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New Japanese Photography (1974)

Much as I might wish it were otherwise, in considering the Museum of Modern Art’s latest photography exhibit and catalogue New Japanese Photography it proves impossible to discuss the photographs themselves without simultaneously analyzing the show and book. […]

The Curious Case of the Arbus Casebook (2)

I think it likely that those who buy this “enhanced” version of these texts will be lookers, not readers, more engaged with the book’s visual, sensual appeal than intrigued by and ready to become absorbed in the polyvocal discourse it contains. […]

The Curious Case of the Arbus Casebook (1)

I can think of no other postmodern-era project that has at once paid such homage to Walter Benjamin while at the same time so thoroughly refuting him — by making a convincing argument that even digitally rendered, mechanically generated facsimiles of mass-produced artifacts can effectively contain and transmit the experience he called “aura.” […]

Diane Arbus: MoMA Retrospective, Redux (1972)

A photographic image is a transformation of reality; when selected with consciousness and an intention beyond the recording of surface, it is inevitably a remaking of an event into the photographer’s own image, and thus an assumption of godhead. […]

Peter Bunnell (1937-2021): A Farewell

“I was snookered into photography to begin with — captured by certain aspects of the medium — and it’s simply been a matter of deciding what I could do within that context. The whole reason I’m in this curatorship is Beaumont [Newhall].” […]