I would propose that what Langston Hughes achieved in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, though radically different in kind, constitutes an editorial accomplishment that bears comparison with what Robert Frank did with his own pictures in The Americans, published in 1958-59. To use a distinction from general systems theory, Hughes took a heap and made of it a whole. […]
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Wynn Bullock’s ability to reconcile both these approaches to photographic praxis, the European and American versions of modernism, has few parallels in the field. The consequent breadth of his investigation of the medium makes him one of the most experimental photographers working in the U.S. in his time. […] World Press Photo was founded in the Netherlands in 1955 — not coincidentally, the year in which Edward Steichen’s extravaganza, “The Family of Man,” made its debut as a traveling exhibit and a catalogue. That enormously influential show and book undoubtedly exerted a considerable influence on the way that the WPP exhibitions took form when they began. That influence can still be felt today; the individual images for the most part reiterate the classic tropes of that era, the show itself collects and sorts its contents into little more than a yearly variation on the Steichen model. […] |
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