I think you can trace the degree with which someone will embrace authoritarian thinking by looking at to what extent they will agree with that anyone who has not actually violated the law does not have to worry about dealing with law enforc…
One of the most astonishing aspects of the collaboration between writer Arnold van Bruggen and photographer Rob Hornstra is that the more complex a topic, the sharper the duo manage to bring it into focus, ultimately making their most ambit…
It seems obvious that social media have drastically changed how photographers engage with the internet. In fact, for many people — photographers as much as the rest of the population — social media are the internet: this is where you either…
Art has mostly no power except for the following: it can remind us that at least in theory we have the option to become better people than who we are. By “better people” I don’t mean more productive or more popular or more powerful. Instead…
As someone who has spent a lot of time with photobooks — presenting them online, teaching how to make them, writing about them in a critical fashion, making them myself, over the years the most common question has been: what makes a good ph…
Almost twenty five years ago, a few days after 9/11, I went to a restaurant serving food from Afghanistan. At the time, I still lived in Boston, from which two of the planes had departed that were used in the terrorist attacks. For a while,…
A well known curator once said that the problem with collage was that it’s too easy to make a decent one, while it’s almost impossible to create something great. Whether or not I am misremembering or paraphrasing I am not sure. But collage
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but our world isn’t doing so well. Even as there still is endless denial by fossil-fuel corporations and the politicians they’ve bought climate change has started to wreak havoc. In addition, in many places of…
A few years ago, Karin Wieland wrote a double biography of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, two German women whose career ran in parallel and who made very different choices when faced with the rise of the Nazis. Dietrich ended up che…
Just to get this out of the way: the depressing aspect of Sophie Calle’s Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished is the fact that its least interesting ideas still are vastly better than anything we typically come up with. I. Not we. No doubt,…
One of the biggest misconceptions of so-called street photography is that it can serve as a descriptor of the world (mostly cities) at large. It simply can’t any more (or less) than the rest of photography. What it can do, though, is to ser…
The more I know about photography and the more I have become comfortable making my own photographs, the more I feel the need to experience its interactions with other human activities in which the reality that surrounds us is captured in so…