Photography

Daniella Zalcman
What We See
The inaugural book from Women Photograph, What We See, is a broad survey that represents the equally broad careers of our members.



A Photographer at a Wedding
Midwife. Funeral director. Wedding photographer. You meet them once on a delicate day. They quickly slip into the inner circle of a family to perform their role during this rite of passage, and then they are gone.


Kathleen Meaney
A Breath of Fresh Architecture
What takes our breath away is both the thrill of life and life threatening.


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
Episode 116: A Decade in Politics, A Year in Culture
101 political images of 2010s; plus Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror; Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me; Beck’s Hyperspace; Underworld’s Oblivion with Bells; The 1619 Project podcast; Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?; Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story; Steve Bannon’s American Dharma; Fleabag Season 2; Chernobyl; Anni Venti in Italia at the Piazza Ducale in Genoa; Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum; Vecchio Amaro del Capo; BrewDog’s Nanny State; and Athletic nonalcoholic beer.


Jessica Helfand + Ellen McGirt
S7E7: Daniella Zalcman
Daniella Zalcman is a documentary photographer and the founder of Women Photograph.


Coen Projekts
The Alice Austen House Museum
In 1866 Alice Austen, one of the first women photographers in America, was born in a house on Staten Island. The house is now a newly re-opened museum, dedicated to her life and work.


Debbie Millman
Chase Jarvis
Debbie talks to Chase Jarvis about his career as a photographer and entrepreneur. “It doesn’t matter if you’re creating small things every day that are seen by a few. Or if you’re creating a business that is seen or expereienced by hundreds of millions or billions of people. It’s all creativity.”


Steven Heller
Photographing Science
The role that image makers have in the fields of science and engineering is more vital, especially now.


Debbie Millman
Albert Watson
Debbie talks with famed photographer Albert Watson about his career and about the importance of preparing conceptually for a shoot.


Debbie Millman
Pete Souza
Debbie Millman talks with Pete Souza about his years as the Obama administration official photographer.


Lily Hansen
“Doers get Noticed” and Other Truths from Photographer Jeremy Cowart
“Doers and people who are cranking it out all of the time get noticed.”


Kathryn Lofton, Alan Thomas
Forms of Obsession
How do we define the line between attention and obsession?


Rick Poynor
Herbert Spencer and The Book of Numbers
The Book of Numbers by Herbert and Mafalda Spencer was aimed at children, but its intriguing visual approach is more “photobook” than “schoolbook.”


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
S3E11: Melissa Harris
Melissa Harris is editor at large of the Aperture Foundation and the author of A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols.


Sean Adams
Fake News: Blow Up
We are conditioned to understand that a photograph is an honest record of an object, time, and place.


Sean Adams
Gateway Drug of Dessau
The typography and graphic design at the Bauhaus represent the most religious allegiance to Modernism. But, it is the photography at the Bauhaus that serves as a gateway drug.


John Foster
Looking Down: An Interview with Photographer Bryon Darby
Photos of grids and airplanes.


Melissa Harris
A Wild Life
PERMISSION EMPHATICALLY DENIED. The story of a National Geographic photographer’s journey documenting mountain gorillas in Rwanda. An excerpt from A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols.


John Foster
Tuning In
Early television call signs


Jade Doskow
Lost Utopias
Lost Utopias documents the remains of World’s Fair sites.


Antonio Alcalá
Looking Harlem in the Eye
Designer Antonio Alcalá explains his strategy for creating the exhibition catalogue for the Harlem Heroes: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten exhibit at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum


Alan Thomas
Signs, Signs
A visual essay of the women’s march in Chicago.


VII
Women's Day, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, 2004
Photo by Alexandra Boulat


VII
Uncertain Journeys, Lesbos, Greece, 2015
I felt conflicted about photographing the refugees as they arrived in Greece.


VII
U.S. Marines, Fallujah, Iraq, 2004
Combat engulfed the forces’ advance, as insurgents engaged them with sniper fire and RPGs in one of the fiercest battles yet


VII
Syrian Refugee, Lesbos, Greece, 2015
...their journey had not ended—it was just their next step into the unknown.


VII
Subway Attendant, Pyongyang, North Korea, 2007
The idea that ’life imitates art’ takes on a whole new meaning in North Korea.


VII
Polluted Garden, Romania, 1995
Broken Dream: Twenty Years of War in Eastern Europe


VII
Mustard Field, Bangladesh, 2015
Places in this photograph do not exist anymore.


VII
GoGo Anna, NYC, 2005
Immediately after photographing Anna she barked at me...


VII
Fur Coat, Dongling, China, 2012
I was stepping out of a car on a trip to a village in landlocked Anhui province in central China when she caught my eye.


VII
Faith, Swiebodzin, Poland, 2011
Representing transcendent aspects through a visual art as photography is an interesting challenge.


VII
Displaced Women, Sudan, 2007
I could not have imagined what a powerful moment it would represent.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Eighteen



VII
Dancer, Verona, Italy, 2004
“...and the magic appeared and she made my day.”


VII
Cheerleaders, Lexington, KY, 2005
It was the stark contrast that makes a photographers job so crazy and wonderful sometimes.


VII
Chechen Fighters, Contact Sheet, Grozny, Chechen Republic (Russia), 1995
At that moment in time there was not a more dangerous place on earth.


VII
Balloons, Kabul, Afghanistan, 2002
Children are allowed again to enjoy kites and other items banned by the Taliban


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Seventeen
More from the streets of Paris: City as theatre.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Sixteen
The Louvre, visting cats, taxidermy’s magical world, street typefaces, cafe chairs.


VII
Light Overcoming Darkness
Donald Trump kisses his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 20, 2016.


VII
Older Sisters Rule
A young girl dreams of becoming a summer festival queen like her older sister, Conesville, Iowa.


VII
Your Civic Duty, An Incredible Right
A woman casts her ballot in the Afghan presidential election in Herat, Afghanistan, on Oct. 9, 2004. For the first time in 20 years, Afghan women were allowed to vote in the 2004 presidential election.


VII
The Three Amigos
In 2000, November 7th was election day. And what a day it was.


VII
The Rough Rider
Supporters of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega attack elected Vice President Guillermo (Billy) Ford in Panama City, May 10, 1989.


VII
I Do Solemnly Swear
President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts as the 44th president of the United States on the West Front of the Capitol as his wife Michelle looks on in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 20, 2009.


VII
Make America Great Again?
Inside the convention the Jumbotron projected a vision of strength and unapologetic aggression. Speech after speech worked to reinforce the need for order and security.


VII
Who Needs a Hug?
US President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton embrace on the third day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 27, 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


VII
Trick or Treat
Children across the country celebrate Halloween dressed as goblins, Hollywood starlets, and super heroes. Pictured here in Tampa, FL, Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, and Princess Leia prepare for Halloween treats and frightful adventures.


John Foster
Welcome to the Asylum
A selection of images that came from the days when ‘asylum’ was a noun, not a verb.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Fifteen
There are moments and places in Paris where the visual evocation of time’s inevitable passage is simply meaningless.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Fourteen
Corsets, posters, entomology, L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, doll as cutlery + more from the streets of Paris.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Thirteen
Elegant and expressive variations on Parisian signage — a typographic buffet of style and history + more


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Twelve
Seen on the streets of Paris: a clown, a dog, mannequins, gorgeous hand-drawn signage + more.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Eleven
More Paris street photography + a surprise in a box.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Ten
A collection of type on the streets of Paris


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Nine
Lightbulb-headed naked dolls, Butter! Eggs! Lemons! Type = theatre, how the light falls in Paris + more.


