In 1989 a twenty-year-old photographer named Michael Galinsky drove across the country to photograph malls.
Starting in the winter of 1989 with the Smith Haven Mall in Garden City Long Island, Michael photographed malls from North Carolina to South Dakota, Washington State and beyond. The photos he took capture life in these malls as it began to shift from the shiny excess of the 1980s towards an era of slackers and grunge culture.
Click here to read the full story by Matt Stopera.
Click here to read the full article by Alicia Eler.
Axel Hoedt's Once a Year offers a series of photographs of traditional German festival costumes, a sort of project that has become more familiar with the recent work of Charles Freger, Estelle Hanania and Phyllis Galembo. Hoedt's work falls more inline with Hanania's approach, yet his take is his own. With a background as a fashion and portrait photographer, Hoedt's photographs revel in the strangeness of their subject matter. A good fashion photographer isn't simply looking for beauty, but the moment where clothing transfigures the person wearing it -- a transformation perhaps never more powerful than with costume. Photographed against white backdrops or in the streets in both black and white and color, Hoedt's atmospheric images invite you to look, yet not in the same way documentary images do. In these images it is possible to see something beyond the garment. Momentarily still, Hoedt's photographs allow us flashes of a centuries old world hidden in the experience of otherness of this once a year tradition.
Click here to read the full article by Sarah Bradley.
Guy Bourdin is a photographer of limited range and repetitive imagination, but also unique vision. His apparent obsessions are constricted in content and tone: dollish models with painted faces, the frame within a frame, light and its reflective qualities. These themes pervade his work, giving his photographs a trademark flavor and creating an arranged world, a Bourdin world. Given these factors, Bourdin is left with a small frame to work within, a formula that is something like that of the mathematician or, better, the sonneteer.
Click here to read the full article by Christopher J. Johnson.
In the early 1990s, the photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia made five trips to Los Angeles to pick up male prostitutes in Hollywood. Cruising down a seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, where young men loitered suggestively by the curb, he would slow down in his rental car when he saw a likely prospect.
Once the man approached, Mr. diCorcia would make a proposition. He offered to pay the going rate, but instead of sex, what he wanted was a photograph. Usually, the hustler agreed. They drove together to a setting that Mr. diCorcia and his assistant had chosen and prepared. There, the pictures were taken, the money was transferred, and the two sides went their separate ways.
Click here to read the full article Arthur Lubow.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London
The photographer’s groundbreaking portrait series, made during the AIDS epidemic of the early 90s, exists in the space between documentary fact and postmodern fiction. It’s being reissued this month in an expanded monograph.
Click here to read the full article by Phil Bicker.
