This Week In Photography Books – Hiroshi Sugimoto and Mark Rothko

by Jonathan Blaustein Last week, I wrote about the Holocaust. It’s a hard one to follow, even for someone like me, who rarely lacks an opinion. (Are you kidding me? That salsa was way too bland. What kind of a person serves coffee that bitter? How many times are you going to tweet about your […]

Roman Vishniac at the ICP

by Jonathan Blaustein Growing up, there was a lot of talk about the Holocaust. In the 70’s and 80’s, we were not yet so removed from the atrocities. People knew people who’d been in concentration camps, and, somehow, survived. Back then, we Jews seemed to feel as if our particular horror defined us as a […]

Photographs Push First Amendment Boundaries

I don’t know much about Richard Prince, but I like to think that he’s in the business of operating at the edges of what’s acceptable. Whether he’s pushing the boundaries or just working in the grey area I think it’s important for art to have trouble makers. I’m more comfortable thinking about blank canvasses and drawing on top of […]

This Week In Photography Books – Antonio M. Xoubanova

by Jonathan Blaustein The flavor molecules remain on my tongue. Even now, as I swirl the red muscle around my mouth, I can taste the delicious bitterness. The coffee is a fresh memory, but I can feel the nascent flow of caffeine through my body. The battle, uphill all the way, is still to be […]

William Clift at the New Mexico Museum of Art

by Jonathan Blaustein It’s a magical process, creation. One minute, something doesn’t exist, and then, click, it does. Embedded chemically or digitally, light from the world codifies into an illusion, packed with information. Occasionally, that information is meant to challenge and provoke. Some photographs are hard to look at, intentionally. They capture the essence of […]