Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:

There Will Be Ink (1)

Our newly renovated neighborhood library, a mashup of late 19th- and early 21st-century architectural styles,offers 40 computer stations and 10 loaner laptops with online access and printing, free wifi, DVDs and CDs. A perfect example of the postmodern library. It even has books. […]

Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon U. (2)

It reassures me to read spontaneous, underivative variations on vintage jeremiads of mine in a major journal of post-secondary education and a prominent mainstream multi-subject website. Perhaps I wasn’t as crazy as people thought when I had the temerity to offer such cautions in the midst of the photo boom of the ’70s and ’80s. […]

Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon U. (1)

Having witnessed this “northward drift” of grades as a teacher in both undergraduate and graduate liberal-arts programs over the past four decades, I can testify that it’s very real. And I’m willing to wager that, if social promotion ever get traced to its origins in higher education, we will learn that it began in college-level studio art programs, and, even more specifically, in college-level photo programs, circa 1965. […]

Robert Heinecken as Black Sheep (2)

One obligation facing any curator engaging with Heinecken’s work for the Museum of Modern Art is to explain to the audience the pervasive influence on the medium of this museum’s Department of Photography as gatekeeper during the period 1965-85, because much of Heinecken’s activity can best be understood as an oppositional response thereto. […]

Robert Heinecken as Black Sheep (1)

I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and Robert Heinecken continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. They knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle. […]