In Roger Ballen’s “Boarding House” there are few actual subjects with which to identify. The already claustrophobic, airless interiors of the building have been further flattened by Ballen’s bright flash, and in the shallow compositional field that results one finds not whole bodies but parts.

Epstein began with a straightforward if ambitious premise—to depict our nation’s varied energy infrastructure—but quickly expanded his remit to include several notions of power that course through American society as invisibly as does electricity through the national grid. Cooling towers and reactors factor in many of the images, yet each kind of power—not only literal, but also political, economic, and the power of nature—impacts upon the others.

8 Natural Handstands (1969) is emblematic of the small but potent body of sculptures, photographs, and performances Kinmont created in the late 1960s and early ’70s, many of which were also on view in this exhibition, his first solo show in thirty-eight years.

Published in Aperture 197 (Winter 2009).
Seen one at a time, Jochen Lempert’s black-and-white photographs of the natural world and its inhabitants do not make great claims upon a viewer. Some have artless compositions; others seem out of focus or to have no subject at all. Encountered in aggregate, however, as in Field Work, the first [...]

My interview with Luc Sante, about his new book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Yeti/Verse Chorus Press), has just been published on Artforum.com. Click through not only to read his ruminations on this early-twentieth-century phenomenon, but also to see a slide show of additional images from the book. In the course of our [...]

Published on Artforum.com on September 25, 2009. To see the review in context, click here. The exhibition remains on view at Matthew Marks Gallery until October 24, 2009.
Some of the pictures in this exhibition were published a decade ago in Doubletake magazine; most have never been exhibited. They were made from 1956 to 1958, while [...]

Surrounded by condemned buildings and not yet eager for more human subjects, photography Danny Lyon set out to document the broad swaths of downtown being razed for two major infrastructure projects: a new ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge on the East Side and the World Trade Center on the West Side. [...]

Published in Artforum, February 2009. To learn more about the book that accompanied this exhibition, click here.

This was Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s first New York solo exhibition in over seven years, and coincided with Aperture’s publication of the first English-language monograph dedicated to the artist. Ghirri, who worked consistently from the early 1970s until his [...]

The Asia- and Europe-based photographer Michael Wolf is known for his fine-art and editorial photographs depicting rapid growth in Asian cities. A new series of photographs made in Chicago, “Transparent City,” goes on view this week at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and is collected in a book just published by Aperture. Interview, [...]

Over the weekend my review of Sharon Core’s new exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery was published on Artforum.com. It begins: “What pictorial genre seems to require less interpretive acumen than the painted still life? Accumulations of fruit and fish and fowl are all exquisite surfaces, and invite surface readings. But photographer Sharon Core, after making a [...]

Published in Artforum, November 2008. To see images from the exhibition, click here.
In a passage in his journal dated February 5, 1855, Henry David Thoreau asserted, “In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or characters of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important [...]

Earlier this year, William Cordova, whose artwork frequently references human rights struggles, organized two exhibitions for Ingalls & Associates in Miami. One, titled “Casa de Carton,” features an intergenerational range of contemporary artists, and the other, “Up Against the Wall,” the photographs of journalist Ilka Hartmann. Both exhibitions will open at Branch Gallery in Durham, [...]

Published on Artforum.com, September 27, 2007. To see the review in context, click here.

This exhibition is the largest US presentation of Zurich-based Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi’s photographs to date. It is an assembly of archetypes, offering still lifes, portraits, and landscapes rendered with a formal clarity that corresponds to received notions of Swiss precision or [...]

Published on Artforum.com on April 16, 2007. To see the review in context, click here.

In contrast to the haphazard chic that characterizes neighboring art spaces and boutiques, nearly everything about this one-year-old Lower East Side gallery is rigorously composed, from its visual identity to its intriguing program of contemporary and historical exhibitions, avant-garde film screenings, [...]

Published in Artforum, March 2007.
A room on a stage is typically missing one side, the virtual “fourth wall” through which the audience peers; the rooms depicted in the photographs Sabine Hornig included in this show are, unexpectedly, absent two sides. In each of the photos on view, the street-facing window of a Berlin storefront (there [...]

Published on Artforum.com on January 4, 2007. To see the review in context, click here.

Since her solo debut at this gallery, photographer Melanie Schiff has moved out of the studio and into the world, trading fussily arranged, evenly lit still lifes for more casual, serendipitous compositions of everyday objects. These photos are hymns to natural [...]

The Cirkut camera, introduced just after the turn of the 20th century, charted—by means of a patented spring-arm rotation technology with a 360-degree range—the development of American society for the better part of 40 years. [...]

Published on Artforum.com on June 21, 2006. To see the review in context, click here.

Susan Sontag, relentlessly curious, roamed widely across the cultural landscape, the specificity of her writing compensating for her occasional lack of specialist knowledge. This jewel-box exhibition, which draws its title from her thin, seminal book first published in 1977, acknowledges her [...]

Published in Artforum, summer 2006. For additional images from and information about the exhibition, click here.

For her New York solo debut, Italian photographer Luisa Lambri presented a four-year minisurvey consisting of just seventeen photographs, and the restrained selection underscored the importance of editing to her practice. Lambri spends considerable time in each of the modernist [...]

Published in Artforum, May 2006.

On January 7, 2000, at 10:37 PM, Munich- and New York-based photographer Barbara Probst first employed a technique that remains unique among contemporary artists. Using a remote-control device, she simultaneously triggered the shutters of twelve cameras strategically positioned around a New York City rooftop, and the resultant set of poster-size prints, [...]

Published on Artforum.com on April 12, 2006. To see the review in context, click here.
Sze Tsung Leong’s gorgeous, abundantly detailed, medium- to large-size photographs of Chinese cities undergoing cataclysmic change fuse Edward Burtynsky’s synoptic aerial views, Elger Esser’s blanched palette, and the patient attentiveness evident in underappreciated Japanese photographer Ryuji Miyamoto’s mid-’80s “Architectural Apocalypse” photographs. [...]

Published on Artforum.com on December 14, 2005. For more information about the exhibition, click here; to see the review in context, click here.
Had Richard Prince organized this show, he would’ve called it “Twenty Women Looking in Every Direction.” But Harry Callahan, an acclaimed though under-exhibited photographer perhaps best known for loving, often experimental portraits of [...]

Published in Untitled Magazine.
Louise Lawler would be the first to admit that an exhibition of her work is a product of forces beyond her control. For twenty-five years, most often with the aid of a camera, she has demonstrated that an artwork on the wall in front of a viewer—hers included—is a nodal point in [...]

Published on Artforum.com on October 25, 2004. To see the review in context, click here.
Like the two slim poetry volumes Rimbaud published by age 20, David Wojnarowicz’s “Rimbaud in New York” photos, shot in his early twenties, are a fully realized aesthetic statement. The forty-four small black-and-white photographs in this show (accompanied by a selection [...]