The US-Mexico border is not exactly a welcoming place for documentary photographers. And yet, for the past seven years, David Taylor has been photographing across 690 miles of that politically rigid, and altogether socially porous, demarcation. In that time, he…
Born out of a conversation in 2002 between an SMFA graduate student (Sean Horton) and instructor (Matthew Nash) about the viability of bringing arts coverage in Boston to the web, Big Red & Shiny has since been a labor of…
Those of us with our heads in the clouds of art theory sometimes forget that it’s enough to take pleasure in looking at photographs. I have to remind myself that the materiality of works of art can surpass the concepts…
At Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center through December 18, Vivian Maier: A Woman’s Lens may be the first exhibition of the elusive (some would say, reclusive) photographer’s work in the Greater Boston area, but it coincides with Self-Portraits…
In retrospect, it seems only fitting that I should see Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video installations at the Davis Museum. It’s been years since I last uttered the words “esse is percipi,”1 but those conversations (arguments, really) involving Bishop Berkeley…
Believe it or not, An Enduring Vision was an exhibition catalog before it ever reached the Herb Ritts Gallery, published by the MFA in 2011. And it was part and parcel of a collection of some 6,000 photographs before being…
Title: “Limbic” Artist: Kathryn Parker Almanas Exhibit: Pre-Existing Condition Gallery: Yellow Peril Gallery There are only seven photographs in the first gallery, but they pack a punch to the gut. The immediate response upon walking through the door is…
Harold Feinstein,Two Men & a Boy Contemplate, Coney Island, 1950 “It’s a nickel a question,” he joked. At that point, I suppose I already owed Harold Feinstein five cents, since I had just asked if I could ask him…
Earlie Hudnall, Jr., Lady in Black Hat with Feathers, 1990, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist. © 1990 Earlie Hudnall Interspersed throughout three galleries of vivid paintings and sculptures, the silver gelatin prints on…
What is queer photography? Do we know it when we see it? Or does the definition hold a certain slippage, the paradox of any deconstructive category? By the late 1980s, amidst a mounting backlash from conservative political factions, photographers were…
If you’re in the mood for Neo-Victorian drag iconography torn from the pages of comic book fantasies (and, let’s face it, who isn’t?), then Dress Up should be your next destination. On view now through September 10 at Panopticon…
Potato Power, LaJoie Growers LLC, Van Buren, Maine 2012 #1/5 23×29″ Pigment print ©Caleb Charland We think we know how photographs are made. It’s an almost instantaneous assumption that informs our perceptions, to some degree or another, in the…
Victoria Crayhon (Providence, RI), Untitled, Auburn, NY, 2010, from the series “Thoughts On Romance From the Road,” Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches, courtesy of the artist We’re used to a certain type of photography in the New…
David Hilliard The Tale is True (DH237) from A Tale is True 2012 Courtesy of the artist and Carroll and Sons, Boston. It’s only right that The Tale is True come to Boston’s Carroll and Sons Gallery. I’ve been…
The opening reception of Toshio Shibata, Constructed Landscapes at PEM on Wednesday April 17 drew well over 200 visitors, from affiliated artists to friends of the museum (which includes, as it turns out, the consulate of Japan in Boston),…
Clifford Landon Pun Opium, No Pun Intended, 2011 Digital print on plinth, 36″ x 54 Image Courtesy Melissa Blackall Photography It sounds like a karaoke bar, a din of voices carrying on private conversations while someone in the back…
The decision to pair Guillermo Srodek-Hart’s Interiors with Lynn Saville’s Vacancy is so compelling that I expected it to have been a curatorial strategy as carefully crafted as military tactics. But longtime gallery director and owner Arlette Kayafas knows the…
So you’ve seen Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street at the Museum of Fine Arts and just can’t help wanting more? That is quite possibly the third of life’s proverbial certainties, and the only one worth indulging. Fortunately, all you have…
There’s no question that Bruce Davidson is a lion of twentieth century photography, and with good reason. His silver gelatin prints are atmospheric, transporting viewers to a rough and tumble 1960s Harlem neighborhood. Like the work of Lewis Hine, Walker…