John Foster
Architectural Exuberance Along the Bus Route
Bus stops in the Soviet Union



Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Eight
George Melies, the art of the mannequin, Franz Lizst, the Bourgeois + more.


Rick Poynor
The Never-ending Struggle against Clutter
Clutter and design are inseparable as concepts because clutter is the negation of design.


Adam Harrison Levy
Coney Island of The Mind
It’s late August and your shirt sticks to your back. The only escape is….the beach.


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Andy’s Food Mart by Tibor Kalman and M&Co
The virtue of the vernacular


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Six
The dogs of Paris, an umbrella whisperer, the astonishing power of typography, and more.


Jessica Helfand
Paris One Forty: Week Five
French handwriting, baby legs, one unfortunately-named family, silk hats for men + more.


Debbie Millman
Design Matters from the Archive: Brandon Stanton
Debbie talks to photographer Brandon Stanton about his ongoing project “Humans of New York” and why total strangers open up to him.


Blake Eskin
White Lines
Shared Earbuds


Rick Poynor
Exposure: License Photo Studio by Walker Evans
The building as camera


Adam Harrison Levy
Hiroshima Lost and Found
The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb’s effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember.


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Drape (Cavalcade III) by Eva Stenram
Abducted in plain sight


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Mrs. E.N. Todter by Dion & Puett Studio
Art and the Ladies’ Field Club


Alan G. Brake
Dust to Dust
Nadav Kander’s searing landscapes


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Rayograph with Gun by Man Ray
The poetry of the cameraless photo


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Clive Owen in character by Dan Winters
Anatomy of a publicity picture


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Assicurazioni Generali by Tošo Dabac
The textual unconscious of Zagreb


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Motion Efficiency Study by Frank Gilbreth
The ghost in the grid


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Commuter in Tokyo by Michael Wolf
How to cope with compression


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Ford Motor Plant by Charles Sheeler
The cathedral of industry


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Adamanese Man by Maurice Vidal Portman
Photography for anthropologists


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Domestic Interior by Nicole Bachmann
Design for everyday life?


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Cement Sky by Marla Rutherford
A fetish for motels


Rob Walker
An Album-Packaging Feast
A delicious viral tribute to a gut-bomb ZZ Top album-packaging image from the vinyl era


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Wintery Forest by Yang Yongliang
Building the new China


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Nurse Midwife by W. Eugene Smith
The mystery of birth


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman
The photographer as performer


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Guts of the Beast by Marcus Nilsson
How to take a food picture


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Woman Mourning by Don McCullin
What are images of suffering for?


John Foster
Identities Revealed
The Found I.D. Photos of Gulu Real Art Studio


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Cabaret de l'Enfer by Harry C. Ellis
The ghoulish cavern in the villa of Ormen


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Chimpanzee by James Mollison
Looking into the face of an ape


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Operating Room by Augustine H. Folsom
Early surgery as public theater


John Foster
Nathan Pearce
A yearning for place


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Francis Bacon by Bill Brandt
Portrait of the artist or photographer?


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Oildale by Rudy VanderLans
The dismal beauty of an oil field


Rick Poynor
The Observer Decameron—Eighth Day
The top ten books of 2015 picked by our contributors


Rick Poynor
Exposure: House #3 by Francesca Woodman
Fabricating a phantom girl


John Foster
Jim Power
Mosaic Man of the East Village


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Copacabana Beach by Thomaz Farkas
A pioneer of Brazilian photography


John Foster
Lee Godie
Homeless genius


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Bar in Valparaiso, Chile by Sergio Larrain
The ambiguity of soft focus


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Suburban House at Night by Todd Hido
The pleasure in not knowing


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Man with a Bandaged Head
The aftermath of extreme weather


John Foster
Variations on a Rectangle
Thirty years of graphic design from Pentagram’s DJ Stout


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Portrait of Space by Lee Miller
Frames within frames in the desert


John Foster
The Valley of 10,000 Smokes
A photographer’s snowy sublimes


Rick Poynor
Exposure: H.P. Lovecraft by Lucius B. Truesdell
The master of horror


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Morandi’s Objects by Joel Meyerowitz
The sublime in ordinary things


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Tilda Swinton by Tim Walker
The performance of a picture


The Editors
A Collector’s Collections
A celebration of outstanding curation


Rick Poynor
Exposure: American Hermit by Alec Soth
Alone in the great outdoors


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Pirelli Calendar Model by Peter Lindbergh
The production line of glamor


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Kreuzberg Tower in Berlin by Hélène Binet
The aura of a building


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Marlene Dietrich Billboard by Brassaï
Superhuman mystique of a star


John Foster
Living Pictures
The photographic art of Arthur Mole and John Thomas


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Crashed Car by Arnold Odermatt
Fast and Furious: a retrofit


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Grace Jones by Jean-Paul Goude
Beauty, androgyny, and threat


John Foster
Stalking Brick City
The Newark street photography of Cesar Melgar


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Beauty Salon in Kraków by David Hlynsky
The Surrealism of window displays


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Crime Scene in Paris by Alphonse Bertillon
The killing of a bank messenger


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Children at Play in the City by Shirley Baker
The freedom of the street


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Rossellini and Lynch by Helmut Newton
A primal lovers’ tryst


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Woman Mailing a Letter by Clifton R. Adams
The spell of vintage color


Rick Poynor
Exposure: James Nachtwey by Antonin Kratochvil
Portrait of a war photographer



John Foster
The Thin Line
Mann(ish)


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Dysturb poster in Paris by Jeanne Frank
Taking photojournalism to the street


Rick Poynor
Exposure: American Family by Ralph Eugene Meatyard
The otherness of other people


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Bookstore in Barcelona by Gabriel Casas
A new vision of the book


John Foster
Lilliputian Entropy
Carrie Becker’s small rooms


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Invisible Man by Gordon Parks
The view from an electric cave


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Kuwait, 1991 by Sophie Ristelhueber
The scars of a desert war


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Newport Baths by Max Dupain
Sun, sea, and disconnection


Rick Poynor
Exposure: The Eiffel Tower by Germaine Krull
A Paris icon made abstract


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Reem-B Robot by Vincent Fournier
The mental life of a machine


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Salvation Army Barracks by Jack London
Down and out in early 20th-century London


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Flypaper and Flies by Jacques-André Boiffard
A cold eye on insect carnage



Adam Harrison Levy
Death’s Bloom
From 1913 to 1971, 5,121 mentally ill patients were cremated. Nineteen of them were soldiers. This weekend they were buried with military honors.


Rick Poynor
Exposure: The Gamble by Peter Kennard
The clandestine operations of power


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Pages from Fabrik by Jak Tuggener
The dark undercurrents of industry


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Head below Wires by Roger Ballen
Absurdity in the South African outland



Sara Jamshidi
The Observers
Built Environment


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Surface Transit by Eva Fuka
The shock of New York in the sixties



Sara Jamshidi
The Tree
Three perspectives


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Rue du Temple, Paris by Gail Albert Halaban
The lure of a lighted window


Rick Poynor
Exposure: J.G. Ballard by Brian Griffin
The science fiction of the ordinary


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Brodsky, the Tie Seller in Paris
Every photograph is an enigma


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Lens bookshop in Sutton by Lloyd Rich
The rediscovery of lost moments


Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand
The Observatory: Land, Rand, Mad Men
Michael and Jessica talk about a panel they participated in at the Paul Rand exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, plus the return of Mad Men and the fate of photography giants Kodak and Polaroid.


