David and Daniel
Forty years after the dirty wars and Pinochet’s coup, photographer David Burnett journeys back to Chile to visit the subject of his most famous image.
Forty years after the dirty wars and Pinochet’s coup, photographer David Burnett journeys back to Chile to visit the subject of his most famous image.
Nathan Thornburgh Roads & Kingdoms Sep 2013 Permalink
A young widow deals with attraction, ghosts, and patients while working in a mental facility.
"Gail refrained from telling her mother about Willem, maybe out of defiance if nothing else. When you live in your childhood home, jobless, for three years, it’s hard not to become something like a teenager again. Gail would be happy to report on her regained self-sufficiency, to tell her mother that she’d received crisis intervention training to defend herself against and restrain these 'crazies.' But her mother wanted to picture Gail dating people, not putting them in headlocks."</p>
Jen Julian New Delta Review Feb 2013 25min Permalink
How to photograph Los Angeles from a helicopter.
Michael Light, Lawrence Weschler The Believer Nov 2010 20min Permalink
A woman agrees to be a photographer for a couple of her adulterous friends; slightly NSFW.
"I walked around the room, taking shots of the empty bed. I took a shot of the clouds outside, and another of Bill and Marie. I snapped the pictures quickly and flung them across the floral comforter with what I felt was the boldness of a pornographer. I took a shot of those dolls. I waved the photograph in the air and watched the ghostly forms darken into a row of Raggedy Anns. They had black circles for eyes and red triangles for noses. Their mouths were thin, red slits. Smile lines ran from the corners of their mouths up to their cheeks."
Natalie Rogers Specter Magazine Apr 2013 10min Permalink
The diarist and photographer Peter Beard, known both for his series documenting a mass elephant starvation and for discovering the supermodel Iman on a Nairobi street, reflects on his life of “drugs, debt, and beautiful women” while recovering from being trampled by an elephant.
Leslie Bennetts Vanity Fair Nov 1996 30min Permalink
Lessons from the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.
James Panero New Criterion Jan 2013 10min Permalink
A wedding photographer catches up with his past clients.
Matt Mendelsohn Washingtonian Dec 2012 40min Permalink
A profile of photographer Richard Avedon from early in his career.
Winthrop Sargeant New Yorker Nov 1958 35min Permalink
A conversation on the “bedeviling sorts of indeterminacies one encounters the deeper one drills.”
Errol Morris, Lawrence Weschler Public Books Jun 2012 25min Permalink
Ten photographs serve as milestones in this romance with fantastical overtones.
"Vaughan captured pieces of the world—never as it was, but as it could have been, as it almost was. As it might actually be, if we just looked around the edges and noticed the magic."
Kat Howard Lightspeed Jan 2012 10min Permalink
“I turned to see Eva padding around the room, naked, dipping a small plastic wand into the bottle of bubble soap she’d bought at the market… Sometime in the far future, when I was lying on my deathbed, I said, this was the moment I wanted to remember.”
On the relationship between travel and photography.
Rolf Potts Places Journal May 2012 Permalink
The author muses on the markers we use to identify ourselves and other people – from names to photographs to fingerprints.
Errol Morris New York Times May 2012 1h25min Permalink
In 1979, a Pulitzer was given to “an unnamed photographer of United Press International” who documented a mass execution in Iran.
His name is Jahangir Razmi – and, nearly three decades later, he wants the credit.
On the popular iPhone app.
Just the day before, President Barack Obama had signed on and begun sending out photos. This seemed like a real sign that Instagram had arrived. Obama already has accounts on Flickr and Facebook. He (or his people) must have seen something unique and wonderful in Instagram's audience, some way to reach people via that channel that it couldn't through others. When the President joins your network, it's news. And while it's great news, it can be the kind of thing a company isn't prepared for. But as it turns out, Obama is a fractional compared to Justin Bieber.
The Vancouver riots and an unforgettable image.
Chris Ballard Sports Illustrated Dec 2011 20min Permalink
An essay drawn from the introduction of Davidson’s iconic book Subway, first published in 1986:
To prepare myself for the subway, I started a crash diet, a military fitness exercise program, and early every morning I jogged in the park. I knew I would need to train like an athlete to be physically able to carry my heavy camera equipment around in the subway for hours every day. Also, I thought that if anything was going to happen to me down there I wanted to be in good shape, or at least to believe that I was. Each morning I carefully packed my cameras, lenses, strobe light, filters, and accessories in a small, canvas camera bag. In my green safari jacket with its large pockets, I placed my police and subway passes, a few rolls of film, a subway map, a notebook, and a small, white, gold-trimmed wedding album containing pictures of people I’d already photographed in the subway. In my pants pocket I carried quarters for the people in the subway asking for money, change for the phone, and several tokens. I also carried a key case with additional identification and a few dollars tucked inside, a whistle, and a small Swiss Army knife that gave me a little added confidence. I had a clean handkerchief and a few Band-Aids in case I found myself bleeding.
Bruce Davidson New York Review of Books Dec 2011 10min Permalink
These were the people I lived with, these were my friends, these were my family, this was myself. I’d photograph people dancing while I was dancing Or people having sex while I was having sex. Or people drinking while I was drinking.
Nan Goldin, Stephen Westfall BOMB Magazine Sep 1991 15min Permalink
A profile of the famed photographer.
Charlie LeDuff Vanity Fair Apr 2008 25min Permalink
A suitcase was smuggled from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War containing negatives from three photographers would later become legends and all die in war zones. The suitcase disappeared.
Dan Kaufman The Nation Jan 2011 Permalink
If Annie Leibovitz sold her work through the traditional channels of the art world, she would have amassed a small fortune. But at the tail end of a career that has snubbed art galleries and collectors, she is destitute.
John Gapper The Financial Times Oct 2010 15min Permalink
Seventeen years after taking the iconic “Afghan Girl” photograph for National Geographic, Steve McCurry went back to find her.
Cathy Newman National Geographic Apr 2002 Permalink
A mission in Baghdad to let a photojournalist get a shot of an insurgent corpse ends up getting a Marine killed.
Dexter Filkins New York Times Magazine Aug 2008 25min Permalink