This is when I love photography; when the medium born to tell a story, doesn’t. No other art form is capable of producing this kind of exchange—giving an expectation of an exact record, only to strip that preconception away, leaving form in its place. In 2012, I saw an exhibition of platinum/palladium prints by master […]

Instead, sending my eyes closer into the grip of the perceptual moment is what I’m after… Stuart Shils, The Residue of Giotto After Imaginary Battles, Acrylic on Archival Digital Photograph, 2014, 6×6″. Image courtesy the artist. What really matters most to me is filling my eyes with joy when riding my bicycle around Philadelphia (the […]

The more I understand the backstory of what I’m looking at, the more I know what’s significant and how to use visual language… This is the fourth installment in a Tilted Arc ongoing feature, Women in the Landscape—conversations between women photographers whose work focuses on the land. This conversation is with Karen Halverson, an artist […]

The exhibition is a stunner, mostly because it’s DeFeo’s unremitting investigatory impulse and deft handling of (sometimes-) antagonistic media — rather than the handful of forms and objects that became both cast and crew in her work — that’s really the subject here. Jay DeFeo, “Untitled (White Spica),” 1973 Gelatin silver print 8 3/4 x […]

“…a space opened up behind that paper, a space—who knows how wide—between the paper and the wall, inaccessible but hinted at by the tear. It occurred to me that this photograph was…” Frederick Sommer, “Max Ernst, 1946.” 1946. Gelatin silver print. © Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation. Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art, […]

I’m definitely conscious of this kind of rhythm, and am always preoccupied with ensuring that a sort of lyrical quality permeates both my imagery and its eventual arrangement. When I’m making photographs or capturing video, I’m certainly aware of the general aesthetic sensibility that tends to drive my response, but I guess my process at […]

The indexical relationship inherent in the medium, the relationship between the thing in the world photographed and the representation of that thing, opens endless questions about how we understand our relationship to our surroundings. The ability to express the very concept of paradox is one reason I love the photographic medium. This is the second […]

After a while it became very obvious that not only was there a great deal of potential there for drawing, there was a great deal of potential there for painting. And that’s really the simple way in which the work I have been doing in drawing and painting for the last 8 years was generated. […]

I wait and watch for a scene to develop and hopefully capture a slice of life, or a moment which stops time and presents a question or mystery. How does a young girl know the posture for a violent act? Does it happen only in Havana—or is it possible in any American city? Who does […]

I was printing pictures of–or by–musicians almost everyday, the lab was a comfortable place to be, the darkroom quiet, and we kept the conversation to the images. I wanted to ask him so many questions, all the time, but kept it to a very minimum. That time, in my darkroom with Lou Reed, was about […]