America’s Race Riots of the Sixties

In the early 1960s, African Americans in cities nationwide were growing frustrated with the high level of poverty in their communities. Since the years immediately following World War II (1939–45), middle-class white Americans had been leaving the cities for nearby suburbs. Businesses that had once provided jobs and tax funding in the cities were leaving […]

WALKER EVANS: “DRIVE-BY PICTURES”

Walker Evans, pictures taken from a moving automobile or train.   EXPLORE ALL WALKER EVANS ON ASX (© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

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.    

Eihoh Hosoe: “Photographs”

“To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression… the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.” – Eikoh Hosoe ASX CHANNEL: […]

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 […]

PAUL KWILECKI: “GEORGIA”

Paul Kwilecki’s Photograph Collection at Duke University contains 583 black and white prints made in and around the town of Bainbridge, Georgia from 1960-2008. A self-taught photographer, Kwilecki honed his craft by photographing the broad spectrum of daily life manifested in Bainbridge and the rural areas of Decatur County. From the Shade Tobacco workers in […]

Seiji Kurata: Shashin Workshop No. 8 1976

            Excerpts from “Shashin Workshop No. 8.” Japan: Shashin Workshop Group, 1976, First Edition, PB, 72 pp, 28 x 14 cm, b/w photos, text in Japanese. Nobuyoshi ARAKI, Daido MORIYAMA, Shomei TOMATSU, Noriaki YOKOSUKA, Masahisa FUKASE, Eikoh HOSOE, Seiji KURATA, editors/photographers A rare volume from the scarce Photography Workshop Group founded […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Todd Hido: “House Hunting” (2001)

“Todd Hido’s large color photographs of suburbia are lonely, forlorn, mysterious… and strangely comforting. Hido photographs the interior rooms of repossessed tract homes, and the outsides of similar houses at night whose habitation is suggested by the glow of a television set or unseen overhead bulb. Seldom does the similar evoke such melancholy. Yet rather […]

Billy Monk – “Cape Town Nightclub” (1967-1969)

  Billy Monk worked as a bouncer in the notorious Catacombs club in the dock area of Cape Town during the 1960s. For just two years, 1967 to 1969, he captured the raw energy of the club, its decadence and tragedy, its humanity and joy. They provide an extraordinarily evocative glimpse of Cape Town’s little-seen […]

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 […]

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 […]

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)

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.