“Memorials are the way people make promises to the future about the past.” Alice Greenwald, director of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, reminds us that a memorial is as much how we describe who we are now as it is about a prior event. The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to look back at a particular moment of disaster, injustice, upheaval, and[…..]

Mark Steinmetz’s current exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art has narrative ambition, but also asks difficult questions about the meaning of “straight photography” and its relationship to the documentary tradition. In what sense are documentary photographs social records, deadpan descriptions, or allegorical explications of the artist’s worldview? Are they a series of facile maneuvers, or as critic Garry Badger once claimed, “an existential[…..]