As early as the introduction of railroads and the telegraph system, the Western landscape has struggled with the aesthetics of convenience. From commercial interests like strip malls and billboards, to national systems like highways and telephone wires, to individual interventions like graffiti and public sculpture, the definition of “eyesore” is […]
50 years is an aeon in the art world, and a powerful increment of time by which to mark change in contemporary ideas. The book Objects: USA 2020 (The Monacelli Press, 2020) seeks just such a reckoning, by first revisiting and recapping the influential exhibition, Objects: USA, presented in 1969 at […]
The perception of photography as a documental form is based on a simple premise: you cannot photograph something that isn’t there. In his latest project, photographer Stephen Berkman turns this idea on its head by claiming to document what is no longer there … and maybe what never was. On […]
In its broadest sense, a temple is a place devoted to a specific and elevated purpose, one not necessarily limited to the spiritual. Maybe it’s fair to say that what I’ve needed lately are secular temples, houses where I can refocus my capacity for reflection, which has been eroded by […]
Nobody is looking at Niko J. Kallianiotis. Even when people are pictured in his book of color photographs, America in a Trance (Damiani, 2018), they are not the kinds of staged portraits that indicate a relationship between artist and model. Kallianiotis captures Americans going about their lives: walking through the […]
The images presented in Yerevan 1996/1997 (2019, MACK Books) are superimposed over a reproduction of an Armenian school workbook. The book replicates a photographic “sketchbook” made by the artist, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, addressed to her daughter, Julia. As the title suggests, the images capture the environs, architecture, and inhabitants of Yerevan, […]
Author, Harvard professor, and historian Philip J. Deloria describes the era captured in the nearly lost art of his great aunt, Mary Sully, as a “critical moment — sometime in the 1920s, perhaps — when many American Indian people crafted new and different lives for themselves.” Deloria writes this characterization […]
In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, photographic artist Lisa Barnard undertook a quest in pursuit of one of the most sought-after materials in human history. Her resulting book, The Canary and The Hammer, presents a heady combination of images and thoroughly researched essays that carve out a core […]
For anyone like me, who is not naturally attuned to large, metal, abstract, brightly colored public sculpture, it takes some effort to muster enthusiasm for the work of Canadian sculptor Robert Murray. Born in 1936, Murray is a standout among his artist-contemporaries, whose works converse with the Canadian landscape. Luckily, I […]
One version of personal mythology might be: the way in which we misremember information and stories, or the way misremembered stories are passed on to us. Somewhere among the innumerable yoga classes I’ve attended, I picked up a bit of mythology connected to hanumanasana – a pose that in its […]