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 […]
Tag Archives: exhibit
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 […]
…Zanele Muholi, whose photographic portraits from her recent project “Faces and Phases,” have been traveling the world for the past few years. Here is a poster from her Amsterdam book exhibit: That is not a photograph of Muholi, but one of over a hundred portraits she took between 2006 and last year, of black lesbians […]
Christina Broom’s story is a bit different from Shirley Baker’s, the British photographer I wrote about recently. Born several generations earlier, Broom (1862-1939) became a photographer from financial necessity when her ironmonger husband sustained a cricket injury that put him out of work. Of course, it is anybody’s guess what makes a gal choose a […]
What a joy to be introduced to the work of this documentary photographer, unable apparently to thrive in the journalism career she’d longed for because of her SEX, yet producing some of the loveliest, most direct, and most communicative street photography on the planet. Like European and American women photographers in her cohort (think Gertrude […]
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 […]
The Photographers’ Gallery in London, at 16 Ramillies Street, just a side alley off Oxford Street, is a destination vacation for photo fans and historians. Three active floors of exhibits in bright clean spaces, a bookstore with lots of film (and I do mean photographic film), and a pretty decent cafe on the main […]
The historian's lens 