Photography

Rick Poynor|Essays

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|Essays

Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up

"Craft-born embellishments," note one supplier of scrapbooking products, "are penetrating an unexpected market: graphic design."

William Drenttel|Essays

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 …

Kenneth Krushel|Essays

The Gates

Much has been written about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates" project in Central Park in New York City, including an outstanding Guest Observer essay by Julie Lasky here at Design Observer. In the past few days, though, we have received …

Kenneth Krushel|Essays

The Gates

Much has been written about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates" project in Central Park in New York City, including an outstanding Guest Observer essay by Julie Lasky here at Design Observer. In the past few days, though, we have received …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

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 …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Robert Polidori's Peripheral Vision

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

William Drenttel|Essays

Bird in Hand: When Does A Copy Become Plagiarism?

Left: STEP Inside Design, Cover, Jan.-Feb. 2005. Right: Photograph by Victor Schrager.Every once and a while, the plagiarism of one artist's work by another crosses the line, or so I thought. I wrote a different piece for Design Observer a …

Michael Bierut|Essays

First Person Shooter

News photographs from Iraq are eerily reminiscent of video game images.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Colorama

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

Jessica Helfand|Essays

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 …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Regarding the Photography of Others

In an interview published in yesterday's Guardian, David Hockney makes a case for the implausibility of photographic truth: asserting that photography is as fictional as painting, his argument is an odd sort of inversion of Susan Sontag's …