The Last Days of W.

Stephen Wirtz Gallery is showing Alec Soth’s photo series, “The Last Days of W.“  I wrote the exhibit up for Flavorpill:
As W. heads back to Crawford for good, he leaves behind memories both pathetic and dire — flying size 10s, bungled phrases, and premature Mission Accomplished banners underscore the outrages of Abu Ghraib and Katrina. [...]

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Bringing the War Home

In her unsettling photo collages Martha Rosler combines domestic images with snapshots of war. 60s housewives pull the blinds back on soldiers in trenches while teenagers with cell phones yammer as explosions go off behind them. The New York Times recently published a video slide show of her work.

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Invisible Nation

Salvadoran artist Victor Cartagena’s latest installation, Invisible Nation, fills the walls of Galeria de la Raza with swarms of official Latin American ID photos, many of them passport pictures from the 70s and 80s, thousands of nameless faces that impress with sheer numbers, but also make it seem necessary to look more closely at [...]

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Valentine for San Francisco

Emilie Valentine started photoblogging before anyone even knew what the word “blog” meant. In 1995, she began a weekly online photo journal called “Snap City” in which she captured atmospheric slices of San Francisco on b&w film, developed the prints, usually about 4-6, and published them to the web with snappy captions—a hint of [...]

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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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