Peace & Noise

. In this morning's New York Times Martha Schwendener reviews Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961-1991, the new show at NYU's Grey Art Gallery. Curated by Philip Gefter, a former NYT pictures editor and author of the excellent anthology Photography After Frank, the exhibition features over 300 photos, all from NYU's massive archive, documenting a period that spans from the social protests of the '60s to the years when gentrification hit its stride.

Above, photography by David Wojnarowicz from Rimbaud in New York (1977-1979), his series of portraits (taken with a stolen 35mm camera) of young men posing with a mask of the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud. From the gallery's website:

According to Wojnarowicz, he was “playing with ideas of compression of ‘historical time and activity’ and fusing the French poet’s identity with modern New York urban activities, mostly illegal in nature.” From Times Square to the abandoned Hudson River piers, the Rimbaud figure’s wanderings mirrored Wojnarowicz’s own transient life in the city. Published in the Soho Weekly News in June 1980, this series marks Wojnarowicz’s first serious effort in photography and his first publicly exhibited artwork.

Downtown Pix is up through April 3rd – click here to read the review and see a slideshow, and visit the Grey Art Gallery's website for more images and info.

Words & Verbs

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I've been reading these books off and on over the last few months and I'm planning to finish them this weekend:
I can't recommend Photography After Frank highly enough. Philip Gefter was a photography critic at The New York Times for many years and was also the art director responsible for picking the main front-page image for the paper everyday; he has an extraordinary knowledge of photography from a multitude of angles. I've been plodding along slowly with this book because I'm trying to write down the name of every photographer he mentions and research the ones I don't know. Read a good review at The Year In Pictures and buy it directly from Aperture.
Susan Sontag's On Photography is kind of the classic in the field and I'm just now getting around to reading it. It's a little stinging in parts because she makes some sharp psychological observations about this desire/need that certain people (ahem) have to, uh, document everything. That she was writing long before cell phones, digital photography, and the web makes them all the more true now. Still, I'm finding that it makes me look at photography in different ways and I appreciate that.

I wonder if all art directors secretly want to be photographers.