Gideon Jacobs

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  picks May 04, 2022

  Peter van Agtmael

  In the unassuming gallery space of the Bronx Documentary Center’s annex are 128 photographs—unframed and held up by magnets—by Peter van Agtmael that, in total, represent the most ambitious presentation of documentary photography I have encountered in recent memory. Van Agtmael, who often works in a photojournalistic mode and is a member of cooperative Magnum Photos, endeavors to interweave many of the political threads that have defined the past few decades in America, each of which could have easily been the focus of an entire exhibition: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the veterans’ experience

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  picks September 22, 2021

  Diane Arbus

  How are we meant to look at what we were never meant to see? This is the unavoidable question raised by “DARK ROOM,” a surprising show of seventeen proof prints made in preparation for Diane Arbus’s posthumous 1972 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. These objects—somewhere between priceless ephemera and pricey works of art—are the photographic equivalents of a late draft, offering us a peek behind the scenes at some of photography’s most iconic images (such as Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, and A naked man being a woman, Md., 1970) before they received their final

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  interviews March 18, 2021

  Chloe Wise

  Chloe Wise’s work has always walked a tightrope between sincerity and satire, romance and irreverence, gravity and levity. More recently, another duality has become an increasingly important part of her tonal high-wire act: the real versus the unreal, or perhaps the real versus the hyperreal. It’s telling that the press release for Wise’s new show, “Thank You For The Nice Fire,” on view at Almine Rech through April 17, quotes Jean Baudrillard not once, but twice. So, as neither Wise nor I have been vaccinated yet, it felt both epidemiologically and thematically appropriate to conduct this

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  slant February 08, 2021

  Point of View

  IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO IDENTIFY exactly when photography “went digital,” but a helpful benchmark is January 19, 2012, the day the Eastman Kodak Company filed for bankruptcy. A little over a decade earlier, digital cameras entered the mainstream consumer market. Soon after, the same technology began to be incorporated into a new, suddenly ubiquitous device: the cell phone. By the end of the aughts, the film and film cameras that made Kodak a multinational $30 billion brand were rendered antiquated and niche. Photographic images, analog for nearly two centuries, were now 0s and 1s. 

  Recently, I’ve been