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Guest Post 10: J. Ross Baughman on Leon Golub

When he referred to this painting by Leon Golub, the art critic Robert Hughes wrote, “In the end, there are some tasks that painting can do and photography cannot. No camera is allowed in the basements of power that Golub has made peculiarly his own.” Perhaps he might have asked the artist for more background. […]

The Photographer and the Painting (1)

If it’s acceptable (or not) for painters to work from photographs, and to replicate closely or paraphrase broadly the iconography of photos, do photographers get to do (or not do) the same with paintings? And, if they do, why do all the complaints about image appropriation seem to come from the photography side of the spectrum? […]

There Will Be Ink (5)

If I were Robert Frank today imagining The Americans ― or Larry Clark working on Tulsa, or W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith on Minamata, or Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor on An American Exodus ― I’d do them as ebooks. Indeed, several of them, specifically Minamata and An American Exodus, strike me as prophecies of the ebook, prototype hypertexts straining at the confines of the printed, bound book. […]

Dog Day Afternoons: Bits & Pieces (5)

Those who reviled me as “misogynistic” in early 2012 for my opposition to such tendencies as cut-rate breast and buttock augmentation will doubtless find further proof of my woman-hating attitude in my celebration of a grass-roots movement known as “The Mom Stays in the Picture,” which arose spontaneously in response to an op-ed piece by Allison Tate at The Huffington Post. […]

There Will Be Ink (4)

I expect the digital component of BookExpo America to expand and the print component thereof to shrink over the coming years. Eventually, I predict, the print-only publishers will huddle in a distant corner, and the digital publishers will rule the floor. For similar reasons, I expect specialized photo-book publishers, and the authors of such works, to move steadily toward ebook format. […]