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Luigi Russolo’s Noise Machines
Sonic conjurors of experimental music


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Butlin’s holiday camp by Edmund Nägele
A sixties vacation in glowing color


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Cat and I by Wanda Wulz
Modernity, femininity and the feline


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Restaurant de la Réserve by Jean Gilletta
Wonder and yearning by the sea


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Berlin scene by Wolfgang Zurborn
The hidden order of the random


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Mother and Child by Philip Jones Griffiths
The gendered power relations of war


Rick Poynor
Exposure: The Colossi of Memnon by Francis Bedford
Mysterious emanations from the desert


Rick Poynor
Exposure: The Simulator by Dora Maar
The chamber of Surrealist visions


Rick Poynor
Exposure: El Paso Street by Stephen Shore
The street corner: an uncommon place


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Rise Up You Are Free by Dominic Hawgood
A post-photographic view of exorcism


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Striporama street scene by Vivian Maier
How good was the photographer nanny?


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Viktoria Modesta by Nadav Kander
Changing perceptions of impairment



John Foster
Leon Lewandowski
A lost street photographer comes to public eye after sixty years in storage


Rob Walker
Watch Where You Walk
Everybody is pro-walking these days. But here’s a project that reveals the value of stopping and looking.


John Foster
Focusing on the Masters
A new approach to portraiture: John Foster on the Miaz Brothers


Adam Harrison Levy
Saul Leiter: Early Black And White
On the occasion of a new exhibition Adam Harrison Levy remembers a friend and the intimacy he captured


John Foster
Dangerous Beauty
Stunning photographs of the Portuguese Man-of War.


Rick Poynor
Tracking the Locations of J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes
A photo-essay on the futuristic marina and business park in the south of France that inspired Ballard’s disquieting fantasy about corporate crime


Jessica Helfand
To Thine Own Selfie Be True
Photographing oneself has become a singular pastime, an instantly rewarding yet indisputably time-sucking activity poised somewhere between narcotic and sport.


Alan Thomas
Lee Friedlander’s Mirror in the Road
His mirrors obscure as much as they reveal, often comically so.


John Foster
Book Review: The True Gospel Preached Here
Margaret’s Grocery: part grocery, part church. And the subject of a new photo documentary book.


John Foster
A Mississippi Delta Road Trip
Photographing the South on a week long journey.


Véronique Vienne
Taylor Holland’s Scenic Tour
A photograph is at first a document. Crop it, and it becomes a picture. Trim it further into a square and you’ve got a “sign” — a potential icon.



Adam Harrison Levy
Tracks of My Tears
As Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photographs make clear, your tears are yours alone and each one is different.


Adam Harrison Levy
The Unseen D-Day
There are other photographs taken on the beaches of Normandy that are almost entirely unknown. Never seen before, we present the photographs of Manuel Bromberg, Normandy, 1944.


Rob Walker
Danger, Nostalgia, and Playgrounds
Brenda Biondo's photographs of mid-century playgrounds document the classic, the dangerous, and the nostalgic.


Adam Harrison Levy
The Falling Man: An Interview with Henry Singer
The Falling Man is a 90-minute documentary that tells the story of a controversial image. Who took it? Why was it censored? And who was the man in the photograph?


John Foster
Our Shared Past
Jefree Shalev and his girlfriend selected 175 film stills from his parents’ past life and dispersed these intimate family images with the Florida art community. The result is an exhibition called ‘Our Shared Past’.


Adam Harrison Levy
The Oldest Living Things In the World
Climate change — once a distant fear — is already upon us, Rachel Sussman’s glorious, and vitally important book could not have come at a more crucial moment.


Rob Walker
Object in the News: The Face Privatizer
Tabloid-press subject Vanessa Stiviano makes fascinating (mis)use of a sun visor as media-age privatizer.


Alex Knowlton
Miami Nice
Alex Knowlton reviews this year's ADC Festival of Art + Craft in Advertising and Design in Miami Beach.


Rick Poynor
The Conceptual Advertising of J.G. Ballard
J.G. Ballard’s conceptual ads anticipated the emergence of culture jamming, subvertising, design fiction and speculative design.


John Foster
The Focused Obsession of Photographer Rob Amberg
Rob Amberg is an award winning a documentary photographer who lives with his wife live on a small farm in the same NC county where he makes his photographs.


Hala Abdul Malak
Hala A. Malak on Lomo
Hala A. Malak is a design critic, curator, branding consultant, and Middle East expert with her own particular view of the world.


David Morris
The Public Library
The public library is a singularly American invention whose prime directive has been to protect access to information.


Jessica Helfand
Fast Thinking
Is this a slapstick fall captured as a slow-motion sideshow? Or an example of how accelerated exposure times tell a different story?


John Foster
Found, Cut, and Rearranged: The Art of John Stezaker
For almost four decades, the artist John Stezaker has been appropriating “found” photographs and focusing on a new way of seeing.


John Foster
The Greenville, NC Daily Reflector: 1948 to 1967
One of the best ways to investigate the life and times of a region is to look at the local photo files from the daily newspaper.


John Foster
Blues, Baptisms, and Prison Farms: The Lomax Snapshots of 1934-1950
Blues, Baptisms, and Prison Farms: The Lomax Snapshots of 1934-1950


Alexandra Lange
Not Afraid of Noise: Mexico City Stories
A photographic tour of Mexico City, house by house, wall by wall.


John Foster
The Dreamland Motel
A reivew of the vanishing signage of our American landscape.


John Foster
Face Time
This week, John Foster looks at the endless fascination we have with the human face and the myriad ways it can be transformed.


Rick Poynor
From the Archive: Surface Wreckage
Why do photographs and images of torn street posters exert such a powerful hold on the imagination and emotions?


John Foster
The Private World of Martina Kubelk
A photo album containing 99 pages and over 380 photographs; self-portraits of a man in women’s clothes.


John Foster
Imperfect Beauty
A collection of 26 photographic images with either deliberate or accidental flaws.


Observed
These Collages Blur the Lines of Reality
Daniel Gordon is an artist and author living and working in Brooklyn. His work is the subject of three booksand a profile this week on Wired.


Rob Walker
Mona Lisa Selfies
Inevitably, the famous Mona Lisa has crossed paths with the selfie — and the results are charming.


John Foster
Garry Winogrand Retrospective At National Gallery
Accidental Mysteries for December 15, 2013 fouses on street photographer Garry Winogrand.


John Foster
Messenger Boys, Call Girls and a Photographer
Accidental Mysteries for December 1, 2013 focuses on the photography of Lewis Wickes Hine, whose photographs were instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States.



John Foster
Graphics of Authority
A look at the police cars that may or may not want to be seen.



Observed
Seven Score and 10 Years Ago
The Gettysburg Address in words and pictures.



Gordon Salchow
New Haven, November 22, 1963
A gallery of images taken by Gordon Salchow in New Haven on the day President John F. Kennedy, Jr. was assassinated.



Rick Poynor
Collage Culture: Nostalgia and Critique
An interview with David Banash, author of Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption.



Rick Poynor
Belgian Solutions: The True State of Things?
The foul-ups or “Belgian solutions” in a new book of street photographs are simply the way things are.


Rick Poynor
New York: City of Spectacular Doors
For six years, Allan Markman crisscrossed New York taking pictures of remarkable doors for a new book.


