Several months ago I set up a little collection of links called "What am I lookin' at?" The idea was to provide links to online material related to photography and visual politics. I add to these links regularly, but don't always write about them in the blog. Here are a few new additions worth highlighting:
I haven't yet seen Errol Morris's film about Abu Ghraib, "Standard Operating Procedure," but it's clear that, among other things, the film offers a theory of photography that's complex and compelling. I can tell you that the web site is amazing. It's fully interactive; you can click on an image and it will tell you the key dates, events, people, and allow you to access interview clips that contextualize the images. Whatever you think about Morris's methods, it's a stunning piece of web discourse.
Historian Sean Malloy has unearthed previously unpublished photographs of the devastation following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The images were made by an unknown Japanese photographer and are held by the Hoover Institution. They are difficult to look at and truly heartbreaking.
Vanity Fair revisits the 1968 presidential primaries in a cover story and slideshow about Robert F. Kennedy's campaign, featuring photographs by Bill Eppridge. It's hard to avoid seeing loss in Eppridge's images of the energy and enthusiasm that followed RFK on the campaign trail.
The New York Times recently wrote about contemporary tintypes of modern American cowboys made by photographer Robb Kendrick. Kendrick chronicles a seemingly lost culture by reviving a seemingly lost photographic form; he's traveled across the U.S. and Canada and made more than one hundred tintype portraits of cowboys (cowgirls, too). And his images simply glow.
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