Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

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

All Greek to Me: APhF 2015

The diatribe of photographer and Magnum member Patrick Zachmann exemplified perfectly the knee-jerk defensiveness with which representatives of what I’ve come to call the Capa Consortium respond to any challenge to the Capa legend. One member of the audience asked me if I’d paid Zachmann to prove our point; I had to answer that he’d done so with no prompting from me. […]

100 Photographers from the East in Lausanne, 2 (1990)

Most of us in the West — even Western Europeans — simply have no idea of what it has meant to be Eastern European in this century, for even those who lived there are only now able to acknowledge it. There’s a long period of reeducation ahead for all of us; and the paper trail we’ll have to follow is strewn not only with sheets bearing the written word but with photographs of all kinds, like these. […]

100 Photographers from the East in Lausanne, 1 (1990)

[Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, then a relatively new museum specializing in photography, announced an ambitious plan to bring together the works of dozens of eastern European photographers in a massive group show the next summer.

I’d met Charles-Henri Favrod, founding director of […]

Time Capsule 1974: Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook

I took the assignment of writing this annual round-up of events in the photo world as an opportunity to create a time capsule of sorts for users of Collier’s Encyclopedia. I just came across the one that appeared 40 years ago in the 1975 edition of the Yearbook, synopsizing the year 1974 (and the last months of of 1973). Here it is. […]

The Photographer and the Painting (5)

Instead of securing licenses for all these replications of other photographers’ works, Sandro Miller relied instead on a legal opinion interpreting the “fair use” exception to the copyright law as covering these restagings. I don’t see how simply replicating a scenario with John Malkovich substituting for the original subject comments in any significant way on the image from which its iconography derives. With all other elements of each image duplicated as faithfully as possible, is Malkovich’s presence in and of itself “transformative”? […]