Rick Poynor
Bohumil Stepan’s Family Album of Oddities
Bohumil Stepan’s Familienalbum presents a series of surreally equipped and irreverently modified collages of his family.


John Foster
Artful Mourning
The art of mourning in Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries: a look at post-mortem and memorial photographs and memorabilia.


Marvin Heiferman
Marvin Heiferman on Photography
Marvin Heiferman, a curator and writer, develops exhibitions, websites and publications that explore visual culture.


Rick Poynor
Bohumil Stepan’s Gallery of Erotic Humor
Mapp Editions has released a digital version of Bohumil Stepan’s Galerie (1968), a surreal collection of collages and drawings about the relationship between the sexes.


Rick Poynor
The Hotel that Dreamed It Was a Museum
The Walpole Bay Hotel: Living Museum, junk-clogged bane of hotel inspectors, or Wunderkammer?



Observed
Surfing the 38th Parallel
Shannon Aston is a photographer and surfer who documented the beaches of the Korean DMZ.


Rick Poynor
Collage Now, Part 1: Sergei Sviatchenko
In a crowded field, Sergei Sviatchenko’s highly reductive photo-collages look like his own and no one else’s.


Rick Poynor
Collage Now, Part 2: Cut and Paste Culture
Cut-and-paste culture is booming and collage-making is rampant: paper-based, digital, and all points between.



Observed
From Dance Hall to Design Studio to Dance Hall
Jeremy M. Lange photographs the inaugural dance held in the restored barn that used to be his grandfather's design studio.


Rick Poynor
Keld Helmer-Petersen: Pioneer of Color
An accessible edition of Keld Helmer-Petersen’s 122 Colour Photographs, a landmark 1948 photobook.


Rob Walker
An Accidental Time Capsule
Snapshots of late-September 2001 signage reveal a tentative American moment.


Rick Poynor
David Maisel and the Apocalyptic Sublime
David Maisel’s photographs are visions of the Earth as we have never seen it full of beauty and terror.


John Foster
The Portrait in Snapshot Photography
The following portraits represent a mere fraction of the vernacular images from the Accidental Mysteries collection, ranging from late Nineteenth to the mid-Twentieth century.



John Foster
A Street Photographer of 19th Century London
Selections from the work of a largely unknown Nineteenth-century photographer named John Thomson.



Observed
The Documerica Project
DOCUMERICA was a program sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency from 1972-1977 in order to “capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities and everyday life in the 1970s”.


Rick Poynor
The Incidental Pleasures of Street Art
Sprawling, evolving, accreting: a collection of recent street art photos from Portugal and Spain.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Auto Anthropology
Cars in their natural habitats — the Auto-Anthropology group on Flickr.


John Foster
Alaska Yukon Gold Rush Era Photo Album
Accidental Mysteries for June 9, 2013 features a photo album from the Alaska Yukon gold rush era.



Observed
The Olympic City, Documenting The Remains
Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit visted former Olympic host cities all over the world, documenting what remains — and what does not.


Rob Walker
The Hyperdocumented Sunset Strip
Using Google Street View Hyperlapse to revisit Ruscha’ Sunset Strip.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Are these Buildings? Or Art?
Images of architecture as art.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Tales From A Parallel Universe
How to describe the cryptic beauty of un-staged moments of perfection frozen in time? Welcome to “Tales From A Parallel Universe”.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Look Out For Pirates
The Flickr pool called “Look Out For Pirates” looks longingly out to sea.


Daniella Zalcman
New York + London: A Vision of Home
Daniella Zalcman created a series images that are part New York, part London, and collectively represent her vision of home



Observed
Maddie the Coonhound
The story of Theron Humphrey and his rescued Coonhound Maddie.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Blurry Fuzzy World
Sometimes images through a fog tell the clearest story.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Damaged Goods
“Damaged Goods” is a collection of photographs in which the scratches, stains and patina are critical components in the gestalt of the image.



Observed
Rick Poynor: Writing with Pictures
Rick Poynor is increasingly preoccupied, as a photographer, with making images himself and will speak about it at a DCrit lecture April 9, 2013.



Observed
The Enduring Allure of Vintage Snapshots
Collector’s Weekly has profiled John Foster about his love for, and his collection of, vernacular photography.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Curatimus Maximus
“Curatimus Maximus” is a beautifully curated group of imagery dedicated to color street photography.



Observed
2012: The Year in Construction
Engineering News-Record, a weekly technical magazine that traces it's roots back to 1874, has announced the winners of their "2012 The Year In Contruction" photo competition.



Observed
Pantone Food Chips
A series of hand-made pantone chips using everyday foods from designer David Schwen.



Observed
Found: National Geographic
In honor of their 125th anniversary, National Geographic is showcasing photographs that reveal cultures and moments of the past.


John Foster
Kodachrome Finds New Life
Accidental Mysteries for March 10, 2013 focuses on Fred Herzog's Kodachrome slides.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Signs of Pittsburgh
Bright cursive hope and rust-covered despair, sigils of titans and corner store shingles, the quick and the decaying done for, encomiums to vanished glory and the name of an immortal beer-and-a-shot bar.



Observed
Vivian Maier: The Movie
A documentary is being made about John Maloofs discovery of Vivian Maier's street photographs.


Rick Poynor
The Experiential Thrill of Driving in Films
A new book, Drive, shows how the car scenes in movies help us understand the experience of modernity.


Alexandra Lange
Balthazar Korab, RIP
Tribute to architectural photographer Balthazar Korab, and a discussion of what made him different from contemporary Ezra Stoller.


Rick Poynor
On My Screen: Shooting the Past
Stephen Poliakoff’s Shooting the Past, set in a fictitious photo library, is a film that could haunt you for years.


Rob Walker
13 Striking Landscape Fictions
Thirteen “landscape fictions,” photographs of the natural world — made distinctly unnatural.


Rob Walker
What Does ‘The Cover of Time’ Mean?
The cover of Time Magazine may not speak with authority in the nonstop news cycle. But what does?


Rick Poynor
Herbert Spencer and the Decisive Detail
In Herbert Spencer’s most memorable photographs, signs of official communication fray into visual poetry.


Alexandra Lange
3rd Annual Holiday Card Review
Holiday card designs for 2012 reveal the social media preoccupations of their buyers, whether it is Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram or old-fashioned (perhaps Downton Abbey-inspired?) stationery.


Rick Poynor
Robert Brownjohn: Photos at Street Level
The Victoria and Albert Museum has put 18 of Robert Brownjohn’s photographs on display for the first time.


Rob Walker
System As Photographer
System as photographer, and photographer as system.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
Once you use time, it is gone forever. Maybe that’s why we spend so much time looking at clocks.  


Alexandra Lange
Having Fun at the Museum
Blocks, rocket ships, playgrounds and balls: the hidden meaning of playthings at the Museum of Modern Art.


Rick Poynor
Demonstrations, Democracy and Design
After demonstrations in 2011, Barcelonas Plaça de Catalunya became a carnivalesque village of protest.


Alexandra Lange
Someone Else’s Shangri La
An exhibition of Doris Duke's Honolulu mansion, Shangri La, proves a “Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian complex” works as theater.


Rick Poynor
John Stezaker: Images from a Lost World
John Stezaker’s collages, recipients of a major photography prize, achieve great resonance with limited means.


Rick Poynor
It’s Smart to Use a Crash Test Dummy
The image of the crash test dummy has traveled from the subcultural fringes to the pop culture mainstream.


Rick Poynor
On My Shelf: André Breton’s Nadja
The Livre de poche edition of André Breton’s Surrealist classic Nadja remains the best visual interpretation of the book.



