The Beats are Back.

If you’re looking for someone to blame for the existence of hipsters, look no further than the beatniks. The iconic fifties youth group, made famous by one of their earliest practitioners Jack Kerouac, are clearly the template in look and attitude for many a modern-day Williamsburg trendy judging by the images in Larry Fink’s recently …

American Colour

  Tony Ray Jones is a photographer famous for his black and white work. Yet like many great practioneers he was also not bad at color either. His work from 1962-65 has been collected in the book ’American Color’. The shots are mainly taken in New York and remind me of Saul Leiter’s early color …

Finding Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier is one of the most mysterious figures in street photography. A woman with obvious skill and a unique eye for the small absurdities of life that seemingly made no attempt to get her vast body of work, totaling some 100,000 images, published. If not for a chance purchase of negatives by John Maloof, …

The Park

Lauren Henkin’s pictures of Central Park put a new spin on an old photographic favorite. The images often feature people looking for their own piece of solitude in the heart of the most intense city on earth. Of course that city cannot be totally obliterated and is visible through its towering skyscrapers that poke their …

Yolanda Dorda

The paintings of Yolanda Dorda feel reminiscent of Bonnard or some of the post-impressionists. However the content is in comparison, highly sexualized and shows Dorda is clearly not afraid to explore the darker side of her psyche.        

The City of Lost Bullets

Fantastic photo essay on gang warfare in Caracas courtesy of Lurdes R. Basoli

Oh to be Young, Beautiful and on the Game.

The title of Francois Ozon’s new film ‘Jeune et Jolie ‘could be the title of a Francoise Hardy song from the late sixties, full of wistful desires and longings. In fact it starts in territory not so very far away from this in the form of a holiday romance in a sultry southern French beach …

The Lover

No one writes about romance quite like the French. Intellectually and emotionally their very best writers are on it, picking over each liaison from every conceivable angle until the familiar and expected way of viewing the subject has evaporated under the laser heat of their enquiries. ‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras is a case in …

Ravaged

‘Across this Ravaged Land’ is a depressingly beautiful collection of African animal images by photographer Nick Brandt. As the title suggests these are not your classic animal beauty shots, even though they are stunning pictures. ‘Across this Ravaged land’ is more of a dire warning to humanity of the consequences of excessive poaching and environmental …

Redeployment

If you set yourself the task of writing about war experiences you set yourself the task of battling everyone from Wilfred Own to Leo Tolstoy. It’s a fight most don’t win. Even with tales that are singularly compelling, the conventions of the genre intervene to make them strangely stylized and predictable. There’s a kind of …