Objects in Mirror Appear Closer

Most Americans experience the landscape around them from the comfort of a moving vehicle. Lee Friedlander plays this idea out in his latest photo series, “America by Car,” at Fraenkel Gallery.
In image after image, an American scene is framed by a windshield, a rolled down window, a side view mirror. These modern automobile interiors [...]

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Shadows of the Afternoon

Berlin-born photographer Uta Barth had a show at Tanya Bonakdar in New York late last year.
Barth focuses on interiors that are empty of people but filled with light and shadow. Her images are subtle and minimal: a vase of red poppies in front of a window sill,  the curvy wisp of a lampshade, a [...]

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Man with a Room-Size Camera

San Francisco-based photographer, John Chiara, works with a lumbering camera he built himself that he carts around with him on the back of a flatbed truck. He creates unique prints by exposing directly onto photographic paper placed on the inside back wall of the camera, using his hand over the lens as a dodge [...]

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The Way We Were

Anne Collier takes pop culture objects and images from the 70s and 80s, photographs them and then delivers them in conceptual format, wrapping sentimentality up in deadpan commentary.
Magazines from 30 years ago with their dated production values and period clothes and hairdos. Posters of saccharine sunsets overlaid with equally saccharine poems. Images of [...]

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Other People’s Pictures

Bertien van Manen is a Dutch artist whose work is on display at Yancey Richardson in New York.
The current show features images from her travels across Russia, where she photographed people she befriended in the intimacy of their own home. Her style is an intriguing mix of documentary and personal.
Van Manen has an earlier [...]

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Class Act

Irving Penn’s “The Small Trades” is a series he created for Vogue in the 1950s which documents service people in Paris, New York and London. This collection of images has been acquired by the Getty in its entirety and will be on show in 2009.
Penn is known for his classic portraits of models and [...]

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Images of Flight

I watched Mira Nair’s “The Namesake” the other night. It’s a movie about two generations of an Indian family living between two places, Calcutta and New York. The film shuttles between cities, languages and cultures, and the waiting halls and runways of airports become the metaphor for this double life.
The DVD includes a [...]

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Black Holes

I’ve often wondered if memories were qualitatively different before photography was invented. When a loved one dies we have the crutch of a family snapshot to remind us of details that without the photo might become cloudy.
The online photo magazine, Lens Culture featured the work of Ludmila Steckelberg recently, a Brazilian artist [...]

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