Shall Rise Again!
William Eggleston and resurgence of the here-and-now

It’s hard to imagine, but William Eggleston’s art was considered quite revolutionary in its time. Of course that probably says more about the times – the 1970’s – and his chosen medium – photography – than it does about William Eggleston – or “Egg” as his good friends call him. In many ways, photography was the seed of much of the tumult that encompassed the world in the 60s – certainly it’s emergence in the mid-19th century sent representational painting into a tailspin from which it can never hope to recover.


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