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John Szarkowski: “Photography Until Now” at MoMA (1990)

What we’re offered instead is merely a set of pictures John Szarkowski likes — a comparative bagatelle … Such a misuse of power, prestige and influence is an effective if lamentable indication of why the Modern’s credibility and influence on the medium have waned so dramatically during the last decade of his tenure. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (45)

We can date John Morris’s active involvement in generating the Capa D-Day myth to sometime during the summer or fall of 1954, when, as Executive Editor of Magnum Photos, he wrote the captions for a posthumous Capa portfolio that would appear in the 1955 edition of U.S. Camera Annual. […]

Three Weeks in Bookworm Heaven (2)

Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset and his designer stayed out of Frank’s way, simply following the layout of Frank’s maquette for The Americans, letting the pictures, individually and collectively, speak for themselves. That this edition failed commercially doesn’t really matter; through it Frank’s visionary project made its way into the world, and into cultural consciousness, on its own terms. […]

Three Weeks in Bookworm Heaven (1)

To give just a hint of the collection’s scope, of the key photobooks listed in The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, edited by Andrew Roth, the Teti Collection has 50. That alone makes it a destination resource for researchers. […]

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? […]