When I finally returned to photograph the tail waters below the dam, I arrived before sunrise. I looked to the east and realized that the sun was going to come up directly behind me and the dam was going to cast a shadow over the landscape. At first, having most of composition in shadow was […]

The generosity of the medium, as Lee Friedlander would later put it, describes the chaos of the backstage scene and its attending excitement: note the missing bulb over the mirror, the awkwardness of Andy shaking hands while holding both a tape recorder and camera, the shadows of guitars on the wall, the lone hair brush […]

The spectacle we all saw on TV of ruined homes and homeowners, a somber-faced reporter asking someone who lost her home or, in too many cases, a loved one, “how do you feel?”—it was just was too much for me. What kind of answer did they want, those reporters? Peddling tragedy for ratings was repulsive […]

Aaron Siskind’s photographs from the post-Photo League years feel at first crowded with big, familiar names: Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman. But Siskind, who understood that paint is paint and the camera is different, made pictures that remain wholly his own. Never mind the pervasive sense of Abstract Expressionist gesture in […]

The book that evolved from the discovery of these prints, “Eduard et Voulangis,” is one of the finest samples of an artist-in-residence, in this case, the artist’s own residence in Voulangis, just outside of Paris. Steichen would use this time that Greenberg called “a great artist’s most contemplative period” to evaluate, create, and innovate. Steichen […]