Monthly Archive for June, 2010

From Lenora Jane Estes at VFDaily…

Walker Evans’s early documentary photographs of poverty in the South during the Great Depression captured the public’s attention—even altering the way many Americans saw their country—and helped define his 46-year career. Yet his little–known works produced in the ensuing decades are equally as innovative. Drawn chiefly from a largely unseen private collection, and curated by the ever–inventive James Crump, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Decade by Decade (on display through September 5), is the first exhibition spanning Evans’s work from every decade, including his years at Fortune magazine in the 1940’s, 50s, and 60s, until his death in 1975. The exhibition also debuts rare photographs from the Victorian House survey series, which Evans began in 1931, as well as prints from a trip to Tahiti the following year. As a coda, the show offers Evans’s very last images, shot in the 70s with the then–new Polaroid SX–70. Quote Evans, “The matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.” More…

From Sue Hubbard at 3quarksdaily.com…

Little could the British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, have imagined, when in 1841 he developed the calotype, an early photographic process using paper coated with silver iodide, where this nascent technology would lead; the ethical and moral questions that photography would raise.  From Fox Talbot’s point of view the camera was about producing ‘natural images’. But more than 150 years later we know that the photographer’s relationship with his subject is more complicated. As Susan Sontag perceptively put it in her seminal book On Photography: “like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much further away. It offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others – allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation.” More…