Sunday Salon index

Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins takes photographs of anonymous places that hold no particular meaning to the viewer. Airport runways, vacant beaches, highway road barriers—locations and sites with which we’re all familiar, but which are largely barren of any personal connection. He then emphasizes the absence of emotional content by photographing those locations in ways that […]

Harold Evans, editor of UK’s The Sunday Times, recounts an incident that took place during a routine firefight in some nondescript zone of conflict in some obscure corner of the globe. People were screaming, gunfire was rattling, everybody was running and ducking for cover…and Don McCullin stopped long enough to take an exposure reading. Afterwards […]

Every few years the world of art photography discovers a new golden child. From 2000 to 2005 the golden child was Ryan McGinley. He was young, he was gay, he was a skateboard thasher, and he had moderately attractive friends who got high and were willing to pose nude. All that gave him street cred, […]

Given the oddity of his most famous photographs, there’s a strange poetry in the fact that Ralph Meatyard was born in a town called Normal, Illinois. Given the critical and artistic acclaim of his work, there’s irony in the fact that Meatyard was a weekend photographer who earned his living as an optician. Given the […]

When he was eleven years old Andrew Miksys went with his parents to a bingo parlor, where a special session for children was being held. He won US$300. “Overnight, bingo entered my life as this magical game that brought me treasure and the envy of all my friends,” he says. Bingo was, in effect, the […]

She was born in the spring of 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents named her Elizabeth Miller, though she went through life using her nickname ‘Lee.’ Her career…in fact, her entire life…can only be described as remarkable. And it all began by accident. When Lee Miller was 19 years old and visiting New York […]

Some people dismiss architectural photography by asking the question Who is responsible for the beauty of the photograph—the photographer or the architect? It’s a legitimate question. The architect, after all, designed the structure in such a way that it was intriguing to the eye. If not for the architect, there’d be nothing to photograph—so surely […]

It sounds as if Richard Misrach always had a camera in his hand. At the age of twelve his parents put him in charge of photographing the family vacations…but he was never serious about it. Then in high school he took a photography course and did well…but he wasn’t really serious about it. In college […]

Sarah Moon is usually referred to as an "impressionist" photographer. Her work is noted for a sort of softness, a vagueness that’s suggestive of the impressionist painters. Moon comes by this style naturally—she is extremely near-sighted. "It was only when I started photography that I became aware of it," Moon told an interviewer. "People would […]

I’m not going to be entirely fair to photographer Andrew Moore. Moore is a well-respected fine arts photographer whose work centers around the intersection of history and culture as manifested through architecture. He’s spent most of the last decade and a half creating brilliant images in such varied locations as Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Bosnia and […]

There is unexpected subtlety in Abelardo Morell’s Camera Obscura series. The very first impression is disorienting. The eye seeks something familiar to which the mind can anchor itself. It takes a moment to realize that what we’re looking at is the exterior world projected upside down on an interior setting. Morell sometimes exaggerates that initial […]

In 1945, detective novelist Raymond Chandler wrote an essay about the “new detective story.” The stories were new because they introduced a new type of protagonist: the hard-boiled detective. In part, Chandler wrote: “…down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…. He must be […]

If the 1960s could be said to have a birthplace, it would have to be London. Probably Carnaby Street. Or maybe the opening of the boutiques on King’s Road. But definitely London. Everything changed. Music, fashion, theater, literature, politics. Entire world views shifted radically. And right in the middle of it all was Lewis Morley, […]

He has been called “the hottest war photographer on the contemporary scene.” He has been accused of “war porn.” He has been the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary film. He has won the the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, the World Press Photo award (twice), the Leica Award (twice), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award […]

This is not the Salon I’d intended for today. My intention was to examine the work of one of the old masters…but I’m going to put that off for a week. Why? Because as I was doing the research for that Salon I accidentally came across a photograph by a modern photographer, Jon Naiman, whose […]

We are the music-makers, We are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams— A few years ago I saw the photograph below. I don’t recall now where I saw it, and there was no attribution given. I had no idea who took it or under what circumstances. I assumed […]

In 1919, Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan led a coalition of tribes in revolt against the British, who’d ruled his nation since 1839. After the British agreed to withdraw their forces, Amanullah ordered the construction of a Victory Arch in Kabul Province to commemorate Afghanistan’s newly-won independence. The arch was designed the Greek style—a style which […]

How does one measure a successful life? Is the proper metric a rewarding career? A loving relationship? Contentment with the choices one has made? More joy than regrets? What if you lived a long, fulfilling life doing important and interesting work, a life replete with friendship and love, a life lived on your own terms—what […]

Luis González Palma is best known for his strange, quiet portraits of the Mayan and mestizo women in his native Guatemala. There is a contradictory quality to many of these portraits. The subjects are women who belong to cultures that have been marginalized, yet the photographs have a distinctly European…almost a Victorian…appearance. Even when dressed […]

There is something mythic and heroic about the photographs of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. You can imagine discovering them stored away in some musty archive hidden among the overgrown brambles of the decaying ruin of an ancient city. The images appear to tell the story of an anonymous, black-suited civil servant who was given the […]