July 1, 2026 On Photography Saint Peter: Hujar’s Contact Sheets at the Morgan By Nicholas Gamso Contact sheet: Peter Hujar self portraits on heel, 1974, gelatin silver print, 8.5 x 11″, 2013.108:8.2110. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013. Only a decade ago, just mentioning the photographer Peter Hujar required explanation. “He took that famous picture of Susan Sontag, recumbent with tired eyes.” Or: “He made gorgeous black-and-white photos of writers, artists, dancers, beautiful men, empty landscapes, and animals.” But today no preamble is necessary. There are countless entry points to Hujar’s extensive oeuvre, many of which appeared in the past year alone: a half-dozen new books; exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco; and most prominently, a biopic, Peter Hujar’s Day, adapted by Ira Sachs from a 1974 interview with Linda Rosenkrantz. Read More
December 17, 2025 On Photography Eve Babitz’s Photographs By The Paris Review Hollywood, California. Photographs courtesy of the Huntington Library. In 1969, five years before Eve Babitz published her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, she kept a journal—her only surviving diary—in which she honed the voice that would make her the consummate chronicler of seventies Los Angeles. A selection of entries appears in our new Winter issue. In the journal, Babitz also detailed her experiments with several other art forms, including collage and photography. “I got a camera for $7.98—a Brownie,” she notes on December 21, 1969, “and have been taking pictures of palm trees which are turning out very well.” The Huntington Library, which acquired Babitz’s archive in 2021, is currently displaying several of those photographs in an exhibition that features, among other subjects, those very same palm trees near Babitz’s Hollywood home, and members of her family and her famous circle of friends: Babitz’s father, Sol, a former violinist for the 20th Century–Fox studio orchestra, a bespectacled Annie Leibovitz, and Linda Ronstadt, swaddled in furs. Annie Leibovitz. Linda Ronstadt. Sol Babitz. Linda Ronstadt. Eve Babitz’s brownie camera.
August 14, 2025 On Photography Death at the Zoo By Kate Zambreno Jumbo the elephant. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Zoological Society of London. We begin the essay with an uncited photograph from history. Roland Barthes speaks of photographs of children from history, their innocence and morbidity. To look at an old photograph of children is to look at children who are long dead. But the same is true for archival photographs of zoo animals. What do you see when you look at this photograph? A grouping of children in Victorian dress on top of a very large elephant, with a man keeping the whole contraption at a standstill. From what can possibly be read of the expressions of children from a grainy photograph, they look expectant, excited—the child zoo feeling. The elephant’s expression is far more inscrutable. Exhausted, possibly. Or just present. So present that photographs of this famous elephant from history always emphasize how much its extremely mammoth body fills the entire frame, or has been herded into a small enclosure (in fact, anything large began to be called jumbo because of the dissemination of his absurdly large likeness in advertisements). Why does John Berger begin with a photograph of Jumbo the Elephant giving rides to children at the London Zoo? Perhaps to situate the Eurocentric nineteenth-century zoo attitude, a narrative of colonialism and alienation from labor (absent while present), a story of tragedy and absurdity, the only possible tonal registers for the history of capitalism. Here is a much clearer photograph than Berger opens with, and the expressions on the faces of the one female chaperone and the children, and the familiar male zookeeper, are far more squinted and uncertain, but it’s unclear whether that’s due to the extremely large animal they are astride or to the even-less-familiar performative moment of photography. Read More
May 5, 2025 On Photography How to Find Your Mother in Her Portrait By Iman Mersal Hidden mother with child. Linda Fregni Nagler, #0173, tintype from The Hidden Mother, 997 collected daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, snapshots. When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the little girl that was me, this portrait happened to be a document of the moment in which, for the first and last time, I had stood beside my mother in a studio, unaware that less than two months time she would be dead. That photograph must be a means of instruction, an exercise in recovering the moment that had passed, in recovering the features and presence of my mother or, as Barthes writes, “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see [in this instance, my mother] has indeed existed.” I never had the sense that the woman in the photograph was my mother. Perhaps it is the anxious expression she turns toward the lens, as though, having stepped out of her domestic fortress, she now stood powerless. Perhaps it is the dress she is wearing, one I only ever saw her in once or twice on expeditions into town. Or maybe it is the hair that hangs down to her waist and which was usually plaited into two long braids that circled her head in opposite directions. The woman in the picture is not just different from what I remember of her, or want to remember: she is a ghost, like the ghosts I would see on strips of negatives as a girl. I would hold them up to my eye, trying to guess who they were, and when I grew bored of this, would fashion these haunted ribbons into bracelets around my wrist. Read More
September 14, 2023 On Photography Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums By Nick Warr W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Korsika Sept 95.” I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away. —W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance. The photographs in the published work of W. G. Sebald represent a similar miscellany of beginnings, with each peculiar form interrupting and channeling the text as it moves toward its inevitable close. “Fiction,” Sebald once observed in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, “is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient.” To resist this dynamic, he concedes, is a difficult task for both the reader and the writer. However, an innate desire to “arrest the passage of time” persists, and it is this that draws us to “certain forms” of visual art. For example, he continues, when you look at a painting: You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this—they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow. Read More
September 8, 2022 On Photography Free Dirt By Angella d'Avignon Free dirt. Photograph via Craigslist. For the past three years, I’ve filled a folder on my desktop with pictures of dirt that I found on Craigslist. The dirt in each picture was offered free of charge to whoever was willing to pick it up (“You haul”) or, if you were lucky, a free-dirter might have offered free delivery. Depending on the angle and composition of the images, “free dirt” posts on Craigslist can look like unintentional landscape vistas. Some shots feature calloused hands covered in tawny fill dirt, vignetted by palm trees and paved driveways in postwar cul-de-sacs. There are endless frames of earth spilling onto asphalt, flattened mounds of rich brown soil indented with tire tracks, craggy piles of dirt gathered evenly along the perimeters of blue tarp in driveways. Where I’m from, in Southern California, free dirt is abundant. Read More