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Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025): A Farewell

Salgado combines what Fred Ritchin calls a “stately lyricism” with an alertness to the drama embedded in the everydayness of hardscrabble subsistence, marginal survival and imminent death. […]

21st-Century Photo Collections (b)

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. […]

21st-Century Photo Collections (a)

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. […]

George Tice (1938-2025): A Farewell

Tice’s pictures sometimes include people, but their visible presence in the flesh is rarely central to his vision, which instead investigates a largely depopulated urban and rural environment, a set of physical structures rather than social interactions. To the extent that he concerns himself with the past and present inhabitants of these locales, he addresses them through what they have built there and the marks they have left behind, not through the activities and behaviors of the present-day citizenry. In that sense, his motive is more archaeological than sociological. […]

Straight Outta Stone Ridge: Small-Town Talk (3)

It’s a sign of the times that, when Trump got elected this fall, we sat down and seriously considered investing in a freezer. Simply contemplating this purchase doesn’t put us on the slippery slope heading downhill toward doomsday prepping. Yet. But it’s a small step in that direction. […]