Opinion: Photography
Banquet of images
For its 50th anniversary, the Arles festival stages a
generous array of contemporary and historical…
Nature in captivity
Luigi Ghirri’s rigorously composed pictures of plants outside people’s homes exercise a banal…
A confederacy of lunches
Visual culture, Critique / Photography
A text-only book argues that ‘social’ photography is more about self-documentation than aesthetics. By…
Catalogue of things
Visual culture, Critique / Photography
A close relative’s colour slides show a densely layered record of everyday life. Photo Critique by Rick…
From out of the blue
Volume one of Anna Atkins’ beautiful study of British algae, issued in 1843, was the first ever…
Awkward objects
The tradition of the painted still life has been reinvented by contemporary photographers with pictures…
Streets without people
Visual culture, Critique / Photography
Emigre’s Rudy VanderLans explores the clotted terrain of Tokyo’s Shibuya and Shinjuku districts with the…
Hole in the head
An artful book of deliberately torn, anonymous photographs from the Cold War era leaves many questions…
Twisting the alien
Reviews, Visual culture, Critique / Photography
Set to minimalist techno, Arthur Jafa’s APEX is a cycle of images that illuminate the condition of black…
Scenes from an imperfect world
Visual culture, Critique / Photography
Even Don McCullin expressed doubts about his photographs of war and suffering. What is their message…