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“Why I’m Saying No To This New Arbus Book” (1995)

[In the fall of 1995 I received a review copy of the new Diane Arbus monograph, Untitled, just published by Aperture. Planning to review it, I sought answers to several legal and structural questions its production and publication raised. Becoming suspicious when I proved unable to get satisfactory answers — indeed, any answers at all […]

Harold Feinstein (1931-2015): A Farewell

In the last analysis, whether working in black & white in the urban social environment or isolating the particulars of a flower or shell insect in their distinctive coloration, Feinstein is still showing us a world filtered through his own inimitable sensibility. Animated by the same spirit, the works of his earlier years and these more recent projects actively enrich and amplify each other. A profound awe in the presence of living things manifests itself in all his pictures. […]

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 […]

The Skeleton in the Met Closet (1970)

The Metropolitan Museum has behaved like the latter in regard to photography, with the result that it has become so irrelevant and useless that it is in imminent danger of becoming completely divorced from the living medium. Unless the museum decides to take immediate steps to rectify this, it might do well to consider the possibility of turning its holdings over to any one of several other institutions which would be capable of treating them with the respect they deserve — and proud to do so as well. […]