Observed
Merce Cunningham: The App
Aperture's Merce Cunningham: 65 Years is a monograph in the form of a dynamic and interactive iPad app.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
Accidental Mysteries is an online curiosity shop of extraordinary things, mined from the depths of the online world and brought to you each week by John Foster, a writer, designer and longtime collector of self-taught art and vernacular photography. This week's focus is Occupational Photographs.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
In 2007, the discovery of an unknown street photographer named Vivian Maier changed the world of art photography forever.


Rob Walker
Observational Instruments, Observed
Peeping at the Venue project's delightful gear, and Google's Seussian Trekker



Observed
John Foster: Accidental Masterpieces
John Foster profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle by Judy Walgren, Director of Photography.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities curated by John Foster, highlights images of design, art, architecture and ephemera brought to light by the magic of the digital age. This week's focus is smoke.



Observed
Leonard Ross : Photographs of Social Change
Leonard Ross was a distinguished photographer who believed that the camera had the power to transform society.



Observed
Signs We Love : 02
“No Photography”, photographer and location unknown.


Rick Poynor
Jan van Toorn: The World in a Calendar
Jan van Toorn’s provocative 1972/73 calendar for the printer Mart.Spruijt has been reprinted by a Dutch design company.



Observed
Signs We Love : 01
Photographed in Cape Town, South Africa by Fiona Drenttel, March 2010


Adam Harrison Levy
The Geometry of Time
Francesca Woodman's notebook, entitled Some Disordered Interior Geometries, is featured in a retrospective of her work at the Guggenheim Museum.


Rick Poynor
The Strange Afterlife of Common Objects
In lstanbul shops like The Works: “Objects of Desire,” the novelist Orhan Pamuk found the artifacts for his newly opened Museum of Innocence.



Observed
Make a Mixel this Weekend
This weekend the folks at Mixel, an amazing collaborative collage app for the iPad, want to spread the word about how easy (and fun) it is.


Rick Poynor
Studio Culture: The Materialism of Matter
Studio, print shop, dance club and store: a photographic essay on Matter's design HQ in Denver.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities curated by John Foster, highlights images of design, art, architecture and ephemera brought to light by the magic of the digital age. This week's focus is Superheroes.


Rick Poynor
Phil Sayer, Designer of Photo-Portraits
Phil Sayer’s photographic portraits for Blueprint gave the magazine great visual impact and presence.


Alexandra Lange
Frank Lloyd Wright + Katniss Everdeen
On photographing architecture as sculpture and telling stories via architecture.


Rick Poynor
Typographic Stories of the City Streets
Characters, a new book by Stephen Banham, investigates the stories behind Melbourne’s street signs.


Rick Poynor
The Unspeakable Pleasure of Ruins
“Ruin porn,” a reductive tag that makes any photograph of ruins seem suspect, ignores the cultural history of the ruin.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
Welcome to Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities set aside for your perusal and enlightenment. This week's focus is Politics.


Rick Poynor
On My Shelf: A Classic by Berger and Mohr
John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man brilliantly fuses words and photos to examine a doctor’s life.



Michelle Hauser
Pop Photographica: An Interview with Daile Kaplan
Daile Kaplan’s comprehensive collection all has one unifying trait: a photographic element that was not intended for viewing on the wall.


Rick Poynor
Ernst Haas and the Color Underground
Has Ernst Haas, an early master of color photography, received the credit his ground-breaking pictures deserve?



John Foster
A New American Picture: Doug Rickard and Street Photography in the Age of Google
When Google launched Street View in 2007, it was just the ticket for photographer Doug Rickard.


Rick Poynor
Saul Leiter and the Typographic Fragment
In Saul Leiter's color photographs, the fragment is infinitely more mysterious and suggestive than the whole.


Rick Poynor
The Infinite Warehouse of Images
The more photos we collectively produce, the more ruthless we need to be about bestowing our attention.


Rick Poynor
Should We Look at Corrosive Images?
What do violent photographs of war do to us as viewers?



Photo by Iain McKell
The New Gypsies
Photographer Iain McKell documents England's romantic travelers


Rick Poynor
Funerary Portraits: Snapshots in Stone
The portrait sculptures in the Cimetière du château in Nice resuscitate their subjects with a frequently startling vividness.


Rick Poynor
Andrzej Klimowski: Transmitting the Image
Andrzej Klimowski, author of a new book, On Illustration, has used the medium to create a compelling alternative reality.



Photo by Jason Orton
London 2012
Photo of London's Olympic Park site, one in a recent series


Rick Poynor
J.G. Ballard’s Terminal Documents
A speculative visual interpretation of one of the surreal image lists in J.G. Ballard’s experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition.



Daniella Zalcman
South Sudan: Birth of a Republic
Daniella Zalcman's photos of The Republic of South Sudan on independence day.



John Foster
DART St. Louis
On DART St. Louis, a charitable photo project that brings overlooked neighborhoods to life.


Rick Poynor
On the Threshold of Sebald’s Room
Daniel Blaufuks is haunted by a picture of an office in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Where did it come from and what does it show?


Rick Poynor
Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
A DVD cover for the classic film noir Kiss Me Deadly uses the blindingly obvious symbol that just keeps on giving.


Rick Poynor
On My Shelf: Stefan Lorant’s Lilliput
Stefan Lorant’s use of photos in pairs could be wry, funny, bizarre, whimsical, satirical and not always kind.



Adam Harrison Levy
Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs
Close to a decade ago, a man caught sight of a battered suitcase: inside it, he found photographs of a bombed out Hiroshima. A unique slideshow of 100 photographs.


Rick Poynor
Wim Wenders’ Strange and Quiet Places
The massive photographs in film director Wim Wenders’ new exhibition work best when they serve his painterly eye.


Rick Poynor
The Secret History of the Edgelands
These transitional zones, places of “possibility, mystery and beauty,” can be found anywhere that urban development meets open land.


Mark Lamster
Cities from the Sky
A new exhibition of urban photographs by Sze Tsung Leong.


Rick Poynor
Solitude in Dark Trees
Was this structure the idle amusement of some loggers, or an art piece by someone at the academy nearby? Gingerly testing each rung, I climbed up into it.



Magda Biernat
The Hard Sell
Images from "Betel Nut Beauties": photos by Magda Biernat.


Rick Poynor
On My Shelf: Nairn’s London
Inside the architecture critic Ian Nairn’s classic, idiosyncratic guide to London’s buildings and spaces.


Rick Poynor
Discovered by Chance in a Paris Arcade
What better way to pass a couple of spare hours in Paris than to visit the covered arcades that were, for the Surrealists, some of the best places to encounter the marvellous?



Photo by Milton Rogovin
The Poetry of Simplicity
Pablo Neruda on the photographer Milton Rogovin



Photo by Jason Orton
Built Not to Last
Photo of prefab London housting development slated for demolition.


Rick Poynor
W.G. Sebald: Writing with Pictures
How do the great German writer's notoriously tricky visual fictions compare with reality?



Photo by Thomas Struth
Vanishing Point
Bukseo Dong, Pyongyang, North Korea 2007. Photo by Thomas Struth



Julie Lasky
Bigshot Camera Update
Reporting the status of an innovative children's camera in development


Nancy Levinson
Art Talks
Adam Lowe and Peter Greenaway at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City; Justin Partyka and Sir Terry Farrell at Eleven Spitalfields in London,


Jessica Helfand
Pretty Pictures, Bad Judgment
If a picture's worth a thousand words, a publically broadcast picture is amplified, multiplied and cast out into a world where it can go anywhere.



