I’m not sure why there came to be two significant photo museums in Amsterdam, but it’s apparent that the city can easily sustain the pair. They are quite different physically, though both behind the classic Amsterdam canal-facing house fronts. While FOAM was founded in 2001, Huis Marseille beat it to the street by two years […]
Two hundred prints by the late, more than great Andre Kertesz are displayed as “Mirroring Life” at the fotomuseum of Amsterdam (FOAM). The exhibit appears in coordination with the Jeu de Paume in Paris (the government of France owns Kertesz’s massive estate of negatives and prints). Kertesz was born in Budapest in 1894 and died […]
…an old friend (well, idol of mine) and tireless activist, the photographer Zanele Muholi, whom I wrote about two years ago, in September 2015, when her photos played a small but arresting part in a Pompidou Center exhibit. The current show, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, is full on splendid and all her. […]
Tacky title, for sure. A crowd favorite among European photo fans is the Antwerp FOMU (foto museum) at Waalsekaai 47, 2000 Antwerp. One of its summer exhibits spotlights an archive happily acquired in 1996. Suzi Embo (b. 1936), along with her younger sister Lou, threw herself into photography in her late teens. She had lots […]
I shouldn’t write this in public, but I will anyway. As I get older I get lazier. Let’s just call it an intensified search for efficiency. To my annual sojourn in Paris this late summer season I did take a Fuji X100T — the camera I’ve written about several times in this blog. Yet […]
Paris’s Jeu de Paume – more accurately, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume – has an interesting history. The building is only a century and a half old, dating from the administration of Napoleon III. It was indeed built as a tennis court for the older and more complex game then played […]
In a quartier of Paris that has seen much renovation and new construction in recent decades, Bercy Village stands as a kind of model of what a modern shopping center might offer to build community. There are numerous shaded, terraced restaurants and cafes along the main alleyway, and extensive programs, at least in the summer, of […]
No, I’m not kidding. It is Bond in the Parc these days – in the huge Grande Halle (that is repetitive, I know) of the park. I had never been to the Villette before, and it is more than worth a visit. It is one of the main homes to the performing arts in […]
You know how it is when you see someone’s creative product and you think “Oh, I want to be that guy when I grow up!” Having looked at a LOT of documentary photographs in the past decades, I’ll be doggoned if I know how I’ve missed Louis Stettner, but he’s the guy I want […]
The historian's lens 