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 […]
Tag Archives: documentary photography
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 […]
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 […]
A photographer in the gritty tradition of New York street, Cheryl Dunn applies her cinematographic chops to Everybody Street (2013), a feast of a documentary on New York street photographers. The featured photographers are just about all film shooters, mostly because they started that way and haven’t seen any reason to change. Bruce Davidson, Joel Meyerowitz, Mary […]
Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) had a long and productive life, which he ultimately left discouraged in one major dimension. He was one of the fellows who joined the British Army because he took a notion to make a living, leaving his reformer mother, his surgeon father, and eleven sibs behind in England. Actually, it wasn’t the […]
Though I am passionate about photography, it does not often move me to tears. I’ve just seen an exhibit that forced me to choke up in front of a couple of its artists. And it could hardly have been more difficult to find. The University of Westminster, by Regent’s Park in London, has mounted a […]
I’ve just finished reading Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography of Dorothea Lange (Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits). It’s a thorough, honest narrative of this difficult life and its astonishing production. And it must have been hard to be honest about this life of choices. It is still the case that a man who chooses his […]
The historian's lens 