We asked Luc Sante to tell us about a picture that meant something to him and why. Sante’s The Other Paris will be published next fall. He teaches at Bard.
This photograph — 8 x 10, gelatin silver, poorly washed — stands naked before us, bereft of almost everything that once tethered it to an event it was intended to record, albeit after the fact. It arrived, via eBay, from the effects of a police detective assigned to one of several possible precincts in Brooklyn in the 1930s. None of those facts is conveyed by the photo or its reverse; they derive from scattered clues in or on other photos in the lot, and from specks of information grudgingly supplied by the vendor.
It was taken in a bar, as you can tell from the foot rail, perhaps also from the mosaic tiles, and maybe also from the cuspidor, if anyone recognizes that antique object. The package to its left says “Philadelphia:” it contained Phillies cigars. The cellophane wrapper of one lies a foot or so to the right. There is also a dime. Outside the bar is a distinctive wrought-iron fence of a sort you can still find in the brownstone districts of the Borough of Churches. The angle of its shadow makes me think that the time is near sunset — or would that be sunrise? — and perhaps that the bar is three steps down from the sidewalk.
The picture’s reason for being is the pointer, looking like a collar stay, aimed at a white circle under the rail. But what is in that circle? Something small enough to resist magnification. A dot of blood? A hair? A trace of powder? We will never know, any more than we can know what happened there in that bar. The door has been locked and the key thrown away. But I can’t stop looking at it. The picture encloses a moment of time, a piece of truth, something so specific that it becomes an abstraction. It is a permanent mystery, and it won’t let go.
Kija Lucas: A Taxonomy of Belonging | SF Camerawork
Lucas explores the ambiguous nature of "home" in a series of formal still lifes.
Lucas Blalock: Object Relations
Emile, Man of the Future, 2016-17, barely even looks like a man. The large photograph, installed in Lucas Blalock’s first solo museum show, at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in downtown Los Angeles through July 21.
A Retrospective Presents 40 Years of Dawoud Bey's Empathetic Photographs
Like Harlem Redux, Bey’s latest series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, its title a reference to a line in Langston Hughes’s classic poem Dream Variations, applies the photographer’s compassionate sense of looking to a historically charged landscape.
W.M. Hunt
Tupper, Graduation, 1903 We asked W.M. Hunt, pho...
Lucinda Devlin
In the 1990s, Lucinda Devlin gained significant at...
Rosamond Purcell’s Cabinet of Curiosities
On the occasion of her first retrospective at the Addison Gallery, the photographer speaks to Lyle Rexer about photographing natural-history specimens in the “kingdom of the dead.”
William Helburn: Ad Man at Staley-Wise Gallery
William Helburn’s work spans fashion, editorial, and advertising photography, but one feature united it all: desire.
Vince Aletti Dives into His Archive
photograph's editor, Jean Dykstra, speaks to longtime contributor Vince Aletti about his new book, The Drawer (Self Publish Be Happy).
Roxana Marcoci
MoMA's senior photography curator talks about her cross-disciplinary approach to curatorial work, Wolfgang Tillmans, An-My Lê, and more.
Christopher Rauschenberg
Charles Harbutt, Blind Boy, New York City, 1961. C...
Amy Arbus
We asked Amy Arbus to tell us about a picture that...
Lucinda’s World Part III: Weathered Chromes
[caption id="attachment_12918" align="alignnone" w...