Much of the brief history of photography has maintained a plaintive fixation on the medium’s cultural status in the interest of recognizing it as an art form rather than as a mere mechanical procedure. The medium has long been haunted by an anxiety surrounding its credentials and admittance to highbrow marketplaces, both economic and cultural. Yet this worry has produced a misunderstanding of photography’s profound influence in many aspects of mass media and daily life.

Art and commerce represent the binary of works made for self-expression and those created for mercantile purposes. Although the

In the prologue to her 1992 novel The Volcano Lover, a period piece set against the backdrop of Naples’s Mount Vesuvius, Susan Sontag describes the eponymous geological object as such: “It’s the mouth of a volcano. Yes, mouth; and lava tongue. A body, a monstrous living body, both male and female. It emits, ejects. It is also an interior, an abyss. Something alive, that can die. Something inert that becomes agitated, now and then. Existing only intermittently. A constant menace. If predictable, usually not predicted. Capricious, untameable, malodorous.” Sontag’s passage evocatively captures the

“Meditative Spectacle: Paintings 1974–76” picked up where Parker Gallery’s 2017 show on Franklin Williams’s earlier career left off, with the artist, now ensconced in Petaluma, California, honing his richly patterned and labor-intensive constructions in willful disregard of the contemporary scene despite his proximity to it. The prior installment included works Williams made during his student years at San Francisco’s California College of Arts and Crafts—now known as California College of the Arts—when visiting instructor John Coplans disabused him of painting in an Abstract Expressionist key,

June Wayne (1918–2011), the founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, was primarily a self-taught artist with strong convictions and lofty ideals. In 1959, frustrated by a dearth of technical knowledge and available resources to support the large-scale production of fine-art lithography in the United States, she designed a detailed proposal for a print manufactory and fellowship program, complete with plans for the recruitment and training of expert lithographers. After overcoming numerous obstacles, including the Ford Foundation’s initial reluctance to provide funding, Wayne opened her