L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child,” Norman Mailer infamously remarked in 1971, less than one year before Arbus died and over nine years after she snapped a photo of a scrawny blond boy who actually did have grenade in hand.[…..]
Last Friday, May 13th, at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, five Magnum photographers and one writer gathered to kick off their road trip christened, Postcards from America. Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky & Ginger Strand will spend the next two weeks living together on a bus named “Uncle Jackson,” traveling from San Antonio, Texas to Oakland, California. Postcards[…..]
Today’s article is from our friends at Art Practical, where Bean Gilsdorf discusses History’s Shadow, an exhibition by the artist David Maisel currently on view at Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Walking into David Maisel’s exhibition History’s Shadow, at Haines Gallery, the viewer might not recognize the work as X-ray portraits of antiquities. Surprisingly, the textures, tones and effects created by this process are more[…..]
As Susan Sontag observed, “the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads”. Pure Satire by Maleonn at the 2902 Gallery in Singapore encapsulates this visual aesthetic, creating an open set of performative statements within a symbol-laden, dreamlike universe that amalgamates historical and contemporary trends, wherein protagonists are children with[…..]
“It is so very hard to become a man. . .Everything threatens to beat us down, to strip us of our biological birthright, to destroy us simply for asserting our essential, metaphysical manliness.” – Roger D. Hodge, Onan the Magnificent: The Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art (2000) Today, Matthew Barney will receive the prestigious Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award during the San[…..]
In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as mere “rules and regulations” in her rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In one unruly, titillating performance, Smith flipped the good ol’ boys’ fraternity of rock and roll on its ear by lampooning the muffled sexism of[…..]
Vernacular photography tells us our story. It shows us who we are and who we want to be. Open any photo album, and you’re confronted with cultural clichés played out to illustrate an ideal of family, success, happiness. No surprise these are the moments we choose to memorialize. These amateur-ish snapshots create an archive of moments of imagined joy; they stop time at the instances[…..]
