Sunday Salon index

During his career William Gedney only had one exhibit of his photography. He only had a single photograph published in a magazine in the U.S. He never worked on assignment. In fact, outside of a few other photographers, a handful of gallery curators, and a small number of grant managers at art councils, Gedney was […]

Bruce Gilden offends me. His photographs offend me. His approach to photography offends me. Even his success as a photographer offends me. I like that about Bruce Gilden. I’m actually glad he’s out there offending me. I think it’s important for the craft and art of photography that photographers like Gilden exist. I’ll come back […]

Nan Goldin once referred to photography as “the diary I let people read.” That sounds somewhat self-consciously artsy, the sort of thing you’d read in the Artist Statement of somebody in their first year of an undergraduate photography program. In Goldin’s case, however, it’s absolutely accurate. This is a woman who has never drawn any […]

p> This is what I know about portrait photographer Katy Grannan: she was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1969. In 1991 she received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, two years later she took an M.A. from Harvard University, and in 1999 she earned an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University. She now lives […]

Lori Grinker was born in Freeport, New York in 1957. She attended the prestigious Parsons School of Design, located in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Grinker intended to be an illustrator. However, she registered for a course in documentary photography taught by fine arts photographer George Tice. As part of that course she was required […]

Great cities radiate life—and life, of course, is always changing, always in flux, always moving forward. Yet great cities are also grounded very firmly in history, in the lives of people long gone. Great cities append the promises of the future to the guarantees of the past. That’s one of the reasons great cities attract […]

Facts in isolation are never enough. John Gutmann was born in Breslau, Germany in 1905. That, in itself, means nothing. Add to that simple fact that Gutmann was the only son of a prosperous Jewish family, and it begins to mean something. Consider that 5% of the population of Breslau was Jewish and that it […]

He may have murdered his father. That statement seems an odd way to start a discussion about one of the most celebrated portrait photographers of his era. Certainly, it’s an issue that rarely gets mentioned in any of the articles written about Philippe Halsman. There’s a very good reason for that: it rarely gets mentioned […]

We all know how to do photography. You take a camera in hand, you find a thing you want to photograph, you point the camera at that thing, you release the shutter. The photographer has a reason for taking that photograph; the photographer decides what is photographed and how it’s photographed. The resulting image is […]

In my morning news-reader today was an article headlined Probing Question: Are Smartphones Changing Photography? The lede is: Although cell phone cameras are a recent innovation, they continue nearly 150 years of tradition that photography should be broadly accessible and an extension of our own experience. I suspect Mishka Henner would agree with that lede […]

For the last quarter of a century photographer Bill Henson has been taking strangely, dystopian photographs of urban industrial landscapes and dark, melancholy semi-candid portraits of alienated, disaffected adolescents and teens. His work has a distinctly cinematic quality. While Henson is fairly well-known in his native Australia and through much of Europe, his work has […]

Todd Hido (pronounced Hie-doe) has a successful commercial career…but we won’t be paying any attention to that. He’s been hired by the N.Y. Times to photograph a well-known acting coach who is also a Scientologist…but you won’t see those shots here. Wired magazine has used him to photograph amateur anti-terror hunter Shannon Rossmiller and to […]

Some photographers have an agenda. They see photography less as a form of expression and more as a tool for bringing public awareness to their cause. Their photography is not intended to please, but to inform…not meant to form an aesthetic, but to form an opinion. One such photographer was Lewis Wickes Hine. Born in […]

We all have them. Irrational beliefs, odd compulsions, unwelcome and intrusive thoughts, strange anxieties, illogical fears. Even the most emotionally healthy of us experience these things. They are ubiquitous and pervade almost every aspect of our lives. As improbably as it sounds, Sarah Hobbs photographs them. It could be said she photographs them obsessively. She […]

Over the last year and a half, in the course of preparing these salon discussions, I’ve done quite a bit of research on a lot of photographers. Not surprisingly, a lot of the same names kept turning up when those photographers discussed their influences. They’re usually well-known names, names most of us would recognize. But […]

Don Hong-Oai was born in 1929 in the city of Guangzhou in the Guangdong Province of China. He is often described as a Chinese artist, but not because of where he was born. He left China at the age of seven, after the sudden death of his parents. As the youngest of 24 siblings and […]

As a child growing up in the Japanese countryside during the early years of what would become the Second World War, Toshihiro Hosoe heard the tales of the yōkai—the strange beings and supernatural creatures who haunt Japanese folklore. What child wouldn’t be enthralled—and, perhaps, a bit frightened—by stories about yuki-onna, the snow woman or the […]

There’s a small chain of islands located north of the Arctic Circle—about midway between Norway and the North Pole—known collectively as Svalbard (“the cold edge”). The islands are pretty much equidistant between Norway, Russia and Greenland—right at the juncture of the Norwegian Sea, the Greenland Sea, the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean. About 60% […]

Los Angeles. Tradition names it the City of Angels. Orson Welles called it “that bright, guilty place.” In modern pop culture it’s known as La La Land. In an earlier era, L.A. was said to be where intellectuals went to ruin themselves. In its long history (it was founded by the Spanish in 1781), the […]

She was born in 1935…perhaps in Romania, perhaps in Paris; there is some uncertainty. Her parents are said to have been in the circus…perhaps as performers, perhaps in some other capacity; there is some uncertainty. She either spend her childhood years in Constanta, Romania or traveling; again, there is some uncertainty. She was apparently a […]