Albert Kahn’s collection of early colour photographs started as a banker’s dream of putting an end to war. Almost 100 years on, they provide a unique portrait of a different world. Even among keen students of photography, few have heard of Albert Kahn. Yet Kahn, a banker and philanthropist, was one of the first people [...]
Long before he became a photographer, the American artist Gregory Crewdson was a guitarist in a band. In the mid-Seventies, he and four friends founded a power-pop group called the Speedies that produced several underground hits and played venues across New York, including the celebrated punk club CBGBs. The band dissolved in 1981, but the [...]
The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the [...]
The soft-colored photographs of Sze Tsung Leong capture contrasting landscapes: the verdant green of Germany; the mirage of shimmering towers in Dubai; the urban geometry of Amman, Jordan; the red tiles roofs of Italy. But always the eye is drawn to the distinct line where sky meets earth. Canale della Giudecca, 2007 In Mr. Leong’s [...]
This year’s shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize shows a welcome shift of emphasis. Whereas 2007′s nominees had rather intimidating, introspective themes, this year each of the artists has flung his net outwards with a keen, almost evangelical fervour, to create social observations which make full use of photography’s talent for conferring beauty on [...]
The National Portrait Gallery, London, presents Vanity Fairs Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008, on view through May 26, 2008. Some of the greatest portrait photographs of the twentieth century were taken for, or published in, Vanity Fair. This remarkable selection of 150 classic images features works from the magazine’s first period (19131936), displayed for the [...]
“I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before… pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people,” wrote Alexander Rodchenko in his diary on March 14, 1934. “I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of [...]