Writings

On photography and generosity

Somewhere around the end of last summer, I posted a photograph on Facebook. It was a rather unknown black and white photograph by the late Saul Leiter of his sister Deborah. It was made in 1947. I ...

I remember

I remember writing these words, from the play In the Park by Edgar Oliver, in my notebook immediately after I saw him perform the piece last summer: Longing is the only magic of which we are capab...

The spirit of the case

Judy Fiskin says that Walker Evans succeeded where his FSA boss Roy Stryker failed "because Evans settled for art. Stryker succumbed to the false promise of photography, strove to represent litera...

The bees

Mark Strand, the late Poet Laureate for the Library of Congress, once wrote about the passionate feelings engendered by family photographs, noting that, in contrast, "When confronted with images o...

Miles from our home

"[The photographer's eye is] a dreaming eye: quick to seize the instant in which the fortuitous dance of forms reveals the essential truth, the ineffable thusness of the object. Only in such momen...

The photographer's non-photography syllabus: Mark Steinmetz

TIS is happy to present the second installment of “The Photographer’s Non-photography Syllabus,” for which we asked a number of folks to share with us the five or so books that they would recommen...

Auto care, sincerely

"Personal and historical associations, irrational attachments and affections, to take their place as legitimate elements of the aesthetic experience,” wrote Dr. L.A. Reid in "A Study in Aesthetics...

The dog who catches the car gets killed, sometimes

When I moved to the Kensington section of Philadelphia, I was shocked by what I saw going on: drugs, sex and violence were openly sold and exchanged on the streets, and while the police had no app...

A round and about

"You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story . . . I myself prefer to say that a story...

The photographer's non-photography syllabus: Christian Patterson

Today we very happily launch “The Photographer’s Non-photography Syllabus,” for which we asked a number of folks to share with us the five or so books that they would recommend to other photograph...