The Easel

6th October 2020

Gregory Crewdson’s photos reveal melancholy and mystery in small-town America

Jacqui Palumbo | CNN | 30th September 2020

Crewdson specializes in constructed images – photographs where he creates many aspects of the image. This practice may sound like contemporary movie-making but actually has a history in photography going back to Victorian times. His current work, set in a “dreary post-industrial town”, exudes a sense of malaise.  Says one writer, his are “half-stories, with no prelude and no denouement”.

29th September 2020

The ‘Real’ Cindy Sherman

Laura Allsop | ArtReview | 20th September 2020

An avalanche of reviews of Sherman’s Paris retrospective mostly just state the obvious. This one does better. Of course her work explores identity, but is that all? For some of her characters -aging female socialites, for example – the use of disguise works to expose rather than conceal. “The whole range of injustices that age has imprinted on their faces and bodies suggest an underlying melancholy … you see [them] vulnerable and exposed.”

In Berlin, a retrospective of one of Germany’s most influential photographers

Daniel Berndt | Aperture | 28th September 2020

Schmidt started by photographing his Berlin neighbourhood. That style – factual, black and white images – stuck. He spent 25 years making images of the commonplace – “empty lots, murky puddles, distressed brickwork”. They reveal a Berlin trying to shrug off the burden of history. Schmidt was a “lodestar of postwar photography in Germany … unideological, [and his work] offers a rich vocabulary without being anecdotal.”

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