Category: photography
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Surreal Grandeur of San Francisco’s Little-Known Salt Fields
The southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area is known for expensive real estate, tech companies, and aerospace engineers. Less well known is its salt content. Yet the salt industry has been a vital part of the South Bay for more than a century. Fly into any of the region’s airports and evidence of this…
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Images from the Stasi Archives
Simon Menner’s new book Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives examines the vast collection of information and photos once gathered by the East German secret police. While coincidental, the timing couldn’t be better as news about the NSA surveillance program continues to dominate headlines. “I had come to realize that the public has very…
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Sun Belt Cities from the Sky
Michael Light often snaps his photos from a two-seater plane — at a bumpy 70 mph — that he pilots himself at the same time, but you’d never know it from his well-composed aerial shots. From swimming-pooled suburbs in Phoenix to razed hills awaiting their luxury homes in Nevada, Light has been documenting the western…
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Weegee’s Naked Hollywood
“Hollywood is Newark, New Jersey, with Palm Trees,” quipped Arthur Fellig, the prolific and fearless photographer of America’s underbelly who was known as Weegee—like the ouija board—for his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. After selling the film rights to Naked City, his best-selling book of gritty crime scenes…
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Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984
Joe Deal, reflecting on his landscape photographs of the early 1970s, wrote: “Why contribute, I reasoned, to the growing pile of photographs of an idealized American landscape while it was being chewed up before our eyes by advancing suburban development, interstate highways and shopping malls?” Deal’s sentiments were shared by a new school of Southern California-based…
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Profile of Trevor Paglen
I interviewed Trevor Paglen at Eyebeam, in New York, one afternoon in the fall of 2007. In talking with him about his work, and the research that goes into it, it was easy to get caught up in the dark tangles of government espionage. But he soberly asked me to view his work as art,…
Lyra Kilston 