Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

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

John Szarkowski: “Photography Until Now” at MoMA (1990)

What we’re offered instead is merely a set of pictures John Szarkowski likes — a comparative bagatelle … Such a misuse of power, prestige and influence is an effective if lamentable indication of why the Modern’s credibility and influence on the medium have waned so dramatically during the last decade of his tenure. […]

Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice, 2 (1980)

The crucial question is, To whom is my work addressed? To put it another way, who do you think you’re talking to? By this I mean quite specifically what audience do you as a critic desire and direct your work towards conceptually? […]

Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice, 1 (1980)

The four key elements of the critical equation are (1) the work, (2) the critic, (3) the vehicle or forum, and (4) the audience. Each of these represents a wide range of options; furthermore, each individual case is in a state of continual change. […]

Bruce Davidson: East 100th Street (1970)

It is little short of scandalous that the Museum of Modern Art has never given a one-man show to a non-white photographer, for there are many at least as talented as some of those photographers the museum has chosen to show over the years. […]

Jill Freedman (1939-2019): A Farewell

Does it strike anyone else but me as strange that historians will go scrabbling around in the leavings of defunct, reticent, privileged amateurs like Alice Austen and Marjorie Content rather than grapple with the significant, published output of a living, breathing photographer who has functioned independently from the beginning and, without family wealth or husband to rely on, found ways of supporting herself and her work outside the academy and the grants system? […]