Sunday Salon index

Over the last year I’d come across the name Wolfgang Tillmans a number of times. “One of the most important and distinctive artists to emerge in the 1990s.” “Fashion and magazine photographer.” “Installation artist.” “A documenter of youth.” “Among the most celebrated of contemporary photographers.” “Turner Prize Winner.” “Gay photographer.” “Snapshot portraitist.” “Architectural photographer.” "Punk […]

Alexey Titarenko was born in 1962 in the coastal city of Leningrad in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Photography occupied a strange position in the Soviet Union. Marxist theory holds that capitalist societies are arranged so that the world of art and art appreciation largely excludes the working classes. The socialist State, therefore, deliberately […]

Sometimes the accident of birth shapes the course of one’s life. It’s true for Shomei Tomatsu. He was born and raised in the industrial city of Nagoya, Japan in 1930. The fact that Nagoya was an industrial center became important 15 years later when U.S. B-29 bombers began to firebomb the cities of Japan. Forty […]

Arthur Tress was born in 1940 and grew up in a strange time in the United States…the period between the Second World War and what was called the ‘police action’ in Vietnam. Post-war America took a determined grip on ‘normalcy’ and refused to let go. It was a difficult time for people who didn’t easily […]

In 1979 Joseph Tseng was an unemployed 29 year old artist living with his sister in New York City. On a visit to the city, his parents invited Tseng and his sister to dinner at an upscale tourist-oriented restaurant. The restaurant had a ‘suit and tie’ policy for men; Tseng, unfortunately, only owned one suit […]

A week ago, on 6 May 2007, approximately eighteen thousand men and women of various ages showed up in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s principal square, just before dawn. At a signal, they took off all their clothes. Another signal, they all saluted. Another signal, they all curled up in a fetal position. On a nearby […]

In 1935, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government tried an experiment. It created the Resettlement Administration, which was intended to relocate poor urban and rural families into planned communities, called ‘green towns.’ The program also hired a few photographers to document the resettlement and the living conditions of the poor. A year later the […]

Playful. We don’t hear that word often enough in connection to photography. But it’s summertime (at least in the northern hemisphere) and that means it’s time to relax and play. German photographer Jan von Holleben’s most recent series "Dreams of Flying" is unabashedly playful. After a period of apprenticeship in his native Germany, von Holleben […]

In the middle of the 17th century the Dutch Republic gained its independence from Spain. The Dutch quickly became a major seafaring and economic power, the first thoroughly capitalist country in the world, and one of the most innovative centers of culture. A new European social phenomenon emerged: the middle-class elite. It was no longer […]

I’m often amazed at how large some lives are. The life of Roman Vishniac was large enough for three or four people. Yet, outside a fairly small circle of scientists, historians, and scholars specializing in Jewish history, the name of Roman Vishniac is largely unknown. He was born in 1897 in the dacha of his […]

Jeff Wall is best known for his large scale directorial photographs. Large scale directorial photographs…what the hell does that mean? It means Jeff Wall uses an 8×10 view camera to take staged pictures of events that could be real and then displays those pictures at sizes that are really really BIG. I’ll come back to […]

As he wandered around the San Lázaro Psychiatric Hospital taking photographs, Hiroshi Watanabe was followed by a woman patient. She nattered on about a toothache and he apparently didn’t pay much attention to her. When he was leaving, she asked him “Do you see the angels? Have you seen the angels?” And then she said […]

Imagine taking a fairly common idea and doing it so well that nobody ever expects…or allows…you to have another. Everybody who has both a camera and a dog has eventually turned the former on the latter. How could they not? Dogs are inherently photographable. But when conceptual artist William Wegman first turned his camera on […]

He’s best known as a filmmaker, of course. Wings of Desire, The State of Things, and Paris, Texas. Wim Wenders has made more than forty films – mainly feature films and documentaries. He’s won international cinema awards by the truckload. Wenders is also a skilled photographer with an idiosyncratic approach and a distinctive point of […]

The work of Joel-Peter Witkin can only be described as photography of the grotesque. Everything about his work is grotesque: the subject matter, the models, the printing process, the final image. It’s a perfect storm of grotesquery. Witkin began to gain a strange sort of prominence in the photographic art world in the mid-1970s with […]

Francesca Woodman was born in April of 1958 in Denver, Colorado. Her parents were artists; her mother Betty was an accomplished ceramicist and art teacher, her father George, a painter and photographer. The family owned a summer house near Florence, Italy and the Woodmans spent their summers there. Francesca attended both public schools and the […]

We rarely acknowledge the role luck plays in an artist’s career. We’re all aware of it, of course, but we generally like to pretend it all comes down to talent (or, for those artists whose work we dislike, a venal agent and a lot of hype). But the fact is, a large dollop of good […]

Who can say where it all began? Perhaps with the Gibson Girl, often called the ‘ideal’ woman of the 1900s. Or maybe it was Paul Chabas’ famous 1912 painting September Morn, which was used on calendars and window displays and to advertise everything from cigars to candy. Or maybe it can be traced even farther […]

I know almost nothing about Zhou Hai, this week’s Sunday Salon photographer. I know he was born in1970 in the city of Guilin, which is located in the Guangxi region of China…a region known for its natural beauty. I know he attended Guangxi University and graduated in 1992 with a degree in Radio Engineering. And […]

Unlike Paris or New York City or Prague, the city of Los Angeles has long had a reputation among photographers for being notoriously difficult to photograph. That seems to stem from the fact that LA exists as much in myth as in reality. It lacks a single identity. LA is the city of Raymond Chandler […]