This post is part two of an essay on Paul Seawright’s Invisible Cities project. You can read part one here. Invisible Cities clearly must be considered as part of a tradition of documentary photography and as such it raises a number of interesting questions that I will now turn to. The first of these is [...]
Archive for the ‘Photography Criticism’ Category
Exception to the Norm: Representations of Urban Africa in Paul Seawright’s “Invisible Cities” (Part Two)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged Africa, documentary, martha rosler, ncad, paul seawright, photography, sebastiao salgado, stereotyping, urban african photography, visual culture on March 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Exception to the Norm: Representations of Urban Africa in Paul Seawright’s “Invisible Cities” (Part One)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged Africa, art, documentary, guy tillim, invisible cities, ncad, paul seawright, photography, Photography Criticism, urban african photography on March 8, 2010 | 1 Comment »
This post is something of a departure from the usual business on this blog. It is an essay I wrote on Paul Seawright, focusing in particular on his Invisible Cities work. This work comprises of photographs taken over a three-year period in sub-Saharan African cities. In many senses the work goes against the grain of [...]
Playing In The Fields Of The Image – Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1982)
Posted in Photography Criticism, Photography Theory, tagged abigail solomon-godeau, art, john szarkowski, Maartje van den Heuvel, modernism, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, post-modernism, richard prince, vikky alexander, visual culture on February 25, 2010 | 3 Comments »
This essay appears in Solomon-Godeau’s Photography At The Dock collection. It deals with a number of post-modern photographic artists, explaining their work, and situating it in opposition to the established canon of modernist art photography. It is deeply critical of many of the fundamental assumptions of modernist photography that would have been elaborated in the [...]
Introduction To The Photographers Eye – John Szarkowski (1966)
Posted in Photography Criticism, Photography Theory, tagged art, elliot erwitt, jeff wall, john szarkowski, modernism, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, realism, the photographer's eye, visual culture on February 21, 2010 | 6 Comments »
John Szarkowski’s book The Photographers Eye was based on an exhibition of the same name held at the Musuem Of Modern Art in New Work in 1964. It featured the work of Friedlander, Evans, Strand and many others, and attempted to give an overview of the fundamental challenges and opportunities of the photographic medium. In [...]
Photographs of Agony – John Berger (1972)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged david levi-strauss, documentary, john berger, luc delahaye, photographs of agony, photography, sebastiao salgado, war photography on January 2, 2010 | 5 Comments »
In this essay from 1972 John Berger questions the effectiveness of graphic war photography and in doing so anticipates many of the debates about documentary that were soon to come. It was originally published in New Society magazine and subsequently reproduced in the 1980 collection, About Looking. Writing during the closing phases of the Vietnam [...]
Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before -Michael Fried (2009)
Posted in Photography Criticism, Photography Theory, tagged art, jeff wall, michael fried, modernism, ncad, objecthood, photography, theatricality, visual culture on December 29, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I became interested in Michael Fried’s recent tome of photographic art criticism after reading an interview with him in Aperture magazine. I thought it would serve as good overview of the work of a whole assortment of contemporary photographers. It certainly did that – and much more besides. In 1967 Michael Fried published a controversial [...]
The Documentary Debate : Aesthetic or Anaesthetic – David Levi-Strauss (1992)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged art, david levi-strauss, documentary, martha rosler, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, visual culture on December 6, 2009 | 2 Comments »
In this article Levi-Strauss writes about the relationship between aesthetics and politics in social documentary photography and essentially mounts a defence of the role of the aesthetic within this genre. He starts by observing that the right in America have always recognised the subversive, and deeply political role, of the aesthetic in art and this [...]
Post-Documentary, Post-Photography – Martha Rosler (2001)
Posted in On Documentary, Photography Criticism, tagged documentary, martha rosler, ncad, photography, Photography Criticism, visual culture on November 29, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Martha Rosler is a visual artist whose writings on photography theory have been widely influential over the last two decades. In this essay, her concern is with how documentary photography can continue to function in the postmoden world. The traditional practice of social documentary photography as a means of helping underprivileged, dispossessed or marginalised groups [...]
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