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Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice, 2 (1980)

The crucial question is, To whom is my work addressed? To put it another way, who do you think you’re talking to? By this I mean quite specifically what audience do you as a critic desire and direct your work towards conceptually? […]

Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice, 1 (1980)

The four key elements of the critical equation are (1) the work, (2) the critic, (3) the vehicle or forum, and (4) the audience. Each of these represents a wide range of options; furthermore, each individual case is in a state of continual change. […]

Bruce Davidson: East 100th Street (1970)

It is little short of scandalous that the Museum of Modern Art has never given a one-man show to a non-white photographer, for there are many at least as talented as some of those photographers the museum has chosen to show over the years. […]

Jill Freedman (1939-2019): A Farewell

Does it strike anyone else but me as strange that historians will go scrabbling around in the leavings of defunct, reticent, privileged amateurs like Alice Austen and Marjorie Content rather than grapple with the significant, published output of a living, breathing photographer who has functioned independently from the beginning and, without family wealth or husband to rely on, found ways of supporting herself and her work outside the academy and the grants system? […]

Robert Frank (1924-2019): A Farewell

If Mr. Frank could not escape our awareness of him as the maker of The Americans, he certainly has refused to rest on that laurel, and doggedly resisted our defining him by it. He’s made any attempt to place him on a pedestal or elevate him to a pantheon as difficult as any major artist I know of, past or present. […]