More on: photography

Ritual Images The Autobiographs of Ira Lippke   IN 1918, a German priest named Martin Gusinde traveled to the islands of Tierra del Fuego off the southern tip of South America. Commissioned by Chile’s Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology to study the region’s indigenous tribes, Gusinde made four expeditions over a period of six years to…

The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…

Kathy Hettinga has received many awards and honors for her artwork, including an Indiana Arts Fellowship, a Research Fellowship at The Institute of Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts at Yale University, and the very first Scholar Chair from Messiah University. Her work is in the permanent collections of UCLA, the Armand Hammer Museum, the…

DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…

To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer’s home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. —John Szarkowski, Introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide I’m sure I’m wrong about him, but it’s always seemed like slumming to me, those _____lovely color photographs—quickly seen shots of broken grave monuments…

I suppose if the main challenge I set myself is to make increasingly beautiful work, the simpler the image the better, the more ideas the better, so the other variable is to make those images out of more and more insignificant material: a splash of dried seawater, a rusting can bottom, a handful of sand,…

Decay and Resurrection: An Engineer on the Ecosystem of Abandoned Buildings   THERE’S A DENTIST’S OFFICE captured in photographs that, along with a number of companion images, got quite a bit of circulation in print and on the internet a few years back. The narrow, confined operating room, nested high in an office tower, is…

HER MOUTH is taped shut. That’s what gets your attention first. At first glance, a photograph like this might trigger alarm or suspicion. But context is everything. Look again, and see how those temporary tattoo lines spiral like fiddlehead ferns from her eye to her ear, and that speck of blue glitter gleams on her…