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Duane Michals: National Arts Club (2000)

[This is the fourth in a series of decade-by-decade posts of material from my archives. For the third, click here.

By 2000 I had left the New York Observer, relinquishing — though not without a fight — the column I had run there from 1988-97 when they demanded ownership of copyright to my articles. The […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (45)

We can date John Morris’s active involvement in generating the Capa D-Day myth to sometime during the summer or fall of 1954, when, as Executive Editor of Magnum Photos, he wrote the captions for a posthumous Capa portfolio that would appear in the 1955 edition of U.S. Camera Annual. […]

Three Weeks in Bookworm Heaven (3)

The Waters of Our Time’s imitation of its source positions it as a wannabe companion piece, an aspiring equal, intended to stand beside The Sweet Flypaper of Life and get compared to it. Arrogant, to say the least, and an unwise wager to boot, because it simply doesn’t resonate (for me, in any case) in the way that the DeCarava-Hughes classic did and still does. […]

Robert Frank (1924-2019): A Farewell

If Mr. Frank could not escape our awareness of him as the maker of The Americans, he certainly has refused to rest on that laurel, and doggedly resisted our defining him by it. He’s made any attempt to place him on a pedestal or elevate him to a pantheon as difficult as any major artist I know of, past or present. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (44b)

In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, a complex skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: camaraderie, fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. […]