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George Tice (1938-2025): A Farewell

Tice’s pictures sometimes include people, but their visible presence in the flesh is rarely central to his vision, which instead investigates a largely depopulated urban and rural environment, a set of physical structures rather than social interactions. To the extent that he concerns himself with the past and present inhabitants of these locales, he addresses them through what they have built there and the marks they have left behind, not through the activities and behaviors of the present-day citizenry. In that sense, his motive is more archaeological than sociological. […]

New Japanese Photography (1974)

Much as I might wish it were otherwise, in considering the Museum of Modern Art’s latest photography exhibit and catalogue New Japanese Photography it proves impossible to discuss the photographs themselves without simultaneously analyzing the show and book. […]

Guest Post 36: Andrew Molitor on the Walker Evans Clock

Errol Morris’s position is, I think, quite clearly against the idea that the Burroughs family owned an alarm clock. He does not accept his own third option as credible, any more than James Curtis does. How on earth both Morris and Curtis managed to convince themselves of this, against all the efforts of Occam’s Razor, is something of a mystery itself. Nevertheless, the situation is even worse than that. […]

Diane Arbus: MoMA Retrospective, Redux (1972)

A photographic image is a transformation of reality; when selected with consciousness and an intention beyond the recording of surface, it is inevitably a remaking of an event into the photographer’s own image, and thus an assumption of godhead. […]

Herman LeRoy Emmet (1943-2021): A Farewell

Herman Emmet’s models, I know, are Agee-Evans and W. Eugene Smith, among others. This work emerges from that lineage, extends the thrust of those seminal efforts, and deserves to stand in their company. But it certainly is not of interest exclusively to those concerned with serious photography, who may well prove to be only a small segment of its audience. […]