From Diane Arbus Revelations
IN THE DARKROOM
Diane’s darkroom was in the West Village at 29 Charles Street, just off Seventh Avenue South, in the basement of an old apartment building. It was approached by going through an opening in the front wall, down a flight of steps from the sidewalk, and through a tunnel that ran the depth of the building. Emerging into a courtyard, you turned sharp left and there was a battered black door....more →
Introduction from the book
CERTAIN WOMEN
In the spring of 1991, when my two children were nine and fourteen years old, I routinely found myself delivering them to their school in Lower Manhattan. For various reasons, this often involved more than simply pausing the vehicle for a few seconds while they disembarked, but meant setting foot on the sidewalk or entering the school building, where I invariably found myself greeting other parents, mostly mothers, who were similarly occupied....more →
Afterword from the book
ROUNDUP: PERCEPTION, MEMORY, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND FACT
When my son Alex was seven and still went by his childhood name, I took him with me on a trip to photograph the spring roundup on a Texas ranch. We went to witness and record a routine act of animal husbandry that has a mythic place in our national consciousness. The image of the American cowboy herding cattle or horses is, thanks to countless photographic renderings in films, on television and in advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes, a clear construct in the minds of much of the world’s population....more →
Introduction from the book
LOBBYISTS
For those of us who live outside the confines of Washington, D.C., the image of the lobbyist is so monotonously despicable that, given the richness of human nature, the reality must surely be both more complex and far more intriguing. If, as it often seems, for every interest there is a lobbyist, it would be logical for the world of lobbying to be a microcosm of the world itself—and, in my recent experience, it more or less is. Lobbying is—sort of—the world only more so: no filler, just interests...more →
An illustrated talk given at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France
RICHARD AVEDON AND HIS UNSUNG ART OF COLLABORATION
Unlike virtually all other photographers who saw themselves as artists, and were seeking the attention of the museum establishment in the middle of the twentieth century, Richard Avedon was not a lone individual with a camera and a darkroom. He was rather the epicenter of an organization that was a whirlwind of carefully selected professionals and friends that spewed out photographs, both personal and commercial, sometimes several times a day, each meticulously constructed and imbued with his own highly distinct imprimatur....more →