Michelle Hauser
A Fluid and Expressive Medium: Interview with Robert E. Jackson
In recent years, a new breed of photographer has emerged: the camera-less Photographer. This new generation — many of whom self-identify as collectors — has reinvented the process once again. Michelle Hauser interviews Robert E. Jackson, one of the country's most prolific collector of vernacular photography, who lays claim to a breadth and depth of material rivaled by few if any, in this emerging field.



John Thackara
Look — Or Connect?
In a photography and book project called Shelter Henk Wildschut documents found shelters. Perhaps we should not judge these images by what they make *us* feel, but by which they cause to connect, with the people they portray.



Photo by Taslima Akhter
The Raveled Sleeve of Care
Photo by Taslima Akhter showing living conditions for Bangladesh's garment workers.



Photo by Andy Drewitt
Forty Angles and a Mule
Photograph from series by Australian Andy Drewitt of donkey rescue facility.



Photo by Abelardo Morell
Getting In with the Ingot Crowd
Photo and journalistic excerpts about the soaring price of gold



Luc Sante
Circus: The Photographs of Frederick W. Glasier
Rediscovered: Frederick W. Glasier. Glasier made extraordinary photographs of the American circus during its heyday.



Photo by Teun Voeten
Hell Under Wheels
Photo from Teun Voeten's newly reissued book on New York's Tunnel People.



Alexandra Lange
The War at Home
My brother Jeremy M. Lange is a photojournalist who works for the Independent, in Durham, NC, where he has been able to photograph a number of funerals, with family permission every time.



William Underhill
Somali Documentary Project
Report on the Somali Documentary Project.



Photo by Susannah Sayler/The Canary Project
Hot Mountain
Photo documenting the effects of climate change in Peru, by Susannah Sayler of The Canary Project.



Photo by Greg Constantine
Nubians Then and Now
Image of Nubian homes in the Kibera area of Nairobi by Greg Constantine.



Photo by Pieter Hugo
Permanent Error
Photo by Pieter Hugo of Ghana's Agbogbloshie slum.



Mark Lamster
The Constructed Landscapes of Chris Berg
With digital imaging technology so advanced and widely accessible, the photo-collage has reached a level of almost baroque absurdity.



Patrick Chappatte
Study in Contrasts
Cartoon commentary on 2010 World Cup by Patrick Chappatte.



Mike Sinclair
Midway at the Oasis
Photo of Neshoba County Fair, Philadelphia, Mississippi.



Alexandra Lange
THE Bite THATS Rite
A photograph by John Szarkowski from Looking After Louis Sullivan at the Art Institute.



Julie Lasky
Protect Me from What I Want
Photo in memory of Tobias Wong.



Michelle Hauser
The Leisure of Looking: A Pedestrian View in a High-Speed Era

The current exhibition at the Houston Center for Photography comes from a huge private collection of vernacular group photographs.




Michael Bierut
The Bones of Francois Robert
Francois Robert has spent hundreds of hours arranging the bones of a single human skeleton into a series of striking iconic shapesto create a series he calls "Stop the Violence."  



Alexandra Lange
In the Family
Beautiful work by my brother, Jeremy M. Lange, in the New York Times Sunday.



Alexandra Lange
Reciting Modernist Architects
She hated it when Daddy made her recite modernist architects.



Jason Orton
Tinder Boxes




Mark Lamster
Double Vision: Did David Burdeny Copy Sze Tsung Leong?
When does inspiration cross over the line into plagiarism and copyright infringement?



Alexandra Lange
All Rubble Is Not Alike
I watched Manufactured Landscapes in the weeks before Christmas and it was just too depressing to post about in the run-up to gift day.



Alexandra Lange
Pay No Attention to Me
In one of those strange topical coincidences, this Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section has a profile of Iwan Baan, a Dutch architectural photographer who is the post-Stoller-Shulman-Molitor savior of architectural photography.



Alexandra Lange
Buildings That Aren't There
Photography needs to prove itself again as an interpretive medium for architecture somewhere this side of art.



Mitch Epstein
Why Not in My Backyard?
Mitch Epstein's photo of Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004, from his book American Power (Steidl, 2009).



Rick Landesberg
The Bleating Edge
Rick Landesberg's photo of an innovative design in Haiti for keeping goats in their place.



Jason Orton
All That Remains
Jason Orton's photograph of a tree in Dartford, Kent, one of few left over from a lush arboretum.



Mark Lamster
The City in Pictures
Every great city is unique. Each has its own special character, a certain cosmopolitan energy that is its own, the product of its people, its history, its culture, its physical form.



Julie Lasky
Bigshot Camera
Report on a camera that children assemble to learn about science and engineering principles.



By Dona Ann McAdams
Milking It
Dona Ann McAdams photograph featured in an exhibition at the Opalka Gallery in Albany, New York.



Felice C. Frankel, and George M. Whitesides
No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale
A slideshow of images from the book, No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale.



Lindsay Stark
Renewal
Aid worker Lindsay Stark's portrait of the ritual purification of a child soldier in Sierra Leone.



Owen Edwards
Irving Penn, 1917-2009
Irving Penn, who died on October 7th at the age of 92, marks the end of the great age of glamour in magazines, a remarkable period when brilliant photographers who happened to make their livings in fashion and advertising were finally recognized for the artistry of their eyes.



Justin Partyka
The East Anglians
Image from photographer Justin Partyka's series, The East Anglians, about the decline of rural culture in the UK.



Bradford McKee
New Grub Street
Interview with photorapher Jonas Bendiksen following the opening of his exhibition "The Places We Live."



Richard Ross
No Place Like Home
Image from photographer Richard Ross's latest project, "Suitable Placement: Juvenile Justice in America"



Teun Voeten
Under Cover
Teun Voeten photograph of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2007. The situation for widows in Afghanistan is desperate...



Teun Voeten
Hell in a Horse Cart
Photo of coal merchant in Shanxi Province, China, by Teun Voeten.



Jason Orton
Going Coastal
Photo of Holliwell Point, Essex County, England by Jason Orton.



Mark Lamster
Ballparks Redux
Metropolis has posted a slideshow of the outtake photographs by Sean Hemmerle for my story on New York's ballparks.



Owen Edwards
Remembering Julius Shulman
Looking back on an afternoon of chocolate, pastrami, and Scotch with modern architecture's iconic photographer.



Mark Lamster
The Photographs of Sze Tsung Leong
A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of touring Antwerp with the photographer Sze Tsung Leong, who was there working on an ongoing project documenting cityscapes.



Mark Lamster
Ezra & Julius
Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller were the alfa and omega of American architectural photography.



Mark Lamster
Sex or Biking?
A set of Tour de France photographs by Brent Humphreys indicates the short visual distance between agony and ecstasy.



Adam Harrison Levy
Cars R Us
Andrew Bush’s photographs, featured in his new book Drive, remind us just how intimate we have become with our cars.



Mark Lamster
European Holiday
I'm off to the Continent, which is a good excuse to dip into the family photo archive for a few reminders of a time when European travel was a bit more of a novelty.



Ars Libri Ltd
Walter Dexel Collection
This remarkable collection of graphic design is from the German Constructivist artist and typographer Walter Dexel.


Ken Worpole
Tidal Pools: Photographs by Jason Orton
Tidal pools were once common along the coast of Britain, particularly at seaside holiday resorts. Although many such pools have been destroyed or exist as ruins, others are being revived thanks to the energies of lido enthusiasts. This photo essay captures their beauty, even in decay.



