The Easel

18th February 2025

Screaming in the Streets

Lucie Elven | London Review of Books | 20th February 2025

A sympathetic review of Golden’s retrospective in Berlin, which features six of her renowned slideshows. They all touch on social issues such as drugs and AIDS and, despite constant re-editing, reflect the times in which they were initially made. They share a common core – autobiographically based statements about the human experience. Watching them, says the writer, is “hypnotic, thrilling, [Her friends don’t have jobs] of the 9 to 5 kind. Here, living is a spectacular form of work in itself”

Revisiting Weegee in an epoch where image and illusion is king

Dalia Al-Dujaili | British Journal of Photography | 14th February 2025

Weegee made his name with dramatic, even lurid, images of New York crime scenes. Years later, he moved on to take celebrity portraits. He understood that images make events (and celebrities) newsworthy, and he thus was part of the spectacle creation process. Yet only his early work is acclaimed. This writer defends the later portraits as another way to demonstrate the power of images. Another critic demurs: while Weegee’s early work “pulses with life” his portraits were “puerile … a dead end”.

11th February 2025

Nature’s Emissary

Brooks Riley | Substack | 1st February 2025

Surprisingly, this is Friedrich’s first US retrospective. His acclaimed Germanic landscapes, often painted at dawn or dusk, depict figures facing away from the viewer, contemplating “the empowering essence of nature”. Romanticism was all about the feelings of an individual and Friedrich’s landscapes spoke eloquently to that. As one critic expresses it, his was an “art of experience, in which what you feel has primacy over what you see”.

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