Found

One of my favorite tumblr’s has to be ‘Found’ a collection of images for the magazine National Geographic that seem to span the twentieth century. From Korean school girls playing accordions to men handling venomous snakes it opens up a world that for many was not just unseen but unattainable. For people who probably will …

Sister Act

From August Sander to Diane Arbus, twins have exerted a strange fascination for the photographer. There’s something about people who look identical that challenges us to reveal those slight differences that the human eye might miss but not the shutter. Ariko Inaoka continues this tradition with her photo essay on identical twin sisters’ living in …

Neighborhood Watch

A while back I posted about Gail Albert Halaban, She shot a series of images under the title ‘Out my window’ which focused on the views from New York apartments of neighboring buildings and their inhabitants. I titled it ‘Somebody’s watching you’. Perhaps I should have saved the headline for the work of Arne Svenson. …

Small Trades

What we do for a living occupies the largest part of our lives. Only sleep comes close. Some are lucky enough to do something of monumental consequence in their work but most of us just play a small part in keeping the world ticking over. Such is the lot of the men and women who …

It’s Grim up North

England in the eighties was grim. I know. I grow up there. When I think of it now certain images come to mind, none of them pretty. The interior of social security offices with their low ceilings, stained carpets and dispiriting queues. The exterior of abandoned factories grass growing through concrete floors, once alive with …

Serpentine

  Snakes get a bad press. Yes some of them may bite people and have a tendency to be rather poisonous but many others are extremely pretty, as Mark Laita’s book Serpentine shows. These simple images emphasize the pattern of the skin and vividness of the colors to create a book that almost makes me …

Searching for the Perfect Beat

The exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise that depicts the record collection of hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa is a work of genius. People’s record collections are always a source of fascination. Searching through some MP3 files hardly has the romance of flicking through stacks of scratched LP’s. The site of those battered sleeves in cardboard boxes …

Jeffrey Smart: Urban Artist

  The death of precisionist painter Jeffrey Smart in June saw the demise of one of Australia’s most distinctive artists. Famous for his urban landscapes, Smart had studies in Paris under Fernand Leger in Paris in the late 1940’s and something of the blockishness of cubism is present in his hyper realist images along with …