The Easel

11th May 2021

Peter Hujar: The Show Must Go On

Laurie Barron | Ocula | 5th May 2021

Once just a minor figure in New York’s downtown subculture, Hujar is now seen as a great of American photography. Especially acclaimed are his meticulous, empathetic portraits. Drag performers were a particular fascination because of their courage to be different as well as the ambiguous dividing line between the person and the performance. Said Nan Goldin “he found beauty and value in every stage of life, and grace in every variety of flesh”.

4th May 2021

The cardboard cannabis lab: Thomas Demand’s beautifully deceptive realities

Sean O’Hagan | The Guardian | 22nd March 2021

Demand’s work sneaks up on you. His large scale photographs, seemingly of “real life”, actually show meticulously constructed models of the real thing. Why models? Because they are so pervasive – “computer-generated images, video games … the weather forecast, pension plans. [Models are] a completely overlooked cultural technique.” So, what is reality, disorderly real life or the tidy models we use to make decisions?

Obscura No More

Andy Grundberg | The American Scholar | 29th April 2021

A potted history of photography. For its first century, photography stuttered along in aesthetic terms until Warhol and Rauschenberg blurred the line between art and photography. Since then the tsunami of mass media imagery has arrived, allowing photography to shed its “separate-but-not-quite-equal status”. No one now thinks that its images need be literal. It is accepted as “a medium not just for making pictures but also for making meaning.”

Older links
Newer links