Adam Harrison Levy
William Klein: Contacts
William Klein made a rare appearance in New York recently to promote his latest book, Contacts. American by birth, he has lived most of his life in Paris. He is now 81.



William Drenttel
Polling Place Photo Project
To commemorate the inauguration of President Barack Obama, please enjoy this short film by Andrew Sloat inspired by Polling Place Photo Project.



Mark Lamster
How the West Was Lost
My reviews of two new photography books.



William Drenttel
The Obama Victory
The Polling Place Photo Project, staged in partnership with The New York Times and AIGA, seeks to visualize democracy in action with photographs by citizens engaged with voting at the polls. Yesterday was Barrack Obama's day, and these photographs are dedicated to him.



William Drenttel
Polling Place Photo Project on November 4, 2008
We are pleased to announce that the Polling Place Photo Project is continuing into the 2008 presidential election, supported by a partnership of The New York Times, AIGA and Design Observer.



Andrew Flamm & Michelle Hauser
Folk Photos
The onset of the digital revolution has made the period for using film finite. Processed prints are becoming obsolete. With the immediate option of discarding an unintended image, a rich library of our unselfconscious selves will no longer be recorded. But it lives here, in these beautiful, poetic and tactile objects.



Michael Bierut
Would It Kill You To Smile?
Thoughts on the enduring influence of bershon, "how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture."



Rick Poynor
Lost America: The Flamingo Motor Hotel
I found this old photo in a box at the back of my attic. It shows a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona where I stayed for a couple of nights in May 1978. I was 20, it was my first visit to the US, and for three weeks I had been touring around on Greyhound buses.



William Drenttel
Polling Place Photo Project on Super Tuesday
Voting on Tuesday, February 5, in the U.S. presidential primaries? We hope you will contribute a photograph to the Polling Place Photo Project.



William Drenttel
Polling Place Photo Project 2008
We are pleased to announce that the Polling Place Photo Project is continuing into the 2008 presidential primaries and election, supported by a new partnership of The New York Times, AIGA and Design Observer.



Tom Vanderbilt
Discipline and Design
On a sweeping and fully realized scale, Richard Ross's photographs probes the disciplinary dynamics in the cruel hidden places you would expect them, and in the banal everyday places you might not have even noticed them.



William Drenttel
Burma (Myanmar), 1989
This slideshow of photographs from 1989 is offered in solidarity with the people of Burma — as they again confront one of the most brutal regimes in the world.



Lorraine Wild
Wallace Berman's Photographs
In 1961, Wallace Berman, a California-based artist, publisher of the proto-zine, Semina, gallerist, and photographer, too a picture of his landlady while he was living in Larkspur, California. We see her (the landlady!) sprawled across a bed dressed in a bra and skirt, casually holding a pistol...



Jessica Helfand
The New Manifest Destiny
When does a picture solidify a news story, and when does it merely sensationalize it? Decisions about words and pictures are made by editors and publishers, designers and photographers — but they are consumed by a public fully capable of an entire range of emotional responses. After this week's events at Virginia Tech, words and pictures do a poor job of communicating outrage and pain. And no amount of compositional ingenuity can reverse what happened.



Jesse Nivens
In Search of Stock(y) Photography
That's right: in the alternate universe of stock photography, attactive people outnumber fat people 84 to one. As a culture, have we taken the idea of "overweight" and completely blocked it out?



William Drenttel
Voting & Religion in America: A Slideshow
The reality, contrary to my perception, is that millions vote in religious settings all across the country, casting this important act of citizenry in distinctly non-secular environments.



DJ Stout
Remembering Ann Richards
To create the famous Texas Monthly cover of Governor Ann Richards astride a Harley, art director DJ Stout used a body double. "For many years, I would run into Ann Richards at my favorite Mexican food lunch spot in downtown Austin and she would always thank me for giving her such a 'sexy body.'"



Kenneth Krushel
The Face Of Oblivion
Faces on supermarket packaging conform to a research-based "psychographic" that hasn't essentially changed in more than two decades. What is it about our self-image that identifies, at least on a consumer basis, with such fictional, even farcical lifestyles?


Michael Bierut
My Phone Call to Arnold Newman
Michael Bierut remembers a 25-year-old phone conversation with the late photographer Arnold Newman.



Julie Lasky
The Photography of Mark Robbins
Mark Robbins'
Households is a collection of portraits in which the sitters are sometimes sitting rooms (or kitchens or bedrooms), and the people are polished, draped, and arrayed like furniture. Composed to resemble architectural plans or elevations — or in some cases the triptychs of medieval altarpieces — the images represent home dwellers and their environments. Flesh, bone, brick, stone, contoured torsos, and varnished chairs assume equal status. The message is simple: You may not be what you eat, but you most certainly are where you live.



Michael Bierut
Design by Committee
"Design by committee" is usually thought to be a bad thing, but it has produced one great piece of architecture, the United Nations Headquarters Building.



Julie Lasky
Edward Hopper, Village Person
My friend opened the door to a minimally furnished skylit room. It had a pot-bellied stove, a painter's easel, and photos framed on the wall of a grim man with long legs. The room was the studio of Edward Hopper. (Slide show by Duane Michals.)



William Drenttel
Small Town Meetings
Zoning regulations are how a town designs its future. They determine what kind of development is encouraged, and what kind is discouraged. In Meetings, Paul Shambroom visited 150 local government meetings in 32 states. The photographs are remarkable in presenting the physical details by which towns gather to determine how they live.



Rick Poynor
Getting Louder: Chinese Design on the March
The “Get it Lounder” design exhibition in Shenzhen, billed as the first of its kind in China, reflected the lifestyle aspirations of its participants. Will Chinese design be able to confront social reality in more overtly critical ways?



Jessica Helfand
Extremely Young and Incredibly Everywhere: The Public Art of Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer's emergent body of work includes film and video, public art installations, theatrical collaboration, expressive typography, and a fairly prolific jumpstart as a writer. Cumulatively, all of his projects — which range from collecting empty pages of famous writers, to constructing parabolas in a public park, to collecting anonymous self-portraits — seem to look for ways to formally address time and space and the human condition.



Rick Poynor
Wisconsin Death Trip: A Psychic History
Michael Lesy’s book Wisconsin Death Trip documented awful events in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, using a town photographer’s pictures. Years later, it remains a spellbinding piece of literary and photographic alchemy.


Jessica Helfand
Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up
"Craft-born embellishments," note one supplier of scrapbooking products, "are penetrating an unexpected market: graphic design."



William Drenttel
Stop The Plant: The Failure of Rendering
There is no single rendering ominous enough to create public fear; no image so compelling as to create political momentum; and no symbol so memorable as to unite the opposition. Whether through artistic renderings or compelling information design, no one has made a visual case against these plants that is wholly effective. This is, I believe, a fundamental failure of design.



Kenneth Krushel
The Gates
Much has been written about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates" project in Central Park in New York City. In the past few days, though, we have received two further reports on this project which we want to share with our readers: an essay by Ken Krushel and a photographic portfolio by Adam Bartos.


Jessica Helfand
My Friend Flickr
Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It’s a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a culture — and it’s a brilliant example of socially networked software because it’s free, its easy, and it makes sense.



Michael Bierut
Robert Polidori's Peripheral Vision
Robert Polidori's photographs depict contemporary architecture in the context of a decidedly imperfect world.



