Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

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

Dirty Pictures: The Curator Meets the Censors

To my surprise, I’ve ended up appreciating this film. It’s distant enough in time to take a measured, meditative look at this cultural moment. The Culture Wars constituted one of the rare moments in American history in which photographs and photography took center stage in the national consciousness. It was the medium’s most “teachable moment” to date. If I wanted to take a class of students back to that moment, to teach it myself again today some two decades down the line, I might well start with this movie. […]

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. . . . […]