Observations

When you sit back and watch your new HD television, the shape you are looking at has a history. It also has a future, because it is influencing more than you might imagine. And that includes still photography. Read more on Wider…
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Most Americans think of the twentieth century as essentially an American century, and with good reason. It was (mostly) the period in which the United States grew economically and politically to dominate the world stage. It was also the period when photography blossomed professionally, and as art, and for amateurs, so perhaps we shouldn’t...
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I was just reading a review in the Financial Times of two new gallery shows featuring William Eggleston, viewable here… It begins, “To his army of fans, William Eggleston is a photographer who can do no wrong.” Now I don’t count myself a fan of Eggleston. There are many things I admire about his...
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A visit recently to London’s annual Frieze Art Fair reminded me not only of the huge gulf between photography-as-art and photography-as-reporting, but also between attitudes towards beauty. Probably most photographers see it as part of their job to reveal, enhance or even manufacture attractiveness in their images. If you work commercially (and that includes...
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I started by titling this ‘Why Black and White?’, then soon realised that the more important question is when. It’s no secret that digital shooting has opened up new possibilities for black and white photography because of now-sophisticated channel control. What previously took strongly coloured filters in front of the lens at the time...
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(With deference to Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami in the matter of the title). Curators, which I take to include gallery owners and art-crit academics, don’t talk like you and me. They could, but that would be silly, because the job of a curator in fine art is to establish a knowingness that is...
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This is really a strange term when I think about it, and would have had no meaning at all before digital. With film you could push-process, or over-develop, or cross-process, but you couldn’t meaningfully over-process. But now you certainly can. Caffeinated processing has become the new standard for some photographers. Read more on Over-processing…
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A show opened this summer at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London. For 20 years the photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper has been travelling to the most extreme locations on the planet, such as Prime Head, the furthest extremity of Antarctica which, as the exhibition notes point out, has had fewer human visitors than...
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or Does composition matter? The appeal of most photographs lie in one of two ways — or a combination of both. Through the subject, and through the way in which the image is put together: the composition, broadly speaking. Of course, making an appealing photograph begs the larger question of aiming to please, which is another...
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A Mandari wrestler at a cattle camp near Terekeka, in the southern state of Bahr al-Jabal, Sudan. Wrestling bouts are regular fixtures between cattle camps, and test the strength and combat skills of young men. They rarely last longer than a minute and are won when one of the combatants throws or wrestles his...
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