Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

Minor White: “Octave of Prayer” (2)

In other words, boys and girls, that ain’t Aperture you’re holding, it’s a copy of The Watchtower, intended to make converts willing to follow a man who can simultaneously assert his own “natural talent for camera” and lack of egotism, who can claim, in so many words, that he and his followers are God’s gift to photography. […]

Minor White: “Octave of Prayer” (1)

I believe that Minor White’s group show and catalog “Octave of Prayer” is an insidious insult to all photographers, not only to those whose work is included therein but also to anyone trying to sculpt an idea in silver. […]

Photorealism at 50

That a capitalistic impulse is at the core of this object-fetishism should by now be clear. Photo-Realism is emblematic of the jealously-guarded power of “serious artists” to convert a financially valueless image into a financially valuable object. […]

Cindy Sherman at MoMA, 1997

[Toward the tail end of my decade as the photography critic for the New York Observer I had the opportunity to review the Museum of Modern Art’s celebration of Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series, a complete set of which they had recently acquired and were showing for the first time, in an exhibition sponsored […]

New Documents, Revisited (b)

Collectively, Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand revised the ways in which photographers used their cameras, which changed the look of the resulting photographs, and that they made the photographer’s participatory role in the photographic event a foregrounded given, which transformed both the behavior of photographers and the way we interpret their work. […]