Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

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

Roy DeCarava (1919-2009): A Farewell

Roy DeCarava’s work itself — and what I might call the situation of that work in the field of photography when I came to it in the late 1960s — presented me with some important challenges as a writer about photography, and a chance to define in public some fundamental principles of my own project as a critic and historian. Few people understand what such an opportunity means to a critic, and how rarely it comes along. […]

Vanilla Sex: Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen first published his book Vanilla Sex: Explicit Fine Art Photographs as a free PDF download. Rosen invited me to write the introduction to this project. My essay turned into a meditation not only on his work but on the state of sexually explicit photography in our culture — a subject to which I’ve turned my attention frequently over the decades. That PDF recently passed its 10,000-download mark, which strikes me as remarkable success for a self-published project on such a controversial subject. Now Rosen has published a printed version of the book, via Blurb.com. . . . […]

“Pictures of the Past” (Staten Island Museum Collection)

In early 2007 one of my local institutions, the Staten Island Museum, commissioned me to respond in writing to a set of 49 photographs drawn from its extensive collection. The group consists of Island scenes depicted in lantern slides, commercially produced postcards, amateur photographs, professionally made group portraits, film stills, and assorted other forms. […]