Ariel Goldberg

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  print Summer 2019

  “Destruction and Transformation: Vernacular Photography and the Built Environment”

  The fourth in a series of five consecutive exhibits at the Walther Collection’s New York project space titled “Imagining Everyday Life: Aspects of Vernacular Photography,” the show “Destruction and Transformation” makes demolishing structures and erecting newer ones look utterly routine. The images on view, taken mostly by commercial photographers from the past century who witnessed the altering of urban and rural landscapes alike for commerce and transportation, stand in contrast to the portraiture—ranging from mug shots to lost family keepsakes—that populated the previous three exhibits. This

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  print January 2019

  REBEL REBEL

  “LESBIANS TORTURE DRAG QUEEN” reads the headline of a tabloid that once hung on a wall in Donna Gottschalk’s apartment. As captured in her photograph Marlene, E. 9th St., 1969, her subject, Marlene, turns away from this clipping as if refusing its absurd sensationalism, challenging the dominant narrative of lesbians as vicious. She looks directly into Gottschalk’s camera with her arms crossed against her bare chest, her pants slightly unzipped to reveal a shoreline of pubic hair. She smiles widely without showing her teeth, barely containing her pleasure in being seen in all her butch glory.

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  diary April 27, 2018

  Eye in the Sky

  WHEN BERENICE ABBOTT (1898–1991) began wrestling with a large-format camera to produce her iconic photographs of New York City in the early 1930s, she had to overcome a fear of heights in order to achieve a range of perspectives. On the top floors of skyscrapers, she could escape the interruptions of pedestrians, who would gather to watch her dive in and out of the bulky camera’s black focus cloth.

  This month at the lion-guarded New York Public Library, curator Julia Van Haaften debuted her definitive biography of this “self-taught risk taker,” Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. From the