Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

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

Latent Image (1968)

This article, the first in a series of columns written for the Village Voice between 1968 and 1973, appeared exactly 50 years ago, in the June 20, 1968 issue of that alt-weekly newspaper, which had already become the model for the emerging national and, indeed, international “alternative press.” With it I hung out my shingle as a photography critic, a rubric that I thereby inaugurated and under which flag I still sail. […]

All Geek to Me

The recent incident in which a disgruntled self-described “stoner high school student” accessed the personal email account of the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency provides sufficient proof that it takes nothing more than a teenage degree of cleverness and determination to access just about anything put into digital form. Given that fact, you will perhaps appreciate my standard question to the “internet everywhere” advocates I meet during this fall’s round of new-tech expos: Is it hackable? […]

World o’ Gizmos 2014 (1)

Make no mistake about it: The people involved in inventing, developing, and marketing these devices and apps consider no single area of your physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual existence sacrosanct. There is no corner of your conscious or unconscious life that they do not feel free to invade and colonize. They want to own you as a digital consumer, waking and sleeping, 24/7/365, leap years included, cradle to grave. Coming soon: subcutaneous digital implants. You read it here first. […]

Fine-Art Photo Trickledown 1: The Selfie (b)

The selfie has already become the most thoroughly documented tendency in photography of all time. Doubtless it will evolve its own serious curators and scholars. I consider it a good thing that a form of photographic imagery, and the technology through which it’s generated and distributed, has provoked a wide-ranging and often substantive public dialogue. The more of that we get, the better. […]