A Sigmar Polke Retrospective Opens at MoMA. Get confused is the first and last message of “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010” at the Museum of Modern Art. And if you think, as I do, that some degree of continuing bafflement is a healthy reaction to art, this disorienting contact high of a show is for you. Polke, who […]
There is good deal of irony in the manner in which Vancouver’s Jeff Wall presents his photograph “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000)—printed on a transparency and mounted on a light box. “The large-scale image is illuminated from behind by fluorescent lights, which Wall began using after seeing light-box advertisements in the late 1970s,” according […]
This photographer once dismissed as a shallow sensation-seeker of the 80s is getting the recognition he deserves with a show at the Grand Palais, Paris’s high temple of art – and it’s all down to Smith. The Grand Palais in Paris is one of Europe’s most serious exhibition spaces. It is where France honours its great artists. […]
Photographer Nan Goldin burst on to the art scene in 1986 with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, hugely influential images that chronicled the druggy New York demi-monde she and her friends inhabited. Now 60, her latest work is all about children. So has the queen of hardcore photography finally mellowed?
Disposable and deteriorated, the developer trays used by photographers are usually discarded. Brooklyn-based photographer and printer John Cyr has discovered the beauty in these battered trays, where so many images first appeared.
What’s the connection between a looped high-def video of a carving knife, a row of tall, narrow convex black mirrors, and a hundred-foot-long scroll swarming with shimmering iridescent colors? They are all photographs according to no less an authority than the International Center of Photography (ICP), where they are featured in the exhibition “What Is a Photograph?” on view […]
British adventure photographer Lucinda Grange has travelled the world, scaling famous buildings and structures and taking pictures from the top. Among her impressive list of climbs is the Great Pyramid of Giza, Firth of Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland and the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.
The dirty alchemy of photographer Roger Ballen in combination with frenetic rap-ravers Die Antwoord resulted in the video for “I Fink U Freeky” in 2012. Now a monograph distills the mix of the South African collaborators to its elements. Roger Ballen / Die Antwoord: I Fink You Freeky, published by Prestel in the fall, cuts […]
‘A World of Its Own,’ Examining Photography, at MoMA. Something old, something new, nothing borrowed and not enough color. A variation on the venerable bridal dress code pretty much sums up the Museum of Modern Art’s latest foray into its photography collection, “A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio.” In turn, the title of […]
With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography At first glance, viewers of “What Is a Photograph?” opening on Jan. 31 at the International Center of Photography, will not even recognize the work on the wall as photographic. There is no easily identifiable subject, no clear representational form. “The show does not answer the question,” said […]
Carrie Mae Weems Charts the Black Experience in Photographs Color and class are still the great divides in American culture, and few artists have surveyed them as subtly and incisively as Carrie Mae Weems, whose traveling 30-year retrospective has arrived at the Guggenheim Museum. From its early candid family photographs, through series of pictures that […]
At least two guiding spirits hover around To Leave a Light Impression, the new show by British artist Darren Almond at White Cube, Bermondsey. The most obvious is Charles Darwin, in whose footsteps Almond followed to make several of his images. The other is the lesser-known Scottish nature writer, Nan Shepherd, whose book, The Living Mountain, provides the […]
William Burroughs’s photographs offer real insight into his written work. Lynch’s and Warhol’s images pale by comparison. “A picture just means I know where I was every minute,” Andy Warholonce said. “That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” In this instinct, Warhol was, as always, ahead of the game. One senses that he would […]