Vietnam Zippo Lighters (‘DEATH FROM ABOVE’)”

    Vietnam War-era Zippo lighters featuring personalized and anonymous engravings chosen by U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen during deployment. The collection has been compiled individually by American artist Bradford Edwards over several years in the 1990s, on-site in Vietnam. (Images @ Cowan Auctions)

The Lomax Collection: “American Folk”

The collection includes 400 snapshot photographs made in the course of sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and ca. 1950 for the Archive of American Folk-Song.    

Alexis Penney – Sore, 2014

“Well, I got in trouble for putting naked photos on the Internet when I was seventeen.”   Alexis Penney, Sore, 2014 “Well, I got in trouble for putting naked photos on the Internet when I was seventeen,” Alexis Penney told me, when I asked how long he’d been taking photos. Penney, who told me she […]

Roswell Angier: “Combat Zone”

  In the 1950s, when Boston was a major Navy port, the area around Washington Street became known as the Combat Zone; the name derived from the Shore Patrolmen, who prowled the rock-and-roll bars, busting the heads of sailors. By the 1970s, when Angier spent two and half years (1973-1975) photographing the area, the sailors […]

Dorothea Lange: “Portraits” (1935 – 1939)

  American photographer. From 1914 to 1917 she attended the New York Training School for Teachers and there decided to become a photographer, partly influenced by visits to the photographer Arnold Genthe. From 1917 to 1918 she attended a photography course run by Clarence H. White at Columbia University, NY. Lange moved to San Francisco […]

JOHN BANASIAK: “GEORGE BROWN’S BAR” (1970-71)

From 1971-1981, John Banasiak photographed Chicago and surrounding areas at night. During that time, Banasiak would wander around the city at night, looking for quiet scenes he describes as “stage sets just waiting for the players to arrive.” http://www.josephbellows.com/ (All rights reserved. Images @ Joseph Bellows Gallery.)  

HELEN LEVITT: “COLOR” (1971-1981)

Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 29, 2009) was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for “street photography” around New York City, and has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.”   ASX ARTIST CHANNEL: HELEN LEVITT (All images @ and courtesy of Helen Levitt Estate)

Berenice Abbott – The Photographer of New York City

Berenice Abbott can be considered the photographer of New York City. A revolutionary documentary photographer, Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, and studied for one year at Ohio State University, Columbus, before moving to New York in 1918.

Jean Depara: “Kinshasa” (1951-1975)

  Lemvo Jean Abou Bakar Depara, known as Depara (1928–1997), was an Angolan-born photographer who worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Depara purchased his first video camera to record his wedding in 1950; four years later, he was made official photographer to the Zairian singer Franco. In 1975 he became official photographer to the […]

Daido Moriyama: “Tights and Lips”

  One of the most revered living Japanese photographers, Daido Moriyama’s work is saturated with the melancholic beauty of life at its most ordinary. His photographs epitomize wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in imperfection. Moriyama focuses in on the lost and the discarded, and finds echoes of living through the breakdown of traditional […]

Araki’s Chiro, Yoko, Death and the Baring of a Soul

  In Sentimental Journey and later in Winter Journey Araki documented both the intimate and the mundane from his honeymoon and his wife’s terminal battle with cancer. By blurring the boundaries between life and art Araki’s work becomes uncomfortably candid, presenting death with a reverence as shocking and graphic as any of his more erotic […]

Andy Warhol: “Polaroids”

From 1970 to 1987 Andy Warhol took scores of Polaroid photographs, the vast majority of which were never seen by the public. These images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silk-screen paintings, drawings, and prints. EXPLORE ALL ANDY WARHOL ON ASX (All images @ Andy Warhol Foundation)

Man Ray – “Rayographs, Etc.”

    Man Ray made his “rayographs” without a camera by placing objects-such as the thumbtacks, coil of wire, and other circular forms used here-directly on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing it to light.

Lee Friedlander: “The New Cars 1964” (2011)

  In 1964, two young art directors at Harper’s Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander’s jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaarwas to […]

LARRY SULTAN & MIKE MANDEL: “EVIDENCE”

  From 1975-1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel selected photographs from a multitude of images that previously existed solely within the boundaries of the industrial, scientific, governmental and other institutional sources from which they were mined.  The project, “Evidence”, was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was one of […]

Edward Hopper: “Survey” (1882-1967)

  Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and often melancholy renderings reflected his personal […]

Jerry Brendt: Scene from 1960’s Boston – ‘The Combat Zone’

                ‘The Combat Zone’ was the name given to the roughest area in Boston at the end of the 1960s, full of violence, sexual exploitation and racial war. In 1967, Harvard University commissioned Jerry Berndt to explore this Boston of shadows and vice. Like a war reporter, the […]

Dash Snow – Collage

Dash Snow’s collage-based work was characterized by his practice of using his own semen as a material applied to or splashed across newspaper photographs of police officers and other authority figures.