Sunlight on Water, 1943 by Harry Callahan (1912–1999)
Untitled from The Democratic Forest, 1983-1986 by William Eggleston (b. 1939)
Invisible Man Retreat, 1952 by Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
The Kiss, 1904 by Clarence White (1871-1925)
Untitled (from Los Alamos), 1966-74 by William Eggleston (b. 1939)
Deer Skull (Georgia O’Keeffe), 1961 by Todd Webb (1905-2000)
Untitled (Man in Chair Aiming Gun, American Flag), 1963–71, printed 1980 by Larry Clark (b. 1943)
Untitled (from The Democratic Forest) by William Eggleston (b. 1939)
Nan Wood Graham, 1975 by Joan Liffring-Zug Bourre (b. 1929)
Untitled, c. 1971-1973 by William Eggleston (b. 1939)
Circus Woman, 1940 by Nakaji Yasui (1903-1942)
Teju Cole’s essay “The History of Photography is a History of Shattered Glass,” part of his “On Photography” series, is new in today’s New York Times.
From the essay:
Broken glass, and broken windows in particular, are a notable byway in photography’s history. Brett Weston made one of the most striking examples in San Francisco in 1937. Weston was not recording evidence of a crime, or even particularly making a sociological comment. He was describing an abstraction with his camera, the calligraphic presence of a jagged black hole surrounded by a gray remnant of glass. What has been broken away dominates the picture. We see an outline like a map of a fictional island. There’s more dark to see here than glass, and the darkness is deep and mysterious, a mouth agape in an unending scream. About this picture, John Szarkowski, the influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that the black shape “is not a void but a presence; the periphery of the picture is background.” In the middle, in that darkness, is where Weston’s self-portrait would be, if the window were intact.
