Sunday Salon index

Still life art has an ancient artistic tradition. Still life paintings have been found on the walls of Egyptian tombs; still life frescoes were uncovered on the walls of Roman villas in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Although the popularity of the still life has waxed and waned over the centuries, it has never become moribund. Because […]

Sometimes it all comes down to a teacher. For Irving Penn—and a myriad other well known photographers—that teacher was Alexey Brodovitch. To understand Penn, it’s necessary to understand something about Brodovitch, who was the head of the Advertising Design Department at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. Brodovitch was a devotee of the Bauhaus approach, […]

I recall the first time I saw a photograph by Anders Petersen. It was an image of a bare-chested young man who appears to be blissfully drunk or stoned in the embrace of an older woman who is laughing uproariously. I had no idea the photo had been taken by “one of the most important […]

The course of British photographer Sarah Pickering’s career seems to have been driven as much by serendipity as by design. Her early work (which included such topics as idealized glamor, women’s body image, and eating disorders) appears to have little in common with her more recent work…studies of police/military training grounds and explosions. Yet there […]

I love Sylvia Plachy. I first became aware of her in the mid-1980s through the Village Voice, the free weekly ‘alternative’ newspaper distributed in New York City. The contents page of the Voice included a single black and white photograph, usually presented without any context…no caption, no connection to the contents listed, no relationship to […]

Traditional architectural photography is documentary. It’s intended to be aesthetically pleasing, of course, but the primary concern is to accurately depict the appearance of a structure. Most architectural photographers come to their craft through their love of architecture. Robert Polidori is different; he’s different in his approach and different in his motivation. He’s different in […]

If you’ve ever taken a nature photograph…budding trees in spring, fallen leaves in the autumn, a bird nesting, a lichen-covered stone…you owe a debt to Eliot Porter. Virtually all modern nature photography is an imitation of (and occasionally an improvement on) the style created and developed by Porter. The photographs you see in this discussion […]

Richard Prince was the first photographer whose work sold for more than a million dollars. It happened in 2005 in New York City at Christie’s auction house. The photo was one of a very limited series of images which all shared the same title: Untitled (Cowboy). The subject of that record-breaking photograph brings to mind […]

America, says British photographer Muzi Quawson, “is like a fictitious place.” By America, of course, she means the United States of America. But that just demonstrates the impact of U.S. popular culture—for good or for ill—on the rest of the globe. It has clearly been profound. There are cowboy bars in Tokyo, there serious blues […]

He was born in 1941 in Wells, Somerset in the Southwest of England, where he was given the unfortunate name of Holroyd Anthony Ray-Jones. His father, an engraver whose work was collected by the British Museum, died when he was only eight months old, after which his mother moved the family to London. At some […]

Los Angeles-based photographer Richard Renaldi is one of those prolific photographers so many Utatans would like to be. He travels widely, he photographs the things that interest him and the resulting prints sell for thousands of dollars in art galleries. Renaldi tends to work on photographic series. My impression is that he is often involved […]

Robin Rhode is a smart-ass. One of those young street-punk kids who wants to take on the Art World and kick it in the cojones. And sometimes he really does it…sometimes he lays one right in the goolies (and I’ll give an example later). Most often, though, he makes art at the same time he […]

Is he a street photographer? Yes. Is he a documentary photographer? Yes. A photojournalist? A travel photographer? A portraitist? A fine arts photographer? Yes, yes, yes and most certainly yes. French photographer Marc Riboud isn’t easily categorized, because he’s never specialized in any particular area of photography. There are some recurring themes and stylistic idiosyncrasies […]

There is a long history of social documentary photography in the U.S. Before there was Milt Rogovin, before John Vachon, even before Lewis Hine, there was Jacob Riis. Riis was born in Ribe, Denmark in 1849, the third of fifteen children. Although his father had been a teacher and the editor of the Ribe newspaper, […]

Milton Rogovin never intended to be a photographer, let alone one of the most renowned social documentary photographers in the U.S. He was an immigrant’s son who felt privileged to go to college and lucky to obtain a degree that would allow him to enter the professional classes rather than the merchant or worker classes. […]

Embrace the Blur. That could be Tuscon photographer Ken Rosenthal’s motto. Where most of us generally try to reduce blurring, Rosenthal relies on it. His blur, however, is an expressive blur. It’s a blur that serves a purpose. Several purposes. Rosenthal earned a BA in still photography at the University of Southern California and a […]

Henryk Ross was born in Warsaw in 1910. Up to a point, he lived a relatively normal life. He went to school, graduated, took a job, got married. He was lucky in many ways; he worked at a job he enjoyed (a sports and general news photographer) in a city he loved. Under normal circumstances, […]

Judith Joy Ross is a fine arts portrait photographer. Throughout her career, she has focused her 8×10 view camera on both common people in common places (a swimming hole in rural PA, visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, troops getting ready to ship off to war) and on the policy-makers whose decisions […]

The photograph above was my introduction to Pentti Sammallahti. I was altogether charmed by it. In some ways, it’s not at all representative of Sammallahti’s work; it’s clearly manipulated in post processing and it features an amphibian. In other ways, however, it’s a classic example of his photography. It shows the stark landscape of Northern […]

At some point around 1910 portrait photographer August Sander began to undertake an incredibly bold project—a project of almost unimaginable scale. He’d decided to create a portrait series that would document the entire scope of contemporary German society. The portraits weren’t to be portraits of individuals, but rather portraits of societal archetypes. He wasn’t interested […]