Sunday Salon index

There are a few fortunate people who know early on what they want to do for the rest of their lives…and actually find a way to do it. One of those felicitous folks is Bruce Davidson. Born in Chicago in 1933, Davidson first picked up a camera at age ten. By 16, he’d won the […]

“Even though it jars some of my sensibilities and reminds me of things that I would rather not be reminded of, it is still a good picture.”; Roy DeCarava is speaking about his photograph of two men dancing in an uptown New York club. “In fact, it is good just because of those things and […]

How well-known is Patrick Demarchelier in the fashion world? The 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada is about a newly-hired assistant to the editor of the most important fashion magazine in the galaxy. On her first day on the job she is asked “Did Demarchelier confirm?” While the assistant blinks in ignorance, a more senior […]

It’s a strange thing to do, when you think about it – using a large format camera to shoot relatively formal portraits of casual strangers in nondescript settings. Yet that’s what Rineke Dijkstra has done for the last decade and a half. And she does it so very well it’s made her an internationally-known portraitist. […]

He was born in a parsonage in Cheshire in 1832 to a very conventional Anglican family. Like his father, after whom he was named, Charles Dodgson would eventually take holy orders in the Anglican Church. It was just one of many career paths Dodgson would follow in the odd course of his life. A proper […]

People who live in northern climates have a different relationship with the landscape. The reality of four very distinct seasons gives the natural world five very different faces: one for each of the four seasons and a fifth for those quiet, interstitial periods that take place between both fall and winter and winter and spring. […]

There is a forlorn and tragic rhythm to the life of Czech photographer František Drtikol. Born in 1883 in a mining town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he rose to become a prominent artist and famed portraiture photographer. He was an influential figure in an era known for its creative vigor. He created […]

William Joseph Eggleston turned 70 on July 27, 2009—less than a week ago. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939. Shortly thereafter his father left to serve as a gunnery officer on a destroyer attached to the Pacific fleet in World War II. Baby William and his mother went to live with her parents, […]

Peter Henry Emerson was a child of privilege. He was born in Cuba in 1856; his mother was a member of British society, his father a wealthy American. His cousin was the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. His youth was divided between Cuba and New England. In 1869, when war broke out between Spain and Cuba, […]

He has led a peripatetic life, which seems almost traditional for a Magnum photographer. Elio Romano Erwitz was born in Paris eighty years ago this week, the only child of Russian émigrés who’d fled the 1917 Revolution a decade earlier. After his birth, the family moved to Milan, where he lived for the next ten […]

I’ve been coming across the name Jason Eskenazi for two or three years now. It’s an easily remembered name. I’ve seen it pop up on the periphery of a conversation about street photography, I’ve heard it mentioned with respect by photographers I trust, I’ve seen the name come up in a few photo blogs and […]

Some lives are so out of the ordinary that they seem to verge on fiction. Adolfo Farsari lived such a life. He was born in the town of Vicenza in 1841, which was then part of the Austrian Empire. In 1859, when he was 22 years old, Vicenza was annexed into the kingdom that would […]

Composition, down at the bone, is about geometry. Lines, shapes, angles, forms. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the landscape work of Italian photographer Franco Fontana. Fontana, born in 1933, didn’t take up photography until 1961 when he was 28 years old. Seven years later, he had his first show. Although he is most […]

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the relationship between reality and photography. There’s been discussion about what constitutes a "photograph." These aren’t new discussions, of course (although given flickr’s NIPSA rules, they are increasingly personal and pertinent). This seems an appropriate time to discuss the work of Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta. Fontcuberta has […]

There are photographers whose work is so influential in scope, in style, and in approach that to attempt to write anything about them is intimidating in the extreme. For me, Robert Frank is one of those photographers. His work not only changed the way modern photography is approached, it changed the way modern photography is […]

Robert Frank is, and always will be, best known for The Americans, a work that’s shaped modern photography. But despite its startling originality, that book didn’t just spring up out of nowhere; it was molded by the circumstances of Frank’s life—by his childhood, by the culture in which he was raised, by his professional training, […]

I am not a particular fan of landscape photography. It doesn’t move me. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve spent a great deal of time in natural places of staggering beauty and I appreciate the allure of the landscape. But for the most part, landscape art doesn’t seem to hold my eye for more than a […]

Masahisa Fukase is part of that strange generation of Japanese artists born before the war and who came to maturity after their nation was defeated and devastated. They are, in a distinctly Japanese way, a lost generation. Fukase was born on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, in 1934 and, it seems, always knew he would be […]

In the late 1950s when director Federico Fellini was writing the screenplay for his classic movie La Dolce Vita he needed a name for a character…a news photographer. He chose the name Paparazzo. Where did he get that name? One etymologist says Fellini claimed it was the nickname of a childhood friend and that paparazzo […]

Imagine Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland filmed through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock. Imagine the story of Cinderella as interpreted by Edgar Allan Poe. If you can imagine that, then perhaps you’ll have some insight into Anna Gaskell’s photography. Gaskell’s work is a fairly personal exploration of the narratives surrounding the literary adventures adolescent girls. These […]