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.
Untitled (from The Democratic Forest), 1983-1986 by William Eggleston (b. 1938)
Untitled (Poster in a Hallway), 1970 by William Eggleston (b. 1939)
Untitled, 2012 by William Eggleston (b. 1938)
Untitled (from The Democratic Forest) by William Eggleston (b. 1938)
Winston, c. 1983-86 by William Eggleston (b. 1938)
Tankstelle (Gas Station), 2008 by Julian Faulhaber (b. 1975)
A Chronicle of Drifting, 1949 by Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-87)
Window, 1941 by Kansuke Yamamoto (1930-86)
The Photographer, 1942 by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000)
Biblioklept 