Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

Year-End Ends and Odds

For a lad still a tad, who had passed through and adapted himself to three linguistic environments — Manhattan, southern France, London, and then back to Manhattan — in three years, this came as music to the ears. That Joycean play with language, in a form accessible even to a sprat like me, heightened my consciousness in relation to the spoken and written word by making the very act of reading — not the experience of following a story line, but the savoring of language itself, its slipperiness and mutabiity, its multivalent possibilities — fun. […]

What Happened in Vegas (2)

What is striking about current work is its diversity of style and mood, its attention to the sensuous and tactile, and its insistence on encompassing not only a wide range of sexual behaviors but also a full spectrum of sexual moods. This collective accomplishment unquestionably denotes a raising of the bar for what David Steinberg calls “sexual photography” — an embrace of the true complexity of sex at the present-day intersection of sex and photography. […]

What Happened in Vegas (1)

People here in the United States pursue in growing numbers what I call the photo-erotic, by which I mean the specific act of putting erotic behaviors on the visual record, playing them out in front of a lensed instrument loaded with light-sensitive materials or digital sensors, registering on film or in pixels our erotic inclinations — not just for our private delectation but also for wide distribution. […]

Six Four Eighty Nine (Twenty Five)

Today Photocritic International commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989. […]

CVS vs. Kiddie Porn

While the California authorities, and the mass media, celebrate the arrest and prosecution of a dangerous predator, let’s beware of any tendency to use this case to justify a skein of laws that have resulted in far more persecutions of innocent people than the capture of guilty ones. Meanwhile, this caution for photographers, amateur and professional alike: Do not use a processing lab anywhere in the U.S. to develop or print any images of children (your own or anyone’s else’s) naked, partially clothed, or clothed but striking poses that anyone might construe as sexually provocative. You’ve been warned. […]