It seems paradoxical to say that gentleness and joy are contained in Beuford Smith’s work, even at its fiercest, but the truth of that is perhaps his greatest accomplishment and the firmest possible foundation for the major body of work he has just begun — and, indeed, can at this stage hardly avoid — creating. […]
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Charles Herrick, who has provided most of the military-related analysis published here as part of the Capa D-Day project, has distilled that material into a new book, Back into Focus: The Real Story of Robert Capa’s D-Day. […] I believe that an increasingly sophisticated audience will begin searching out and paying respect to those collections whose coherent structures organize the medium’s imagery in diverse and meaningful ways. […] Photography collecting as a field is still at such an early stage in its development that in the late ’70s connoisseurship alone was deemed worthy of extensive media attention and considerable corporate/governmental patronage. Wagstaff’s cunning in getting sponsors to cover the promotional costs of a marketing enterprise clearly contrived to net him a small fortune raised no eyebrows I’m aware of, save my own. […] Many contemporary artists appear to believe that photography is a virgin territory without a history, free from relevant precedents and prior accomplishments: a brand new field of ideas which have not even been touched on by the medium’s own practitioners, in which any small step breaks new ground. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |