Tag: photography

Carrie Mae Weems may be our best contemporary photographer.

Physiognomy is a discarded 19th-century pseudoscience. Why can’t we stop practicing it?

On one summer day in 1998, XXL magazine gathered 177 hip-hop artists for one of the greatest musical photographs of all time: A Great Day in Hip-Hop.

Lawson’s photographs capture the divinity and stateliness of its working-class subjects.

How an artist keeps working despite living with ALS.

“For me it’s about recognizing that great art comes in all kinds of forms.”

Hilton Als on photographer Diane Arbus’ uncanny ability to capture the humanity of her marginalized subjects.

The New York Times styles Manning for her first profile—but she’s already in charge of her own image.

Jury chairman Stuart Franklin called the decision “morally problematic.”

Henry Leutwyler on portraiture and the magic of inanimate objects.

When you work the night shift for too long, the murders start to link up with one another, blending cause and effect in a centrifugal force that gnaws away at the city. The veteran reporters start to see this; the man gunned down one night is related to an ongoing gang dispute, which originates in […]

On the aesthetics, performance, and “majestic wrath” of Frederick Douglass, the most-photographed American of the nineteenth century.

Diane Arbus was renowned for photographing people on the margins, such as the mentally challenged, dwarves, giants, sideshow performers, crossdressers, and transsexuals. Was she merely a privileged voyeur of the vulnerable or an unsung champion of sexual and societal minorities? Here are five stories that will help you cut through the controversy.

“Here, I see many barriers, many conflicts—between class, between race, between cultures, between ideologies, between jobs.”

After my internship, my first assignment for National Geographic was a story about the Zinacenteco Indians in the highlands of Chiapas. The subject was interesting but very challenging. As a woman, my access was mostly limited to other women who only spoke the Maya language I was struggling to learn. Once I traversed the language barrier, it […]

“Mary Mazur, 61, shrank into the blankets, muttering into the leaves, whispering to her only friend.” An Instagram essay by Jeff Sharlet.

“I want to introduce white America to people who they might never have met, and I want them to fall in love too.”

Beginning writers are fond of openings stories with quotes that aren’t strong enough to lead with. Who is the speaker? Why do we care? Until they have more experience distinguishing a great quote from a merely good one, journalism instructors urge students not to open with some one else’s words. In a profile, opening with […]

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. 1. “Two Decades After Crown Heights, What’s It Like to Be Black and Orthodox Jewish?” (Wayne Lawrence & Molly Langmuir, New York magazine, December 2012) A gorgeous blend of photography and personal testimony give this […]