Formerly a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Observer, Coleman contributes to ARTnews, Art On Paper, and Technology Review, and publishes columns in Photo Metro and Photography in New York. His syndicated essays on mass media, new communication technologies, art, and photography are featured in such periodicals as Juliet Art Magazine (Italy), European Photography (Germany), and Foto & Video (Russia). His work has been translated into 20 languages and published in 28 countries. He has appeared on NPR, PBS, CBS and the BBC. American Photo named Coleman one of "the 100 most important people in photography in 1998."

Coleman has been a Getty Museum Guest Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Foundation. He was honored in 1996 as the Ansel and Virginia Adams Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Creative Photography, where his archive is housed. In 2002 he received the Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh/German Photographic Society).

Coleman's books include The Grotesque in Photography; Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978; Critical Focus: Photography in the International Image Community; Tarnished Silver: After the Photo Boom; Depth Of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media and Lens Culture; The Digital Evolution: Visual Communication in the Electronic Age, Essays, Lectures And Interviews 1967-1998; and Looking at Photographs: Animals, a work for children. Critical Focus received the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Writing on Photography in 1995. Wired magazine called The Digital Evolution "required reading for today’s media-savvy or information-obsessed artist." A new collection of Coleman’s essays, Available Light: Photography in the 1990s, will appear in 2004.

An independent scholar and teacher as well as a freelance writer, Coleman lectures, teaches, and consults widely across the United States and abroad.

More information about him can be found in his prefaces, forewords, and introductions to his several books of essays, available through the links immediately below.

Contact: A. D. Coleman, 718-447-3280 or adcoleman@photocriticism.com.

Books

• The Grotesque in Photography (1977). Complete text.
• Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-78 (1979). Selections:
  • Preface
  • Latent Image: "Photography" (1968): first Village Voice column

Critical Essays

• "Why I'm Saying No to This New Arbus Book" (1995)
  • A response to Janet Malcolm
  • A response to Mark Power
• On "Kiddie Porn":
  • "The Wrong Arm of the Law: 'Kiddie Porn' Hysteria Strikes Again" (1995)
  • "Another Hunting Accident: The Shotgun Approach to 'Kiddie-Porn'" (1996)
• Criticism Workshop: A Writing Assignment
  "Attending to Photographs: An Exercise," Part 1 (1996)
  "Attending to Photographs: An Exercise," Part 2 (1996)
  "Attending to Photographs: An Exercise," Part 3 (1997)
• "Cindy Sherman's 'Untitled Film Stills' at MoMA" (1997)

• "Straight From the Hearth: Photography and the Luminous Image" (1996)
• "Boaz Tal: Allegory/Allegro (Non Troppo)" (2001)
• "Time Capsule³: Harriet Casdin-Silver's and Kevin Brown's 'A Celebration of Aging'" (2001)

An A. D. Coleman Bibliography

A comprehensive bibliography of A. D. Coleman's writings on photography and related matters from 1968-1995, produced and published in 2000 by the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, has been posted here as a free PDF download, courtesy of Coleman and the CCP.

(Photo credit: "A.D. Coleman, Stockholm," 1994. Photo © copyright 1994 by Jorgen Jensen. All rights reserved.)

For citation purposes, the specific online source for this text is: