ontheimage.com

From Terry Castle at The Paris Review…

I’ve been collecting anonymous photographs for more than two decades now and probably own a thousand or so, in all kind of formats. Nineteenth-century tintypes and cyanotypes, cabinet cards and cartes de visite, turn-of-the-century RPPCs (Real Photo Postcards), disaster pix, police mugshots and Bertillon cards, photo-booth strips, deaccessioned newspaper photos (especially ones with white crop marks), old prom photos, not to mention a recently acquired batch of ratty, Nan Goldin–style, 1970s Polaroids. Should I be in rehab? Lately I’ve managed to put a small part of my collection into serious, made-for-collectors-type albums—the organic kind, that is, with acid-free archival sleeves and glassine pockets. You can get them in the kale and beets section at Whole Foods. But most of my pictures, alas, remain scattered about, secreted away in boxes and drawers and plastic bags, stuck into books, or else just hiding out somewhere in my house. Where, I’m not sure: domestic life becomes ever more Grey Gardens–like. No more vintage photo shows, says spouse Blakey—nor will I be going anywhere near the eBay log-in page—until I unearth all the mute, two-dimensional Missing Persons already lurking somewhere in the downstairs closet.

As addictions go, collecting old photos of obscure provenance may be harmless enough. Indeed, the habit might seem easy to peg as one of the fast-expanding subdivisions of the Great American Nostalgia Industry—along with scrapbooking, rubber-stamping, collecting Pez dispensers or Barbies still mint in their boxes. Now that digital photography has made just about every older image-making process obsolete, even the prints and Polaroids of only ten or twenty years ago have begun to look quaint and vestigial. Collecting them is like dragging out one’s old Joy Division albums. More…

From James Polchin, The Smart Set

The linearity of the well-dressed party walking single file along a balcony, all framed against a shell-pocked building façade, makes for an unusual wedding photograph. By its title, the photograph asks us to notice the group of people walking between the elegant railing and the damaged building, but all I could see were those rough shell markings. When the photo won a World Press Photo award, it was featured in the German magazine Der Spiegel. The editors noted the façade damage was not from neglect, but rather was the residue of a three-week popular uprising in 1956 that overthrew the government before being defeated by Soviet troops. Nearly 20,000 people were killed. The photograph became symbolic more of the 1956 uprising and its repression than of life in 1965 Budapest. After the Der Speigel publication, Fejes was banned from publishing his photographs in Hungary for several years.

“Wedding” comes near the end of a show that chronicles nearly 70 years of Hungarian and European history through the eyes of five leading photographers. While their Hungarian names are a mystery to many of us today — Gyula Halász, Endre Ernö Friedmann, Andor Kohn, Lásló Weisz, Márton Mermelstein — their photographs have become iconic images of the 20th century. Brassaï’s demi-monde of Montmartre and Montparnasse at night. The haunting and shocking war photojournalism of Robert Capa. The intimate moments of quotidian life in André Kertész’s Paris and New York. László Moholy-Nagy’s rich, modernist explorations in Bauhaus aesthetics and photograms. Martin Munkácsi’s innovative and energetic fashion photography.

To Read More…

Photo by Ruth Fremson from The New York Times

From Roberta Smith at The New York Times…

SCIENTISTS have yet to determine what percentage of art-viewing these days is done through the viewfinder of a camera or a cellphone, but clearly the figure is on the rise. That’s why Ruth Fremson, the intrepid photographer for The New York Times who covered the Venice Biennale this summer, returned with so many images of people doing more or less what she was doing: taking pictures of works of art or people looking at works of art. More or less.

Only two of the people in these pictures is using a traditional full-service camera (similar to the ones Ms. Fremson carried with her) and actually holding it to the eye. Everyone else is wielding either a cellphone or a mini-camera and looking at a small screen, which tends to make the framing process much more casual. It is changing the look of photography. More…

From Kimberly Bradley at The New York Times…

The art scene in Berlin can sometimes seem like a big game of musical chairs, as galleries migrate from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of undiscovered spaces, low rents and artist-friendly locals. The latest move, though, is a little different.

The new hub, along Potsdamer Strasse, situated mostly in West Berlin’s Tiergarten district, is actually an old one. Until World War II, around 200 art and antiques dealers were situated in the then-elegant neighborhood, along with a lively night-life scene; after the war, the dealers failed to rematerialize along the street.

In recent years, Berlin’s art world has downshifted. Many small galleries have closed, and the city’s main art fair, Art Forum Berlin, was recently canceled after a 15-year run. The gallery cluster on Potsdamer Strasse, though, takes a new approach; it is almost hidden from the public: the street is lined with cheap clothing shops, Turkish vegetable markets and empty storefronts, while most of the galleries are on upper floors or hidden in back courtyards. More…

From Bryony Quinn at It’s Nice That…

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, with a pretty intense educational backdrop of political science, both studied and taught, casts an interesting, aesthetic angle on the underlying motives behind the literally named series’, shooting from the hip and ontheplane (pictured). Both of these – with their brighter, more perfect light than is standard in the immediate, occasionally voyeuristic, street-style photography he often employs – seem altogether hyperreal. His site is curated really well, though his flickr is well worth a closer look for its proliferation of impossible yet offhand observations. More…