Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor|Essays

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.

Rick Poynor|Essays

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.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Dom Sylvester Houédard’s Cosmic Typewriter

Dom Sylvester Houédard: Benedictine monk, champion of concrete poetry, and master of the “typestract.”

Rick Poynor|Essays

Herbert Spencer and the Decisive Detail

In Herbert Spencer’s most memorable photographs, signs of official communication fray into visual poetry.

Rick Poynor|Essays

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.

Rick Poynor|Essays

True Stories: A Film about People Like Us

Ambiguous but prescient, David Byrne’s film True Stories is a classic piece of postmodern pop anthropology.

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Museum of Communicating Objects

Orhan Pamuk’s The Innocence of Objects is an illuminating guide to his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul.

Rick Poynor|Photos

Demonstrations, Democracy and Design

After demonstrations in 2011, Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya became a carnivalesque village of protest.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Why the Activist Poster is Here to Stay

Digital communication has given posters produced to contest an outrage or support a cause a new lease of life.

Rick Poynor|Essays

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|Essays

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|Essays

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.