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AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: "Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander & Garry Winogrand at Century's End (2000)"
By A. D. Coleman
The "New Documents" exhibition opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 1967, almost exactly a third of a century ago. Organized by John Szarkowski for the museum's Department of Photography, this show featured almost 100 prints by three relatively unrecognized younger photographers from the east coast of the U.S. — Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand — and came as a watershed moment in the evolution of contemporary photography. What exactly did this exhibition signify?
AMERICANSUBURB X: INTERVIEW: "Manufactured Landscapes: An Interview with Ed Burtynsky (2006)"
"Manufactured Landscapes": An Interview with Ed Burtynsky
John K. Grande : What made you decide to start your photo lab, Toronto Image Works?
Ed Burtynsky : When I graduated from Ryerson Polytechnic, there was no access to professional darkrooms in Toronto. After four years of working at home in the basement, I realized how inefficient my production was, and how impossible it became to realize the quality and scale of prints I envisioned. That was the original inspiration for Toronto Image Works. I decided not only to create something that would support my own creative printmaking, but also to open a facility for other artists in the city to use.
J.K.G. : One often hears of an artist dealing with the sacred earth as a subject, and though that is fine, this brand of art can be diminished by its avoidance of world problems caused by production, pollution, toxic earth, global warming. Artists cannot whitewash what is something very real with purist aesthetics, no matter how beautiful, or ritual, or superficially sacred they may be. Your photos touch on that strange duality, for they attract us with beauty.
AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: "Michael Fried on Luc Delahaye"
The photograph, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros. The diners, eleven men, sit facing the viewer--though none looks toward the camera--on the far side of a long table that runs the full width of the picture. (To take this in the viewer must begin his or her engagement with the work by standing ten or twelve feet back from it.) One has the impression that the lunch has not properly begun. For the most part the men are talking quietly with one another, and to the left a chic young woman, possibly a waitress, bends over the table as if serving or taking an order. The image is by far most arresting toward its center, where the elegant, dark-haired and mustached Musharraf is shown talking earnestly to Soros, while a third man, to Soros's left, listens in. And what is arresting is precisely the extraordinary accuracy, as it seems to one, of the depiction of an entire range of small-scale, unemphatic, but nevertheless intensely photogenic gestures, expressions, postures, and pieces of behavior: for example, the small-scale gesture--scarcely more than a tensing of the wrist--of Musharraf's partly open left hand as he makes his point; the downward cast of Soros's head and his inscrutable, almost sullen-seeming facial expression as he plays with something on the tablecloth with his left hand; and the diffident demeanor of the third man who sits with both elbows on the table and his hands clasped.
AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: "Dorothea Lange: The Photographer As Agricultural Sociologist"
Dorothea Lange: The Photographer As Agricultural Sociologist
By Linda Gordon
To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange’s are the most influential. Although many do not know her name, her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility, because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media. If you watch the film The Grapes of Wrath with a collection of her photographs next to you, you will see the influence.1 Lange’s commitment to making her photography speak to matters of injustice was hardly unique—thousands of artists, writers, dancers, and actors were trying to connect with the vibrant grass-roots social movements of the time. They formed a cultural wing of the Popular Front, a politics of liberal-Left unity in support of the New Deal.
AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY - "Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age"
THEORY - "Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age"
Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age
By Martha A. Sandweiss
The brief essays in this round table collectively explore how photographs can be used to understand the past. Their broad mix of voices—from the archivist and the historian, the photographer and the photographic subject—makes it clear that there is no one way to understand an image. Even a quick reading reveals interpretive tensions: the photographers’ intentions clash with the ambitions of the subjects, and both appear at odds with the needs of the viewers, who bring to the image their own experiences and interpretive concerns. Despite their differences, the essays taken together pose two critical questions. What does a historian need to know to interpret a photograph as a historical document? And how stable are images as records of the past?
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