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Three Weeks in Bookworm Heaven (3)

The Waters of Our Time’s imitation of its source positions it as a wannabe companion piece, an aspiring equal, intended to stand beside The Sweet Flypaper of Life and get compared to it. Arrogant, to say the least, and an unwise wager to boot, because it simply doesn’t resonate (for me, in any case) in the way that the DeCarava-Hughes classic did and still does. […]

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? […]

Robert Frank (1924-2019): A Farewell

If Mr. Frank could not escape our awareness of him as the maker of The Americans, he certainly has refused to rest on that laurel, and doggedly resisted our defining him by it. He’s made any attempt to place him on a pedestal or elevate him to a pantheon as difficult as any major artist I know of, past or present. […]