Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

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

Hurricane Sandy: Postlude (1)

First of all, we — myself, my wife Anna, her son/my stepson Jacky, and our two cats, Billie and Mini — survived this hurricane unscathed and are all fine. Second, our house, on a small hill, sustained no damage at all, nor did most of our immediate neighbors — though we’re not far from the coastline of Staten Island. A missing storm window here, a few shingles ripped off there. More good luck. […]

Election 2012: Image World (9)

Paul Ryan is the human face of “compassionate conservatism,” in other words. The rise to the top of the Republic Party of this cynical, opportunistic piece of white Wisconsin trash is proof positive that, even in the fetid waters of the radical right, fecal matter floats. […]

Dog Day Afternoons: Bits & Pieces (3)

Late last year I gave a talk in London, “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” in which, among other things, I bemoaned the fact that the newspaper and magazine industry has begun to replace specialized critics grounded in the visual arts (like me) with “cultural journalists,” generalists with no depth of […]

Birthday Musings 12/19/11

This year I found it necessary to fire a client, declining to undertake a second rewrite of a commissioned photo-book introduction. Both the editor and the photographer insisted that I refrain from discussing at any length the socially and politically charged subject matter of the pictures, demanding instead that I address the images purely in formalist terms, preferably by making comparisons to great painters of the past. […]

Straight Through to China (2)

On August 1, 2009, Anna’s birthday and Melville’s too, I got to read the role of Starbuck in OutLOUD’s yearly rendering of Moby Dick, with Anna present in the audience for the first time, and to dedicate my share of the program to her. As I did, I held in my mind that image of her as a precocious girlchild, sneaking under the locked gate to read this book in Chinese and hearing it now for the first time in English, read by her husband. I felt part of some great circle of connectedness. […]