William Drenttel
Bird in Hand: When Does A Copy Become Plagiarism?




Michael Bierut
First Person Shooter
News photographs from Iraq are eerily reminiscent of video game images.



Michael Bierut
Colorama
Grand Central Terminal's enormous Colorama displays by Kodak documented a suburban fantasy world for millions of commuters.



Jessica Helfand
An Instrument of Sufficiently Lucid Cogitation
The legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died on Tuesday at his home in the South of France, always carried a sketchbook with him. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as meditative, while photography was intuitive: though certainly both activities might have been informed by a relentless need to observe and in a sense, preserve the world around him.



Jessica Helfand
Regarding the Photography of Others




Jessica Helfand
The Crisis of Intent




Rick Poynor
Stephen Gill: Behind the Billboard
Designers are battlers against entropy: a vital task, but taking the long view, often a doomed, quixotic mission. Stephen Gill’s photographs, showing the disorderly zones behind billboards, offer a reality check.



Rob Walker
Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes
The many options for digitally antiquing your 21st-century self-expression.



Observed


Cheryl Holmes's next book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades—where are the Black designers?— along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: where did they originate, where have they been, and why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons? With a foreword by Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design, HERE: Where the Black Designers Are will be published next fall by Princeton Architectural Press.

Can ballot design be deemed unconstitutional? More on the phenomenon known as "Ballot Siberia," where un-bracketed candidates often find themselves disadvantaged by being relegated to the end of the ballot.

Designing the Modern World—Lucy Johnston's new monograph celebrating the extraordinary range of British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange—is just out from our friends at Thames&Hudson. More here.

Good news to start your week: design jobs are in demand!

An interview with DB | BD Minisode cohost and The State of Black Design founder Omari Souza about his conference,  and another about his new book. (And a delightful conversation between Souza and Revision Path host Maurice Cherry here.) 

What happens when you let everyone have a hand in the way things should look and feel and perform—including the kids? An inspiring story about one school’s inclusive design efforts

Graphic designer Fred Troller forged a Swiss modernist path through corporate America in a career that spanned five decades. The Dutch-born, Troller—whose clients included, among others, IBM, Faber Castell, Hoffmann LaRoche, Champion International, and the New York Zoological Society—was also an educator, artist, and sculptor. Want more? Help our friends at Volume raise the funds they both need and deserve by supporting the publication of a Troller monograph here.

The Independence Institute is less a think tank than an action tank—and part of that action means rethinking how the framing of the US Constitution might benefit from some closer observation. In order to ensure election integrity for the foreseeable future, they propose a constitutional amendment restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original protections.

Design! Fintech! Discuss amongst yourselves!

The art (and design) of “traffic calming” is like language: it’s best when it is extremely clear and concise, eliminating the need for extra thinking on the receiving end. How bollards, arrows, and other design interventions on the street promote public safety for everyone. (If you really want to go down the design-and-traffic rabbit hole with us here, read about how speculative scenario mapping benefits from something called “digital twins”.)

Opening this week and running through next fall at Poster House in New York, a career retrospective for Dawn Baillie, whose posters for Silence of the Lambs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dirty Dancing, among countless others, have helped shape our experience of cinema. In a field long-dominated by men, Bailie's posters span some thirty-five years, an achievement in itself. (The New York Times reviews it here.)

Can't make it to Austin for SXSW this year? In one discussion, a selection of designers, policymakers, scientists, and engineers sought identify creative solutions to bigger challenges. (The “design track” ends today, but you can catch up with all the highlights here.)

Should there be an Oscar for main title design?

Design contributes hugely to how we spend (okay, waste) time online. But does that mean that screen addiction is a moral imperative for designers? Liz Gorny weighs in, and Brazillian designer Lara Mendonça (who, and we love this, also self-identifies as a philosopher) shares some of her own pithy observations.

Oscar nominees, one poster at a time.

Ellen Mirojnick—the costume designer behind Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Oppenheimer, for which she is 2024 Oscar nominee—shares some career highlights from forty years in film. (Bonus content: we kicked off Season Nine of The Design of Business  | The Business of Design with this conversation.)

Erleen Hatfield, of The Hatfield Group, is the engineer behind many innovative buildings, including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons, whose roof opens like a camera aperture to reveal the sky. Now, she's also one of the newly-minted AIA fellows, an honor awarded to architects—only 3% of their 98,000+ AIA members—who have made significant contributions to the profession.  

Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company co-founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) and digital artist Brendan Dawes, wants to reshape the cinematic experience with a proprietary generative technology that can create films that are different every time they’re shown.

Viewers seem more concerned with Biden's rounded smartphone than with his policies. (We're not discussing the age of the man, here—just his phone!)

Claiming he is “not very good at design,” Riken Yamamoto, a 78-year old Japanese architect, wins the coveted Pritzger Prize. Notes the jury: "Yamamoto’s architecture serves both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously”.

Citizen outcry over Southwest's new cabin design—and in particular, it's new-and-improved-seats—may not be likely to  result in changes any time soon, but the comments (Ozempic seats!) are highly entertaining. (“Is there an option to just stand?”)

More than 50 years ago, a small group of design educators tried to decolonize design in Africa, hoping to teach African designers how to use research and design for their people and their nations by leveraging their own indigenous knowledge and local customs. While their pioneering effort was suppressed after a few short years by the colonial authorities, their approach to teaching design still resonates today: consider the story of François-X. N.I. Nsenga, an indigenous African designer who grew up in Belgian Rwanda and studied in British Kenya at Africa's first university-based design program. For more on the cultural history, design philosphy, and the "Europeanisation" of colonial Africa, you'll find a conversation with Nsenga in Gjoko Muratovski's book, Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice

At turns dystopian and delightful, the future of AI-based digital assistants seem poised to communicate through the “emotion and information display” of new constellations of hardware. (Including … orbs!) Like concept cars, they're not on the market just yet, but developmental efforts at more than a few telecoms suggest they're clearly on the horizon. More here.

Jha D Amazi, a principal and the director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab for MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Design Group, examines how spatializing memory can spark future collective action and provide a more accurate and diverse portrayal of our nation's complicated past. She gave this year’s annual Richard Saivetz ’69 Memorial Architectural Lecture at Brandeis last month, entitled, “Spatializing Memory”.

Self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” and style icon Iris Apfel has died. She was 102.

“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” observes Steve Matteson, the designer behind Aptos—Microsoft's new “default” font. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g." Adds Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for design: “It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it”. Resistant to change (or simply longing for Calibri), font geeks are not having it. Fun fact? Aptos was originally called Bierstadt. You may well imagine, as we did, that this was a nod to the 19th century German-American landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt—but the actual translation is “Beer City”. 

In Dallas, the Better Block Foundation is sponsoring a design contest called Creating Connections, aimed at addressing the growing epidemic of loneliness by exploring the impact of design on how people connect with others.

Good design is invisible, but bad design is unignorable. Elliot Vredenburg, Associate Creative Director at Mother Design, bares it all.

Arab design is a story of globalism, evidenced through collaborations with the Arab diaspora living, working, and creating abroad, and with the expatriate community in the Middle East and North Africa. More on the highlights (and insights) from Doha Design 2024 here.

Organizations that embrace diversity tend to foster innovation, challenge ingrained thought patterns, and enhance financial performance. Its true benefits emerge when leaders and employees cultivate a sense of inclusion. How architecture is reckoning with the cultural and economic challenges of—and demands for—a more inclusive workforce.



Jobs | March 19