Judging the Photography Awards: Why Not Just Paint It?
Photographs can favor artistry over other values such as documentary witness, hard-boiled realism, formal simplicity, or critical provocation. But should they win awards for it?
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Southern US Hit With Storm of Kindness and Humor
It was a disaster, all right: thousands of vehicles stranded; major highways closed; entire cities shut down in eerie silence. Reminds you of the Congress, doesn’t it?
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The Face of the Future in Kiev’s Battle for Middle Earth
I’ve argued before that conflict photography is accumulating evidence of a of disturbing change in the political and cultural dimensions of modern violence: that it is becoming less modern.
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What Can You Really See From Space?
The problem I want to raise is that once you’ve been given a literal description of the image, your imagination may shut down too soon.
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Fashion Week in the Big House
Shouldn’t there be some recognition of the difference between one of the more dangerous environments on earth and one of the most privileged?
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On any Given Day, What May be Needed is Not 400 Photographs, But Just 1
There is much more to the "photo excess" discussion than the likelihood of being overwhelmed. Bob Hariman weighs in.
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She is Seeing Terror. You are Seeing Terror. We Will Continue to See Terror.
The narrow aperture is as salient as the face behind it, while the blinds on each side make a thick frame designed to obscure. The message is clear: what you see through the aperture of the camera is not the whole picture.
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On That Open Carry Parking Lot "Shooting"
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help seeing (that profile) view as a targeting, and exactly the angle that a real enemy would take. More to the point, we can see how the potential for violence invites a greater potential for violence.
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Mineral, Vegetable and Animal: after the Quebec Tank Car Explosion, Robert Hariman’s Meditation on Oil
I know human beings were decimated without purpose. Nonetheless, I think this photograph captures something important about the larger economy of life and death in a machine age.
Continue ReadingRobert Hariman On Daniel Etter's Viral Taksim Square Protest Photo
Neither quite color nor black and white, it seems to create a dimension halfway between documentary reportage and artistic reflection.
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When Words are Photoshopped
So it turns out that there really are two sets of rules: the rules that guide reporting what is supposed to be said, and the rules that insure that some things are not said.
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Modernism: Past the Dynasty and the Mad Men
Individuals still have their preferences, of course, but modernism is now a period style rather than a dynastic order.
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The Ghost in the Machine
Fashion isn’t timeless, but the photographer’s artifice has captured something about photography itself.
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The Aleppo University Bombing and the Banality of Good
A well functioning civil society is one in which you don’t have to worry about civil war. The university represented the last space where that was possible, and now that has been lost as well.
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The White Party National Convention
To become a majority party,the GOP would have to learn how to live with the rest of the country, not just employ them.
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Todd Akin's Right-Wing Science
If Congress had a committee on stupidity, we know who would be this week’s nominee to chair it.
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Flying into the World Trade Center? Or, Just Photography's Fourth Wall?
The plane’s silhouette cuts through the screen with terrifying force–indeed, it is the presence of terror as it evokes the image of those planes hurtling into the twin towers on September 11, 2001.
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HuffPo Amps Up the Culture War
If this direct comparison of Obama with Jesus Christ doesn’t play to conservative invective, I don’t know what does.
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